Abstract
This paper presents an account of the manner in which a proposition’s immediate structural features are related to its core truth-conditional features. The leading idea is that for a proposition to have a certain immediate structure is just for certain entities to play certain roles in the correct theory of the brute facts regarding that proposition’s truth conditions. The paper explains how this account addresses certain worries and questions recently raised by Jeffery King and Scott Soames.
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Notes
Throughout I assume a Russellian view of what the constituents of propositions are. However, much of what I say below can with appropriate modification be applied to a Fregean view of what the constituents of propositions are.
I also abstract away throughout from delicate issues involving tense and time.
This view of propositions contrasts sharply with those advocated in King (2009) and Soames (2008, unpublished) and that developed in Chapter 5 of Soames (2010). According to those views, propositions have their truth-conditional features only because of things cognitive agents do to them. It is worth noting that the view ultimately advocated in Soames (2010) differs from that advocated in Soames (2008, unpublished) and developed in Chapter 5 of Soames (2010). See Chapters 6 and 7 of Soames (2010) for the view ultimately advocated in Soames (2010). Although the official view of Soames (2010) differs significantly from that developed here, it does not do so by being incompatible with the view that propositions have their truth conditions in virtue of their very natures.
In the case of each these first two theses, the alleged necessity is to be understood as conditional on the existence of a proposition’s actual constituents. Thus, for example, structural internalism allows that a proposition might not have (existed and) had the structure it actually has if one or more of its actual constituents had not existed. However, it does not allow that all of a proposition’s actual constituents might have existed without its having had the structure it actually has. Similarly, for truth-conditional internalism.
In fact, Soames (2008, unpublished) uses his worries to motivate the rejection of not only SNSI, but also NSI, necessitationism, and truth-conditional internalism.
Soames’s talk of “showing” and being “read off” might suggest that the problems he has in mind are more closely tied to issues of explainable a priori entailment than they are to explainable necessary entailment. As will become clear below, both the problem outlined here and my response to it can be reformulated, without loss of plausibility, in terms of an alleged entailment that is explainably both necessary and a priori.
Throughout “if and only if” is to be understood as expressing the material bi-conditional.
Here ‘brutely’ is to take scope over ‘x is true if and only if < Socrates, Plato > instantiates the teaching relation’, not just ‘is true’. Similarly, throughout.
My focus here has been on the passage quoted above from Soames (2008, unpublished). (I am thankful to Soames for permission to cite this source, as it was in reaction to it that this paper was originally written.) An almost identical passage occurs in Soames’s more recent work (2010, Chapter 2). There are, however, some important differences. The relevant passage from Soames (2010) replaces talk of ‘structure’ with talk of ‘formal structure’, and it includes a footnote instructing the reader that by a ‘formal structure’ Soames means “a system of relations that organizes the constituents of the proposition in terms of relations that are not themselves semantically primitive or semantically defined” (31, n. 21, my italics).
I’m not quite sure what to make of these modifications. In the modified passage Soames continues to suggest that it is a problem for the view that there are propositions “in the Frege Russell sense” that no “formal structure” could be a proposition in that sense. This is puzzling because the advocate of Frege-Russell propositions need not think propositions are “formal structures” in Soames’s (2010) sense. At the end of the day, one who wants to make use of the sort of argument that Soames here presents is faced with a dilemma, neither horn of which seems to suit his purposes especially well: one can understand ‘structure’ in either an inclusive or an exclusive sense (ala Soames (2010)). If one understands it in the first way, one’s argument fails for the reasons pointed to in the body of this essay. If, on the other hand, one understands ‘structure’ in the second way, one limits the scope of one’s argument so as to include neither (i) the view that there are propositions in the “Frege-Russell” sense nor (ii) the special case of that view advanced in this paper. Soames (pc.) informs me that it had not occurred to him at the time at which he originally wrote the body of the relevant passage that one might, as I have done here, define structural notions in terms of truth-conditional or representational ones.
I do not intend to rule out the possibility of infinite propositions as a matter of principle. Rather, I am simply ignoring their possibility to simplify the discussion.
I am also ignoring Russell’s paradox regarding propositions (see n. 15 below). If the correct resolution of that paradox is in terms of a ramified theory of types, then the principles employed here will have to be replaced with ramified-type-sensitive schema of some sort.
It is sometimes suggested by advocates of structured propositions that as a “general rule” the manner in which a proposition’s constituents are unified in it is identical to the manner in which the meaningful constituents of sentences that express it are syntactically related to one another. (See, for example, Salmon (1989), pp. 331–392). If the view suggested here is correct, then the manner in which a proposition immediately unifies its immediate constituents is never identical to the manner in which the constituents of any sentence are syntactically related to one another (unless, oddly, some sentences have truth-conditional features brutely and these brute truth-conditional features of sentences are syntactic). Of course, this does not prevent a sentence’s immediate syntactic structure from, as Frege (1977) (p 55) suggested, serving as an “image” of the manner in which a proposition it expresses unifies its constituents.
If we were not ignoring the possibility of infinite propositions, some interesting questions would arise as to whether the structures of such propositions a priori entail their truth conditions. Corresponding issues of necessity, I take it, would be unaffected.
These answers differ markedly from those that King (2007) endorses.
In connection with the analogies I’ve drawn here, I would like to make one clarifying remark regarding my use of ‘brute’ and its cognates. There is one sort of explanation that I do not intend to rule out in claiming that a proposition has its most basic truth-conditional feature brutely; I do not wish to rule out the possibility that a proposition has its most basic truth-conditional feature is explained by its essence. If one can explain why { Socrates } has Socrates as an element (if he exists) by saying that it is its essence to do so, then one can explain why the proposition that Socrates teaches Plato is true if and only if < Socrates, Plato > instantiates the teaching relation in a similar manner. Throughout my use of the term ‘brute’ should be understood as ruling out all explanations other than essentialist explanations of this sort. I wish here neither to affirm nor to deny that such “explanations” are explanations.
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Acknowledgements
For helpful comments I am indebted to David Braun, Mark Schroeder, Scott Soames, audiences at the University of Southern California in fall 2009 and at the Central Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in 2010, as well as the participants in my graduate seminar at the University at Buffalo, SUNY in spring 2009.
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McGlone, M. Propositional structure and truth conditions. Philos Stud 157, 211–225 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9633-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9633-x