"...all of this motivates moving away from the otherwise natural position, which says, ‘There’s nothing there’. And that’s where, as I said before, I’ve got a real burden of talking about how these statements are made true and false. And one of the things I also have to do, which many philosophers are uncomfortable with, is when they think of truth conditions—of the semantics of these sentences—they think, ‘Well now we’re telling a story that connects our sentences to the world’. And I’m going to say, ‘No. That doesn’t happen in a semantic theory. It can happen, but it doesn’t have to happen. It does happen when the terms refer to objects in the world, but when they don’t refer, then the direction from the semantics to the world is more indirect, more complicated." (From an interview by Mary Leng with Jody Azzouni in The Reasoner, 2012, 6(6): 97.)
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