Words stand for things of various kinds and for various kinds of things. Because words do this, the sentences made up of words mean what they do, and are capable of expressing our thoughts, our beliefs and conjectures, desires and wishes. This simple idea seems right to me, but it flies in the face of formidable authority. In a famous passage in Reality without Reference, Donald Davidson criticizes what he calls the building-block theory:
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John Perry (1994) studied this question.
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