Abstract

The chapter makes a case for the view that a ‘just is’-statement such as ‘for the number of the dinosaurs to be Zero _just is_ for there to be no dinosaurs’ should not be rejected on general linguistic or metaphysical grounds. The core of the chapter is a defense of a conception of language labeled ‘compositionalim’, according to which language involving object-talk is attractive insofar as it enables us to give a recursive specification of truth-conditions for a class of sentences rich in expressive power, but not because it has some additional virtue. The chapter concludes by arguing that compositionalism does not lead to an unattractive metaphysics.