Online research in philosophy

The status of premise 1 is controversial: friends of two dimensional modal logic (and others) will be reluctant to grant that the proposition that I exist is both contingent and knowable a priori (even by me). Instead, they will insist that all that I know a priori is that the sentence "I exist" expresses some true proposition or other when I token it. But, of course, even that will suffice for the purposes of the argument. Provided that I know a priori that the sentence "I exist" expresses some true singular proposition or other -i.e. some proposition or other which contains an individual -then I have an a priori guarantee that there are some individuals, and so I am entitled to assert 2. Of course, it will remain true that there are some people who refuse to accept 2: consider, for example, those ontological nihilists who think that the proper logical form of every sentence can be given in a feature placing language. [3] However, many people will be prepared to grant that we can know a priori that there are at least some individuals -and that it enough to sustain interest in our argument to this point.

Attempts to characterize unarticulated constituents (henceforth: UCs) by means of quantification over the parts of a sentence and the constituents of the proposition it expresses come to grief in more complicated cases than are commonly considered. In particular, UC definitions are inadequate when we consider cases in which the same constituent appears more than once in a proposition that only has one word with the constituent as its semantic value. This article explores some consequences of trying to repair the formal definitions.

Barbara Partee is reported to have said that she never was sure whether the complement of an attitude verb should be a sentence or a proposition, where proposition is to be understood in a pre-theoretical sense as sentence meaning. In this paper we take up the question by investigation a suggestion made by David Kaplan in (Kaplan, 1977), viz. that the complement of an attitude is in fact a proposition, which is described by some character. Our answer to Partee's question is that the complement of a de re attitude is both a proposition and a sentence.

Sainsbury and Tye (2011) propose that, in the case of names and other simple extensional terms, we should substitute for Frege's second level of content—for his senses—a second level of meaning vehicle—words in the language of thought. I agree. They also offer a theory of atomic concept reference—their ‘originalist’ theory—which implies that people knowing the same word have the ‘same concept’. This I reject, arguing for a symmetrical rather than an originalist theory of concept reference, claiming that individual concepts are possessed only by individual people. Concepts are classified rather than identified across different people.

Within cognitive science, language is often set apart (as it is in the present volume) from perception, action, learning, memory, concepts, and reasoning. Yet language is intertwined with all of them. Language perception is a kind of perception; language production is a kind of action. Vocabulary and grammar are learned and stored in long-term memory. As novel utterances are perceived or produced, they are built up in working memory. Concepts are most often studied in the context of word meanings; reasoning is most often studied in the context of inferring one sentence from another.

This paper explores how words relate to concepts. It argues that in many cases, words get their meanings in part by associating with concepts, but only in conjunction with substantial input from language. Language packages concepts in grammatically determined ways. This structures the meanings of words, and determines which sorts of concepts map to words. The results are linguistically modulated meanings, and the extralinguistic concepts associated with words are often not what intuitively would be expected. The paper concludes by discussing implications of this thesis for the relation of word to sentence meaning, and for issues of linguistic determinism.

Two different uses of ‘proposition’ are distinguished: the meaning of an eternal sentence is distinguished from that which can be asserted, believed, conjectured, and so on. It is argued that, in the second sense of ‘proposition’, it is not the case that every proposition can be expressed by an eternal sentence.

The paper is an investigation into the concept of actuality from the standpoint of the philosophy of language. It is argued that expressions such as 'actually' and 'in fact' are not indexicals like 'here' and 'now'; when e.g. 'Snow is actually white' is uttered in a world, what proposition is conveyed does not depend on the world. Nor are such expressions ambiguous. The paper makes a suggestion about the role that 'actually' and its cognates do play. It is also argued that the sentence ⌜Actually S ⌝ expresses a necessary truth only if S itself expresses one. In order to capture the necessitation of the proposition expressed in ⌜Actually S ⌝, it is not sufficient to prefix the word 'necessarily'.

Suppose you are to answer the following two questions: (1) Does the sentence "God exists" express a proposition? (2) If so, then is that proposition true or false? If you say no to the first question, then you may be classified as a noncognitivist with regard to God talk . If you say yes to it, thereby allowing that the given sentence does express a proposition, then you are a cognitivist with regard to God talk . (Let us henceforth abbreviate these expressions, simply using the terms "cognitivist" and "noncognitivist".) All theists, atheists, and agnostics are cognitivists, so the second question applies to them: is the proposition that God exists true or false? You are a theist if and only if you say that the proposition is true or probably true, you are an atheist if and only if you say that it is false or probably false, and you are an agnostic if and only if you understand what the proposition is, but resist giving either answer, and support your resistance by saying, "The evidence is insufficient" (or words to that effect).