Reply to Pietroski

Abstract

In this reply to Paul Pietroski’s comment on our book Narrow Content (Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne in Narrow content. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2018), we address his concern that we assume too tight a connection between sentences and contents and thus ignore polysemy. We argue that we were not relying on problematic disquotational assumptions and that our arguments are fully compatible with rampant polysemy. We also argue that Pietroski’s strategy of making room for a theoretically interesting kind of narrow content by giving up the idea that contents determine extensions at indices doesn’t save him from our “Mirror Man” counterexamples. We argue finally that narrow polyadic relations of the sort that feature in our final chapter are better suited than narrow content assignments for Pietroski’s explanatory needs.