The semantics of proposition within its ecosystem: A critique of referential realism in some philosophies of language

A study of the semantics of propositions was carried out. The objective of the study was to show the implication of referential realism as a theoretical foundation of some select philosophies of language for the semantics of propositions. The method adopted for the study was content analysis. The schools of philosophy of language studied include nominalism, conceptualism, contextualism, and truth-conditional semantics. In the course of the analysis, it was discovered that referential realism fails to capture the meaning of the proposition. The paper concluded by defining the proposition within its ecosystem as a report on the cognitive activity of the subject, in such a way that the contributions of both the cognitive subject and object were recognized as semantic components.