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 zombie argument appeals to the conceivability of so-called shombies—entities physically and behaviourally indistinguishable from us that possess conscious experience just as we do—to reject dualism. In light of the resulting stalemate, the proponents of this strategy typically either deny the entailment from ideal conceivability to metaphysical possibility or urge that the debate over physicalism ought to be “de-prioritized”, since it cannot be settled on a priori, purely conceptual grounds. I argue that the battlefield in which “shombists” aim to challenge “zombists” is less neutral than they claim: the implicit assumptions underpinning Chalmers’s formulation of the zombie argument conflict with reductive versions of physicalism. Specifically, I contend that the conjunction of these assumptions—notably, the thesis I term phenomenal essentialism, according to which a subject, by virtue of referring to the way an experience phenomenally appears, is thereby able to grasp what that experience essentially is—with the ideal inconceivability of zombies (a consequence of the ideal conceivability of shombies, given the conceivability–possibility entailment) yields implications a physicalist ought to reject. Physicalists who deem zombies ideally inconceivable are thus committed to denying phenomenal essentialism and/or other assumptions of Chalmers’s argument. I conclude by arguing that phenomenal essentialism is highly plausible.

Epistemic injustice has received considerable attention in the philosophy of psychiatry in recent years. While testimonial injustice, and epistemic injustice more generally, have been widely discussed, hermeneutical injustice has received comparatively little attention. Furthermore, hermeneutical injustice has generally been framed in terms of conceptual lacuna, following Fricker’s (2007) approach. The aim of this paper is to expand the notion of hermeneutical injustice beyond the cases in which it results from a conceptual lacuna. I analyse instances in which hermeneutical injustice arises as a consequence of a distortion of available hermeneutical resources. In this scenario, there are available concepts that may contribute to making experiences intelligible; however, these concepts are distorted. Moreover, some of these conceptual resources, which could serve as a form of hermeneutical dissent against hermeneutical injustice, ultimately contribute to this very injustice due to their distortion. To illustrate this point, I focus on how these conceptual distortions affect those who are dealing with self-illness ambiguity, that is, the difficulty that people diagnosed with a psychiatric condition often experience in distinguishing oneself, or “who one is”, from the diagnosis. I analyse how hermeneutical injustice may arise from both the absence of and especially the distortion of the new hermeneutical tools developed by social movements such as the Neurodiversity Movement and Mad Pride.

This paper develops Virtue Constitutivism (VC), a Spinozist contribution to the metaethical project of grounding practical normativity in the constitutive features of agency. I argue that what Spinoza identifies, in non-moralistic terms, as virtue—the power to be the adequate cause of one’s own actions (E3Def2)—is uniquely suited to this role. This feature exhibits a twofold structure: a conative dimension operating as the constitutive aim, the conatus as conscious desire striving for self-preservation and increased power; and a cognitive dimension operating as the constitutive principle, the dictates of reason, concretely instantiated in what I call beacon practices—patterns of activity that, under conditions of adequate cognition, render adequate striving publicly legible and reliably enable its successful realization. On this basis, I advance three claims. First, VC meets the inescapability challenge without generating relativism, grounding normativity in the intentional structure of desire, prior to any reflective standpoint. Second, beacon practices deliver content-determinacy while resisting reduction to socially successful but power-diminishing customs. Third, VC integrates the central insights of Kantian, Humean, Nietzschean, Aristotelian, and Vellemanian constitutivism while avoiding their characteristic vulnerabilities. The result is an account that is objective without being mind-independent, universal without being abstract, and content-determinate without being relativist.

In a recent article, Montminy and Russo (M&R) (2024) defend a perdurantist solution to forward- and backward-looking cases of Johnston’s Personite Problem (2016, 2017), specifically addressing the issue of compensation for personites—non-maximal fusions of Rinterrelated person-stages that overlap with a perduring person, the maximal fusion of those stages—by appealing to a revised understanding of temporal properties within a perdurantist framework. In this paper we address an overlooked problem with M&R’s account: when applied consistently, it yields a counterintuitive grounding overdetermination (overgrounding) of temporal properties. The problem becomes especially vivid in fission scenarios that are followed by fusion.

BOOK REVIEW Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen PSYCHOPATHY UNMASKED THE RISE AND FALL OF A DANGEROUS DIAGNOSIS, MIT Press, 2025, ISBN-13: 9780262552202 (paper) Paperback: € 47.50