Why Propositions Cannot be Sets of Truth-supporting Circumstances

No semantic theory satisfying certain natural constraints can identify the semantic contents of sentences (the propositions they express), with sets of circumstances in which the sentences are true–no matter how fine-grained the circumstances are taken to be. An objection to the proof is shown to fail by virtue of conflating model-theoretic consequence between sentences with truth-conditional consequence between the semantic contents of sentences. The error underlines the impotence of distinguishing semantics, in the sense of a truth-based theory of logical consequence, and semantics, in the sense of a theory of meaning.     

Propositions: Individuation and Invirtuation

The pressure to individuate propositions more finely than intensionally—that is, hyper-intensionally—has two distinct sources. One source is the philosophy of mind: one can believe a proposition without believing an intensionally equivalent proposition. The second source is metaphysics: there are intensionally equivalent propositions, such that one proposition is true in virtue of the other but not vice versa. I focus on what our theory of propositions should look like when it's guided by metaphysical concerns about what is true in virtue of what. In this paper I articulate and defend a metaphysical theory of the individuation of propositions, according to which two propositions are identical just in case they occupy the same nodes in a network of invirtuation relations. Invirtuation is here taken to be a primitive relation of metaphysical explanation exemplified by propositions that, in conjunction with truth, defines the notion of true in virtue of. After formulating the theory, I compare it with a view that individuates propositions by cognitive equivalence, and then defend the theory from objections.     

Cutting it (too) fine

It is widely held that propositions are structured entities. In The Nature and Structure of Content (2007), Jeff King argues that the structure of propositions is none other than the syntactic structure deployed by the speaker/hearers who linguistically produce and consume the sentences that express the propositions. The present paper generalises from King’s position and claims that syntax provides the best in-principle account of propositional structure. It further seeks to show, however, that the account faces serve problems pertaining to the fine individuation of propositions that the account entails. The ‘fineness of cut’ problem has been raised by Collins (The unity of linguistic meaning, 2007) and others. King (Philos Stud 163(3):763–781, 2013) responds to these complaints in ways this paper rebuts. Thus, the very idea of structured propositions is brought into doubt, for the best in-principle account of such structure appears to fail.     

Processing fearful and neutral sentences: Memory and heart rate change

Abstract

Thirty college student subjects were instructed to process fearful or neutral sentences on cue. Cue tones were presented randomly within a repetitive series of non-signal tones (1 every 6sec). A change in tone frequency (higher or lower) was the signal to recall either the fearful or the neutral member of a previously memorised sentence pair. At the first signal for retrieval, and depending on group assignment, subjects engaged in one of three text processing tasks: null task (i.e. subjects were told not to process the sentence at this first cue), silent articulation of the sentence, or imagery of the text content. A second retrieval signal followed the first, at which time all subjects did the imagery task. Fearful sentences resulted in greater heart rate acceleration than neutral sentences. This affective discrimination was greatest for imagery (during both processing periods), but it was also apparent during articulation, and even to some extent during null sentence processing. This result was interpreted as evidence of spread of activation from language propositions to response propositions, consistent with the associative network structure of fear described in bio-information processing theory.     

Meaning and Conversational Impropriety in Sceptical Contexts

According to “disjunctivist neo‐Mooreanism”—a position Duncan Pritchard develops in a recent book—it is possible to know the denials of radical sceptical hypotheses, even though it is conversationally inappropriate to claim such knowledge. In a recent paper, on the other hand, Pritchard expounds an “überhinge” strategy, according to which one cannot know the denials of sceptical hypotheses, as “hinge propositions” are necessarily groundless. The present article argues that neither strategy is entirely successful. For if a proposition can be known, it can also be claimed to be known. If the latter is not possible, this is not because certain propositions are either “intrinsically” conversationally inappropriate (as Pritchard claims in his book) or else “rationally groundless” (as Pritchard claims in his paper), but rather that we are dealing with something that merely presents us with the appearance of being an epistemic claim.     

