This book focuses on how we should treat philosophy’s theoretical representations. It argues in favor of an instrumentalist attitude towards pivotal cases of theoretical representation in philosophy that are commonly regarded under a realist attitude. Philosophy is awash with theoretical representations, which raises the question of how we should regard them. This book argues that representations in philosophy should not be regarded under a realist attitude by default as individually disclosing the nature of what they represent. Ori Simchen introduces the reader to the general theme of representations in philosophy and our attitudes towards them via case studies: numbers, modality, and belief. He offers a framework for deciding when a realist attitude towards a theoretical representation is warranted and concludes that the representations deployed in the case studies fail the proposed test. The next part of the book illustrates the attractiveness of attitudinal instrumentalism towards representations in semantics, in the philosophy of mind, and within the problematics of rule-following. Philosophical Representation will appeal to researchers and advanced students working in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophical logic, and philosophical methodology.

Some things in the world-intentional items such as words, thoughts, portraits, and passport photos-are about things, whereas other things in the world-sticks, stones, and fireflies-are not about anything. Necessary Intentionality is a study of aboutness, or intentionality, with a focus on the following question: are intentional items typically about whatever they are about as a matter of necessity, or is their aboutness, rather, a matter of mere contingency? Consider, for example, a particular name referring to a particular person, or a specific belief with respect to some particular thing that it is such and so. Is it possible for the name not to have referred to the person and for the belief not to have been about the thing? Ori Simchen defends a negative answer to such questions. That the name refers to the person is necessary for the name and that the belief is about the thing is necessary for the belief. Simchen articulates his overall position in two main stages. In the first stage he fleshes out a requisite modal metaphysical background. In the second stage he brings the modal metaphysics to bear on cognition, specifically the aboutness of cognitive states and episodes. Simchen presents a productivist approach, which takes aboutness to be determined by the conditions of production of intentional items, rather than an interpretationist approach that takes aboutness to be determined by conditions of consumption of such items.

Semantics aims to describe the significance (or meaning) of linguistic expressions in a systematic way. Metasemantics, or foundational semantics, asks how expressions gain their significance in the first place - what makes it the case that expressions mean what they do. Metasemantics has recently been discussed extensively by philosophers of language, philosophers of mind, and philosophically minded linguists and psychologists. A large concern is semantic indeterminacy, the worry that there is no fact of the matter as to the semantic significance of our words. Ori Simchen offers a distinctly metasemantic strategy to counter this threat. Semantics, Metasemantics, Aboutness is the first book-length treatment of metasemantics and its relation to the thriving research program of truth-conditional semantics.