Meaning as Exclusion: A Constraint-Theoretic Account of Semantic Content, Vagueness, Rule-Following, and Communication

The philosophy of language faces three interrelated foundational problems that have resisted unified treatment. The first is the problem of semantic content: what constitutes the determinate meaning of a linguistic expression, and how is that content related to the referents, inferential roles, and use conditions associated with the expression? The second is the problem of vagueness: why are so many natural language predicates genuinely vague, and what is the correct ontological account of that vagueness? The third is the problem of linguistic communication: how do speakers and hearers coordinate on shared content, and what is the relationship between what is explicitly said and what is conveyed by the full communicative act? This paper proposes that all three problems receive unified treatment within Constraint Theory (CT) — the thesis, established by transcendental argument, that constraint is the ontological primitive constitutive of determinate existence as such. On the CT account, semantic content is constituted by exclusion: the meaning of an expression is the constraint it imposes on the interpretation space, determining what the expression rules out as much as what it rules in. This is not a reformulation of inferentialism, though it subsumes it: inferential roles are one expression of a constraint structure that is ontologically prior to any particular inferential system. Vagueness, on the CT account, is genuine ontological indeterminacy in constraint structure rather than epistemic ignorance about a precise boundary (against epistemicism) or a formal gap in truth value (against supervaluationism). Vague predicates have genuinely open constraint profiles: the exclusion relations that constitute their meaning do not determine a verdict for every case, and this indeterminacy is ineliminable because natural language constraint structures are constitutively open-textured. The paper develops this account in detail and shows how it dissolves Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox: following a rule is operating within a constraint structure, and the indeterminacy of rule-following for novel cases is the indeterminacy of applying a finite constraint specification to an indefinitely extended possibility space. Linguistic communication is constraint propagation: the speaker’s constraint structures propagate into the hearer’s interpretive possibility space, closing some dimensions and leaving others open. Gricean implicature is the communicative significance of which possibilities the speaker chose to exclude by their specific linguistic choices; metaphor is the productive propagation of constraint structures across domain boundaries; and the context-sensitivity of meaning is the interaction of linguistic constraint structures with the contextual constraints that further determine interpretive possibility spaces in specific conversational situations. The paper engages the principal positions in the philosophy of language and addresses the principal objections.