Propositions as Structured Cognitive Event-Types

According to act theories, propositions are structured cognitive act-types. Act theories appear to make propositions inherently representational and truth-evaluable, and to provide solutions to familiar problems with alternative theories, including Frege’s and Russell’s problems, and the third-realm and unity problems. Act theories have critical problems of their own, though: acts as opposed to their objects are not truth evaluable, not structured in the right way, not expressed by sentences, and not the objects of propositional attitudes. I show how identifying propositions with other cognitive event-types, namely thoughts, has the perceived virtues of act theories without the defects.     

On the general theory of meaningful representation

The numerical representations of measurement, geometry and kinematics are here subsumed under a general theory of representation. The standard theories of meaningfulness of representational propositions in these three areas are shown to be special cases of two theories of meaningfulness for arbitrary representational propositions: the theories based on unstructured and on structured representation respectively. The foundations of the standard theories of meaningfulness are critically analyzed and two basic assumptions are isolated which do not seem to have received adequate justification: the assumption that a proposition invariant under the appropriate group is therefore meaningful, and the assumption that representations should be unique up to a transformation of the appropriate group. A general theory of representational meaningfulness is offered, based on a semantic and syntactic analysis of representational propositions. Two neglected features of representational propositions are formalized and made use of: (a) that such propositions are induced by more general propositions defined for other structures than the one being represented, and (b) that the true purpose of representation is the application of the theory of the representing system to the represented system. On the basis of these developments, justifications are offered for the two problematic assumptions made by the existing theories.Material from this paper was presented at a conference on meaningfulness in the theory of measurement held at New York University in December 1984, hosted by J. C. Falmagne. I would like to thank Patrick Suppes for arranging my invitation to this conference, and David Krantz, R. Duncan Luce, and Fred Roberts for helpful comments. I would also like to thank an anonymous referee for extremely detailed and helpful comments and suggestions, the most important of which are acknowledged in footnotes.     

A repair of Frege’s theory of thoughts

Frege’s writings contain arguments for the thesis (i) that a thought expressed by a sentence S is a structured object whose composition pictures the composition of S, and for the thesis (ii) that a thought is an unstructured object. I will argue that Frege’s reasons for both (i) and (ii) are strong. Frege’s explanation of the difference in sense between logically equivalent sentences rests on assumption (i), while Frege’s claim that the same thought can be decomposed differently makes (ii) plausible. Thoughts are supposed to do work that requires that they be structured and work that requires that they be unstructured. But this cannot be! While the standard response to this problem is to reject either (i) or (ii), I propose a charitable repair in the spirit of Frege’s theory that accepts both. The key idea can be found in Frege’s Basic Laws of Arithmetic(BL, GGA). Frege argues that the thought expressed by a sentence is determined by the truth-conditions that can be derived from the semantic axioms for the sentence constituents. The fact that the same axiomatic truth-condition can be derived in different ways from different semantic axioms suggests a Fregean solution of the dilemma: A thought is a type that is instantiated by all sequences of senses (decomposed thoughts) that have the same axiomatic truth-conditions. This allows for multiple decomposability of the same thought (for different decomposed thoughts can have the same axiomatic truth-conditions) and for a notion of containment (the decomposed thought contains those senses whose semantic axioms are needed in the derivation of the truth-conditions). My proposal combines the virtues of (i) and (ii) without inheriting their vices.     

Linguistic structures and mental operations

The internal representations and mental operations used in verifying a sentence against a pictorial referent are examined in an experiment where the location of the false constituent (subject, verb, or object) varied. The latencies for false sentences were ordered: verb, grammatical subject, grammatical object, with verb mismatches being detected the fastest. An information-processing analysis indicated that both comparison and search operations are employed, and that sentences are represented, in general, as a list of propositions with case-relational information. Context and task demands impose order on the list and lead to different operations on these structures. The depth of processing sentences varies from simple lexical comparisons up to full encoding and usage of syntactic and semantic features and case relations.     

