Search Results

This introductory chapter begins with a brief analysis of why philosophers believe in propositions. The main purpose of the book is then discussed, which is to formulate and defend a detailed account of the metaphysical nature of propositions. In so doing, it discusses some oppositions to propositions as well. It is argued that there is no mystery about what propositions are. Given rather minimal assumptions it follows that propostions exist, and we can begin to see how and why they have truth conditions and so represent the world as being a certain way. An overview of the chapters included in the volume is presented.

Tarski-style theories of truth are drafted by many semanticists into providing truth-conditional semantic theories for languages. Universally assumed by practitioners in this area of semantics is that such theories are to provide necessary and sufficient conditions on the truth of the targeted sentences. This chapter argues that such an assumption inappropriately restricts the empirical possibilities for the languages to be thus studied. In particular, languages based on alternative logics are ill-served by such an assumption. The chapter loosens the requirement that a semantic theory is to provide necessary and sufficient truth conditions by showing that ‘truth-conditional’ semantic theories are possible which provide not necessary and sufficient conditions on the truth (and falsity) of the targeted sentences, but necessary conditions and sufficient conditions that don't amount to necessary and sufficient conditions, except in certain quite restricted circumstances.

This chapter begins the diagnosis of The Enlightenment Problem. It argues that theorists have tended to proceed as if they adhere to a principle that this book terms Expressed or Implicated (EOI). EOI refers to an utterance of a sentence S in a context C, the truth conditional intuitions of competent, rational speakers who are relevantly well-informed must match the truth conditions of either what is (semantically) expressed or what is implicated by S in C. This chapter argues that EOI is false, and attempts to diagnose why it is that theorists have tended to proceed as though they accepted it.

The meaning of any sentence derives from the meanings of its words and from how those words are syntactically combined with one another. But what explains this ‘principle of compositionality’, and what is its import? The answer is due to Davidson: that since we know (from Tarski) how to deduce the truth conditions of sentences from the referents of their words, we should explain it by identifying (or replacing) sentence-meanings with truth conditions and word-meanings with referents. This chapter offers a deflationary alternative according to which the meaning of a sentence is trivially compositional, since it is constituted by the facts concerning its structure and the meanings of its words. An important implication of this idea is that contrary to the writings of Fodor and Lepore, compositionality can place no constraint whatsoever on how word-meanings are engendered.

Attempts to motivate and clarify a radically ‘deflationist’ view of the relations of ‘meaning that’ and ‘having the content that’, and to defend it against many of the arguments that are widely viewed as decisive against any such view. One of its claims is that standard work in the theory of reference (for instance, that of Kripke and Putnam) can be reconceived so as not to be primarily about reference at all. Includes a long postscript that, among other things, includes an account of how the degree to which behaviour is successful can be explained within a ‘deflationist’ framework.

The aim of this chapter is to show that allowing languages to have ontologically neutral idioms, both quantificational and singular, poses no problems for semantic theories of such languages. The ontologically neutral idioms in the object language are just replicated (in their resources) in the metalanguage that provides the semantic theory for that object language. A traditional truth-conditional theory of a language is given that illustrates the point. That the same point holds for singular idioms is illustrated by describing various semantic approaches to demonstratives. There is a view, propounded by Lewis, Higginbotham, Ludlow, and others, that disquotation is crucial to semantic theories because such provide the needed language/world connections. This claim is shown to be wrong: even with disquotation, such language-world connections can be absent; and it’s also shown that semantic theories that aren’t disquotational can nevertheless provide language-world connections if such are wanted.

This chapter begins by exploring what would be needed to evade fully The Enlightenment Problem, arguing for the abandonment not only of EOI but also of some important variants of EOI. It then considers what is required to avoid The Aspect Problem. By the end of this chapter, it is clear that philosophers of language need to develop theories on which truth conditional intuitions may not be due to any proposition whose truth conditions match those indicated by the intuitions.

This chapter explores logical semantics, that is, the structural meaning of logical expressions like connectives (it is not the case that, either or, if … then), quantifiers (there is, for all, etc.), and modalities (it is necessary that, it is possible that). It focuses on truth-theoretical semantics for formalized languages, a tradition emerging from Carnap's and Tarski's work in the first half of the last century that specifies the meaning of these expressions in terms of the truth-conditions of the sentences in which they occur. It considers Tarski-style definitions of the semantics of a given language in a stronger metalanguage, Tarski's impossibility results, and attempts to overcome them in the post-Tarskian tradition.

