Volume 22, No. 2, 2026

Semantics assigns meanings to words and phrases, providing a framework for understanding language. Metasemantics, on the other hand, seeks to explain the origin of these meanings, exploring why certain meanings are ascribed to particular words, what does it even mean “to mean something”, or what is the ontological status of meanings. Although semantics and metasemantics may appear to provide a complete picture of language, it has been suggested that another theoretical level—above metasemantics—is necessary for our theories to avoid (mainly) the problem of indeterminacy. This additional level is called metametasemantics. This article examines two leading candidates for metametasemantics: Lewis’s Reference Magnetism and Millikan’s Biosemantics. While both theories successfully anchor metasemantics in non-linguistic facts to address the problem of indeterminacy, my analysis reveals crucial differences in their explanatory power and theoretical robustness. The paper develops a four-criteria framework for evaluating metametasemantic theories, distinguishing between threshold conditions (indeterminacy resolution) and gradable criteria (empirical grounding, theory comparison, and pluralism accommodation). Through systematic comparison, I demonstrate that while Magnetism provides an elegant solution to indeterminacy through natural properties, its reliance on the notion of “naturalness” creates significant theoretical challenges. Biosemantics, grounded in evolutionary biology, offers more rigorous criteria for adjudicating between alternative metasemantic theories while maintaining flexibility across linguistic domains. The analysis pays particular attention to how each theory handles persistent issues like functional indeterminacy and theoretical underdetermination.

One comparatively neglected response to David Chalmers’s formulation of the zombie argument maintains that considerations of conceivability of so-called shombies can be used for rejecting dualism. The proponents of this strategy typically either reject the entailment from ideal conceivability to metaphysical possibility or urge that the debate over the truth of physicalism ought to be “de-prioritized”, since it cannot be resolved on a priori, purely conceptual grounds. In this paper, I argue that the battlefield on which “shombists” aim to challenge “zombists” is less neutral than shombists claim. In fact, the implicit assumptions underpinning Chalmers’s original formulation of the zombie argument are inconsistent with at least some versions of physicalism. Specifically, I contend that the conjunction of these assumptions—most notably, the thesis I term phenomenal essentialism, defined as the claim that a subject, by virtue of referring to the way an experience phenomenally appears, is thereby in a position to grasp what that experience essentially is—combined with the ideal inconceivability of zombies (a consequence of the ideal conceivability of shombies, given the conceivability-possibility entailment), yields implications that a physicalist ought to reject. Consequently, physicalists who deem zombies ideally inconceivable are committed to deny phenomenal essentialism and/or other assumptions implicit in Chalmers’s original formulation of the zombie argument. Towards the end of the paper, I suggest that phenomenal essentialism is indeed a highly plausible thesis.