Words by Convention

Existing metasemantic projects presuppose that word- (or sentence-) types are part of the non-semantic base. This paper proposes a new strategy: an endogenous account of word types, that is, one where word types are fixed as part of the metasemantics. On this view, it is the conventions of truthfulness and trust that ground not only the meaning of the words (meaning by convention) but also what the word type is of each particular token utterance (words by convention). The same treatment extends to identifying the populations through which the conventions prevail. The paper considers whether this proposal leads to new underdetermination challenges for metasemantics, and makes a case that it does not.