New Thinking about Propositions

260 Pages·2014·5.227 MB·English

by  Jeffrey C. King, Scott Soames, Jeff Speaks

NEW
THINKING
ABOUT
PROPOSITIONS
Jeffrey C. King, Scott Soames, & Jeff Speaks
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New Th inking about Propositions
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New Th inking about
Propositions
Jeff rey C. King
Scott Soames
Jeff Speaks

1
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1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,
United Kingdom
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© Jeff rey C. King, Scott Soames, and Jeff Speaks 2014
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First Edition published in 2014
Impression: 1
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2013944506
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Contents

Introduction 1
Jeff Speaks
Part I. Common Ground
1. What Role do Propositions Play in our Th eories? 5
Jeff rey C. King
2. What's Wrong with Semantic Th eories Which Make no Use
of Propositions? 9
Jeff Speaks
3. Why the Traditional Conceptions of Propositions Can't be Correct 2 5
Scott Soames
Part II. Th ree Th eories of Propositions
4. N aturalized Propositions 47
Jeff rey C. King
5. Propositions are Properties of Everything or Nothing 71
Jeff Speaks
6. Cognitive Propositions 91
Scott Soames
Part III. Critical Essays
7. Criticisms of Soames and Speaks 127
Jeff rey C. King
8. Representational Entities and Representational Acts 1 47
Jeff Speaks
9. Propositions vs Properties and Facts 166
Scott Soames
Part IV. Further Th oughts 
10. Responses to Speaks and Soames 185
Jeff rey C. King
11. Representation and Structure in the Th eory of Propositions 215
Jeff Speaks
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vi CONTENTS
12. Clarifying and Improving the Cognitive Th eory 2 26
Scott Soames
Bibliography 245
Index 251
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Introduction

Jeff   Speaks
Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, many philosophers of language found themselves in
an increasingly diffi cult situation.
On the one hand, many came to believe that in order to do semantics properly as
well as to give an adequate treatment of the attitudes, one needed to posit certain enti-
ties—propositions—which could be the meanings of sentences (relative to contexts),
the contents of mental states, and the primary bearers of truth and falsity. But largely
due to the arguments of Scott Soames1 many also came to distrust the standard theo-
retical account of the nature of propositions, which treated them as sets of worlds, and
came to think of them instead as structured entities of some sort.
Th ere was however no consensus about what these structured entities could be.
A standard way of talking around the problem was to point out that propositions could
be represented as ordered pairs. But it is pretty plain that this is j ust a way of talking
around the problem—to say that propositions can be represented as ordered pairs is
not to say what they are. Th e unsatisfactory situation persisted.
Jeff King’s 2007 book, Th e Nature and Structure of Content, had a decisive impact on
this situation in two ways. First, it made clear just h ow unsatisfactory the situation was,
by stating the desiderata on a theory of propositions—desiderata which thinking of
propositions as ordered pairs, for instance, plainly did not meet. Second, and perhaps
more important, it made clear that the situation did not have to r emain unsatisfactory;
the book presented a novel view of propositions which both provided a clear meta-
physical account of their nature, and made the case that propositions, so understood,
could play the roles for which philosophers of language and mind wanted them in the
fi rst place. It made clear that progress on the question of the nature of the proposition,
the question which so puzzled Frege, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein, is possible.
Th is book is a contribution to the ongoing discussion to which King’s book, as well as
the work of others, gave rise.2
Th e three co-authors of this book agree on the views which led to the unsatisfac-
tory situation described above. Th e aim of the fi rst Part is to make the case for this
1 See especially Soames (1988).
2 We can’t, of course, hope to discuss all of this recent work. See, among other places, Collins (2011),
Gaskin (2008), Hanks (2009), Hanks (2011), McGlone (2012), Moltmann (forthcoming).
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2 INTRODUCTION
constellation of views in two ways: fi rst, by arguing that we need propositions in our
accounts of language and the mind, and in our semantic theories; and, second, by
arguing that traditional accounts of propositions—the classical theories of Frege and
Russell, and the view of propositions as sets of possible worlds—are not up to the task.
A subsidiary aim of this part of the book is to make plain some of the constraints
which a successful theory of propositions should have to meet. By seeing how certain
views of propositions, or attempts to do without them altogether, fail—for example by
failing to provide suitable objects of the propositional attitudes, or to give an adequate
semantics for a certain class of sentences—we get clearer on the roles propositions
must play. Each of us thinks that we should be able to give some account of the entities
which play these roles. None of us is committed to the claim that this account should
respect commonsense or folk intuitions about what these entities are (to the extent that
such intuitions exist). But, on the other hand, the role these entities play—with respect
to our mental states and our language use—means that they must be the sorts of enti-
ties to which ordinary users can refer and so, in that sense, they must not be completely
beyond the ken of non-philosophers.
At the end of Part I the agreement ends. In Part II, each of us lays out and defends
his favored theory of propositions. King elaborates and refi nes his view of propositions
as facts; Soames extends his view (fi rst defended in his 2010 book, What is Meaning? )
of propositions as cognitive event types; and I defend the view that propositions are
a kind of property. Th e essays in Part III criticize the views defended in Part II; and
in Part IV each of us presents some further thoughts on the task of giving a theory of
propositions.
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