Metaphysics faces a threat from apparently metaphysics-friendly non-epistemic forms of semantics, on which sentences express “worldly” propositions—for example, functions from worlds to truth-values. The threat goes back to Wittgenstein”s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and is pressed in different forms by various contemporary philosophers. It is that metaphysical claims turn out either trivially true or trivially false, because they express the same proposition as a tautology or contradiction. The problem is shown to generalize to accounts on which sentences express Russellian structured propositions. It applies to logic and mathematics as well as metaphysics. Attempts to solve it by reinterpreting apparently non-contingent claims as contingent metalinguistic claims or by invoking Fregean semantics are shown to fail. The underlying problem concerns necessary equivalence, not necessary truth, and arises in all domains. To solve it, we must recognize that the form of our representations plays an ineliminable cognitive role that cannot be reduced to their content.

中文翻译：

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形而上学和语义学

形而上学面临来自显然对形而上学友好的非认知形式的语义的威胁，在这种形式上，句子表达了“世俗”的命题——例如，从世界到真值的函数。威胁可以追溯到维特根斯坦的Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus并被当代各种哲学家以不同的形式提出。正是形而上学的主张要么被证明是微不足道的正确的，要么是微不足道的错误的，因为它们将相同的命题表达为同义反复或矛盾。该问题被证明可以推广到关于哪些句子表达罗素结构化命题的帐户。它适用于逻辑和数学以及形而上学。试图通过将明显非或然的声明重新解释为或然的元语言声明或通过调用弗雷格语义来解决它的尝试被证明是失败的。潜在的问题涉及必要的等价性，而不是必要的真理，并且出现在所有领域。为了解决这个问题，我们必须认识到，我们的表象形式起着不可消除的认知作用，不能简化为它们的内容。