Lexical meaning, concepts, and the metasemantics of predicates

This chapter examines how concepts relate to lexical meanings. It focuses on how we can appeal to concepts to give specific, cognitively rich contents to lexical entries, while at the same time using standard methods of compositional semantics. This is a problem, as those methods assume lexical meanings provide extensions, while concepts are mental representations that have very different structure from an extension. The chapter proposes a way to solve this problem which is by casting concepts in a metasemantic role for certain expressions, notably verbs, but more also generally, with expressions that function as content-giving predicates in a sentence.