The Pragmatist Flight from Content

In Pragmatist Semantics Zalabardo devises the main guidelines of a pragmatist semantics as an alternative to semantic representationalism, i.e. to the view that holds that the meaning ground of a declarative sentence is made up of the referential links that bind its constituents to things, properties and relations in the world. The paper reveals four assumptions that support the pragmatist semantics of sentences used to ascribe propositional attitudes such as beliefs and desires. These assumptions closely connect the expounded pragmatism with a nihilist semantic tradition that has shaped much of contemporary analytic philosophy, the connection consisting of the abolition of the notion of content as a constituent of a propositional attitude.