A central thesis in the philosophy of language, at least since Frege and Russell, is that the meaning of (declarative) sentences determines the conditions under which they are true. Of course, declarative sentences in English divide into two classes — those that have truth conditions tout court, and those that have truth conditions only relative to certain contextual parameters being fixed. With respect to the latter class, identifiable linguistic features determine which contextual parameters go with which parts of the sentence in question. A number of authors have challenged, in varying degrees of scope, the thesis that sentence meaning determines truth conditions. Let's call the extreme critical position ‘radical pragmatics’ (RP). According to RP, sentences lack truth conditions. Sentences have meaning, according to RP, but only utterances have truth conditions. Sentences do not have truth conditions in vacuo, but only in the context of an utterance, only against a background of ‘normal circumstances’. Philosophers who explicitly subscribe to an all out RP are John Searle and Charles Travis. Both these philosophers allude to Wittgenstein and Austin as their chief influences. According to a more moderate pragmatics (MP), the truth conditions of many assertions go beyond anything that a semantics legitimately assigns to the sentences uttered. Many philosophers and linguists (Bach, Sperber/Wilson, Carston, Recanati, Perry, Crimmins, Stich) endorse MP to some degree. If either RP or MP is correct, then semantics is not about truth conditions. The polemical strategy of this chapter is to argue MP is an unstable position. To wit, there is no principled line to draw between MP and its fanatical cousin RP. So if you accept the arguments or intuitions behind MP, you inevitably will wind up endorsing RP. Secondly, it argues that neither RP nor MP has valid arguments against the view that sentence meaning determines truth conditions. And, lastly, it is argued that RP (and so MP) is wrong. Showing that RP and MP, and their collective arguments against truth conditional semantics are flawed is not a defence of truth conditional semantics directly, but it does fend off what has become a rather irksome opponent.

There is a widespread view of truth, tracing back at least to Frege, on which we may say all there is to say about what truth is without so much as mentioning words. This chapter shows that this view is wrong. It argues that what words mean plays a role in fixing when they would be true; but not an exhaustive one. Meaning leaves room for variation in truth conditions from one speaking to another. What that non-exhaustive role is depends on what it is to have said what is true. Identification of the aspect of truth which fixes this role will collapse the widespread view.

This chapter focuses on word reference, and shows that the meaning of an expression cannot be identified with its reference to things in the world, rather than its expression of ideas in the mind. It looks at extensionalist versions of the referential theory that focus on objects in the actual world and sets thereof, as well as intensionalist versions that consider other possible worlds and/or properties and relations. It examines the Davidsonian theory, which used a Tarski-style axiomatization for languages to describe the compositionality of language. Truth-theoretic properties can be systematized in an ideational theory using a generative theory of thought, with phrase structure rules and Tarskian reference rules.

This chapter argues that the conditional probability of the consequent given the antecedent is crucial to understanding indicative conditionals. However, unlike Jackson, it denies that the truth value of an indicative conditional is given by the corresponding material conditional. To begin with are the difficulties that embedded conditionals (i.e. conditionals which have conditional antecedents and/or consequents) present to Jackson. Jackson is aware that embedded conditionals present problems to his approach, and argues that ‘If A then (if B then C)’ is regarded by English users as interchangeable with ‘If (A and B) then C’. Since the latter contains no embedded conditionals, the problem is avoided. However, the proposed solution fails to generalize in satisfactory ways to connectives like ‘but’ and ‘even’. In addition, Jackson's approach to conditionals is restricted to conditionals used to make assertions, and does not readily generalize to conditionals used in other kinds of speech acts. The response to the difficulties with taking the material conditional as giving the truth conditions for the indicative conditional is not to seek an alternative, more satisfactory account of the truth conditions of indicative conditionals; rather, the chapter endorses the ‘no truth conditions’ position originally proposed by Ernest Adams.

This chapter offers an alternative approach to assigning truth conditions to complex descriptive sentences. Truth conditions are first motivated as a kind of composite of the assertability conditions on sentences and mistake conditions on mental states. It is then suggested that given biforcated attitude semantics, plausible assumptions about what mistake conditions will involve can be used to assign the right truth conditions to complex descriptive sentences — a result which is proven in an appendix to the chapter. It is further suggested that given an appropriate semantics for ‘believes that’, the expressivist can go on to maintain that the states expressed by complex descriptive sentences really are beliefs, after all.

Mark Richard (1981) calls the thesis that propositions never change their truth-values over time ‘eternalism’ and the opposing view ‘temporalism’. Temporalism is committed to the view that temporal contents, contents that may have different truth-values at different times, have full proposition status. They may be (i) the semantic values of truth-evaluable sentences, (ii) the objects of the attitudes (e.g. belief, doubt, hope, wish, and so on), (iii) the objects of agreement and disagreement, (iv) what is transferred or shared when people communicate successfully, and (v) the contents operated on by intensional operators (e.g., modal operators or tense operators). After offering more precise formulations of temporalism and eternalism, I argue that temporal contents are the semantic values of truth-evaluable sentences.