关于IN结合论的十对命题

本文首先概述IN结合论的基本内涵,指出它是智力(I)与非智力因素(N)结合论的简称;然后从三个维度考察了IN结合论的十对命题。这三个维度是：(1)区别维度。即从智力与非智力因素二者的区别看,有3对命题;(2)影响学习维度。即从二者对学习的影响看,有4对命题;(3)联系维度。即从二者的联系看,有3对命题。     

Formalization and the Objects of Logic

There is a long-standing debate whether propositions, sentences, statements or utterances provide an answer to the question of what objects logical formulas stand for. Based on the traditional understanding of logic as a science of valid arguments, this question is firstly framed more exactly, making explicit that it calls not only for identifying some class of objects, but also for explaining their relationship to ordinary language utterances. It is then argued that there are strong arguments against the proposals commonly put forward in the debate. The core of the problem is that an informative account of the objects formulas stand for presupposes a theory of formalization; that is, a theory that explains what formulas may adequately substitute for an inference in proofs of validity. Although such theories are still subject to research, some consequences can be drawn from an analysis of the reasons why the common accounts featuring sentences, propositions or utterances fail. Theories of formalization cannot refer to utterances qua expressions of propositions; instead they may refer to sentences and rely on additional information about linguistic structure and pragmatic context.     

Rationalism vs. Sentimentalism: Reviewing Price's Review

Abstract

It is sometimes argued that conceptualism cannot explain (dis)agreements concerning matters of personal taste because it treats sentences involving predicates of taste as indexical. I aim to weaken this charge. Given the idea that people sometimes use indexical sentences to express (dis)agreements about taste, two kinds of (dis)agreement are distinguished, namely doxastic and non-doxastic. Taste (dis)agreements are better explained in terms of the later kind, in which case they become amenable to contextualist treatment. It is argued that if something instantiates a taste property (like being tasty for A), it has to instantiate a corresponding attitudinal property (like being liked by A). Based on this, utterances of taste sentences express propositions that concern tastiness of something (e.g., that X is tasty for A) and these propositions entail other propositions that concern non-doxastic attitudes the speakers bear toward something (e.g., that X is liked by A). One speaker is claimed to (dis)agree with another speaker provided their respective entailed propositions feature (in)compatible non-doxastic attitudes. Although this explanation is similar to hybrid accounts that are currently growing in popularity, it departs from them in some notable respects.     

A Constructive Type-Theoretical Formalism for the Interpretation of Subatomically Sensitive Natural Language Constructions

The analysis of atomic sentences and their subatomic components poses a special problem for proof-theoretic approaches to natural language semantics, as it is far from clear how their semantics could be explained by means of proofs rather than denotations. The paper develops a proof-theoretic semantics for a fragment of English within a type-theoretical formalism that combines subatomic systems for natural deduction [20] with constructive (or Martin-L?f) type theory [8, 9] by stating rules for the formation, introduction, elimination and equality of atomic propositions understood as types (or sets) of subatomic proof-objects. The formalism is extended with dependent types to admit an interpretation of non-atomic sentences. The paper concludes with applications to natural language including internally nested proper names, anaphoric pronouns, simple identity sentences, and intensional transitive verbs.     

Knowing and Supposing in Games of Perfect Information

The paper provides a framework for representing belief-contravening hypotheses in games of perfect information. The resulting t-extended information structures are used to encode the notion that a player has the disposition to behave rationally at a node. We show that there are models where the condition of all players possessing this disposition at all nodes (under their control) is both a necessary and a sufficient for them to play the backward induction solution in centipede games. To obtain this result, we do not need to assume that rationality is commonly known (as is done in [Aumann (1995)]) or commonly hypothesized by the players (as done in [Samet (1996)]). The proposed model is compared with the account of hypothetical knowledge presented by Samet in [Samet (1996)] and with other possible strategies for extending information structures with conditional propositions. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation: “Game-Theoretic Foundation for Multi-Agent Systems”, IIS 9734923. Special Issue Formal Epistemology II. Edited by Branden Fitelson     

Accessing integrated and nonintegrated propositional structures in memory

This paper investigates the access properties associated with different propositional structures. Two memory experiments are reported, in which the underlying structures of sentences were integrated or not. Some sentences tested had the same concept repeated across the propositions (integrated), whereas other sentences had no explicit repeated arguments (non-integrated). Accessibility to the memory traces of the sentences was manipulated through the acquisition and the testing conditions. In Experiment 1, subjects received either immediate or delayed recall tests, under free or cued conditions. Integrated sentences were recalled better than nonintegrated ones under conditions of high accessibility (immediate recall or delayed cued recall). In contrast, under the low-access condition (delayed free recall), nonintegrated sentences were recalled slightly better than the integrated ones. Experiment 2 confirmed and extended the results for delayed free recall. Here again, under conditions of low sentence access, nonintegrated sentences were recalled better. These results were interpreted according to theory dealing with the lag effect in list learning.     

