Talking about semantic content

Does this make sense:

Giving semantic content is like giving a dictionary definition. If you already know how to speak the language, it gives you a way of extending your ability at the margins.

Its similarity to rendering formal syntax is misleading: of course we can write down some rules - this is not a useful model, though, because of the OQ arguments. We can only write down some rules if we can already write down something.

And dictionary definitions are only really useful if we also have some tacit 'hooks'. If we have only synonyms, then the only argument for replacing the synonym with the defined word will be convenience - we can say something more quickly, or in a less clumsy way.

We have to be able to show as well as tell.

We might, like the ordinary language philosophers and the linguists, articulate the way we talk. As we do this, we change the way we talk - words have their meanings 'tidied up', and so changed. Sometimes they are changed in more dramatic ways, that we take time to articualte (as scientific terms change meaning - space, mass, distance).

Discovering how we talk, how we can talk, and what the world is like are not three different enterprises.

What's wrong with the picture theory of language is what's wrong with semantic content, and also what's wrong the 'languages of thought'. This isn't to say that these models, these metaphors, have no empirical value - they may be important heuristics for certain kinds of studies. They just can't answer any interesting epistemological or ontological questions.