 One of Pagin's principal aims is to provide the foundations for seemingly basic semantic concepts like truth and reference in terms of the role that compositional semantic theories must play in explaining the success of linguistic communication.This has led him into various areas of the philosophy of language and logic, and he has written about rules and rule-following, vagueness, synonymy, and assertion, and about the works of Wittgenstein, Quine, Davidson and Dummett.Pagin has also worked in fields adjacent to the philosophy of language such as the philosophy of mind (work on sensation terms), cognitive psychology and psychiatry (work on speakers with autism), and the history of literature (work on indexicality and point of view).