ABSTRACT
Fodor and Lepore begin their piece with a salutary methodological observation: orders of explanation are sensitive to pragmatic context, above all to the interests and purposes that prompt them. So it is sensible to ask what the context is in which I am recommending a “top-down” order of semantic explanation, which talks first about what sentences express, and only later about the contribution that the presence of individual words makes to what sentences containing them express. The context is the project I have been calling “philosophical” semantics, by contrast to “formal” semantics. The former concerns how expressions have to be used, or how items must function, in order properly to be thought of as semantically contentful. The latter concerns how, once semantic interpretants of some sort have been associated with some expressions or other items, they can be understood as determining what semantic interpretants are associated with others.
