Abstract
This paper starts out from the idea that semantics is a “special
science” whose aim, like that of chemistry or ecology, is to identify systematic,
high-level patterns in a fundamentally physical world. I defend an approach
to this task on which sentences are associated with with sets of possible
worlds (of some kind). These sets of worlds, however, are not postulated for
the compositional treatment of intensional contexts; they are not meant to
capture what is intuitively asserted or communicated by an utterance; nor
are they supposed to shed light on the cognitive processes that underlie out
linguistic competence. Instead, their job description is to capture certain
regularities in the interactions between subjects using the relevant language.
I also raise some questions about how the relevant worlds might be construed.