The use theory of meaning and semantic stipulation

According to Horwich’s use theory of meaning, the meaning of a word W is engendered by the underived acceptance of certain sentences containing W. Horwich applies this theory to provide an account of semantic stipulation: Semantic stipulation proceeds by deciding to accept sentences containing an as yet meaningless word W. Thereby one brings it about that W gets an underived acceptance property. Since a word’s meaning is constituted by its (basic) underived acceptance property, this decision endows the word with a meaning. The use-theoretic account of semantic stipulation contrasts with the standard view that semantic stipulation proceeds by assigning the meaning (reference) to W that makes a certain set of sentences express true propositions. In this paper I will argue that the use-theoretic account does not work. I take Frege to have already made the crucial point: "a definition does not assert anything but lays down something ["etwas festsetzt"]” (Frege 1899, 36). A semantic stipulation for W cannot be the decision to accept a sentence containing W or be explained in terms of such an acceptance. Semantic stipulation constitutes a problem for Horwich's use theory of meaning, especially his basic notion of acceptance.

Toward a functional theory of reduction transformations

The theory is advanced that reduction transformations function to provide speakers with the option of deleting redundant information when communicating to a topic-cognizant addressee and/or when using a written mode. To test the theory, an experiment was run in which subjects from an advanced cell physiology class were given a list of deep structure proximal sentences (base propositions), all pertaining to the topic of cellular energy, and were asked to communicate them, in either a written or oral mode, to either graduate students in biochemistry or freshman nonscience majors. An analysis of the subjects' use of reduction transformations when communicating the base propositions supported the redundancy-deletion theory developed in the paper. The implications of these results for the perceptual complexity theory of reduction transformations (Fodor & Garrett, 1967) are discussed.     

汉语主动句、被动句的命题表征项目顺序特点

以中国大学生为被试,采用句子—图画验证任务(sentence-picture verification task )探讨了中国学生理解汉语主动句、被动句所形成的命题表征中项目顺序特点。结果表明,无论是语义水平较高的不可逆句,还是语义水平较低的可逆句,中国学生理解汉语主动句、被动句所建构的命题表征中项目顺序均为“施事→受事”。本研究结果初步表明,中国学生理解汉语主动句和被动句时,能根据它们不同的表层结构（汉语主动句的语言表达顺序为“施事→受事”、汉语被动句的语言表达顺序为“受事→施事”）建构相同的深层结构（语义内容的命题表征项目顺序“施事→受事”）,可能是一个按照“施事→受事”固定方向进行的系列认知心理加工的过程     

Markan Faith

According to many accounts of faith—where faith is thought of as something psychological, e.g., an attitude, state, or trait—one cannot have faith without belief of the relevant propositions. According to other accounts of faith, one can have faith without belief of the relevant propositions. Call the first sort of account doxasticism since it insists that faith requires belief; call the second nondoxasticism since it allows faith without belief. The New Testament (NT) may seem to favor doxasticism over nondoxasticism. For it may seem that, according to the NT authors, one can have faith in God, as providential, or faith that Jesus is the Messiah, or be a person of Christian faith, and the like only if one believes the relevant propositions. In this essay, I propose to assess this tension, as it pertains to the Gospel of Mark. The upshot of my assessment is that, while it may well appear that, according to Mark, one can have faith only if one believes the relevant propositions, appearances are deceiving. Mark said no such thing. Rather, what Mark said—by way of story—about faith fits nondoxasticism at least as well as doxasticism, arguably better. More importantly, the account of faith that emerges from Mark is that faith consists in resilience in the face of challenges to living in light of the overall positive stance to the object of faith, where that stance consists in certain conative, cognitive, and behavioral-dispositional elements.