On Failing to Capture Some (or Even All) of What is Communicated

Abstract This paper examines a methodological argument launched against Cappelen and Lepore’s “minimalist ” semantics. The charge is that this semantic theory – and by implication a great many other ones – cannot be correct, because they fail to capture some of the “intuitive truth conditions ” of the relevant sentences. In response, I argue that this charge rests on the claim that an acceptable scientific theory must (at least sometimes) capture all of the overt phenomena under study. But this claim, I contend, is false. In actual practice, scientific models will often never capture all of the behavior of the relevant phenomenon, and this feature does not undermine them as such. I maintain that semantic theorizing is just an instance of this more general aspect of scientific methodology