Eternalism and Propositional Multitasking: in defence of the Operator Argument

Synthese 189 (1):199-219 (2012)
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Abstract

It is a widely held view in philosophy that propositions perform a plethora of different theoretical roles. Amongst other things, they are believed to be the semantic values of sentences in contexts, the objects of attitudes, the contents of illocutionary acts, and the referents of that-clauses. This assumption is often combined with the claim that propositions have their truth-values eternally. In this paper I aim to show that these two assumptions are incompatible: propositions cannot both fulfill the mentioned roles and be eternally true or false. Following Kaplan and Lewis’s Operator Argument, I argue that compositional semantic values of sentences in contexts do not correspond to eternal propositions. Thus, either we regard the non-eternal entities that in fact realize the semantic role of propositions as also fulfilling the remaining propositional roles, or we abandon the assumption that there is a unique realizer of all the roles. The Operator Argument has recently come under attack, mainly for its tense-logical assumptions. However, rejecting these assumptions is not a sufficient defense of the compatibility of the two claims, since the extensional alternative to the tense-logical framework does not allow us to universally retain eternal propositions as compositional semantic values of sentences either.

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Clas Weber
University of Western Australia

Citations of this work

A Bridge from Semantic Value to Content.Brian Rabern - 2017 - Philosophical Topics 45 (2):181-207.
Operator arguments revisited.Juhani Yli-Vakkuri, John Hawthorne & Peter Fritz - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (11):2933-2959.
Being at the Centre: Self-location in Thought and Language.Clas Weber - 2016 - In Manuel García-Carpintero & Stephan Torre (eds.), About Oneself: De Se Thought and Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 246-271.
A Theory of Propositions.Nicholas J. J. Smith - 2016 - Logic and Logical Philosophy 25 (1):83-125.

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References found in this work

Demonstratives: An Essay on the Semantics, Logic, Metaphysics and Epistemology of Demonstratives and other Indexicals.David Kaplan - 1989 - In Joseph Almog, John Perry & Howard Wettstein (eds.), Themes From Kaplan. Oxford University Press. pp. 481-563.
Themes From Kaplan.Joseph Almog, John Perry & Howard Wettstein (eds.) - 1989 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Semantics in generative grammar.Irene Heim & Angelika Kratzer - 1998 - Malden, MA: Blackwell. Edited by Angelika Kratzer.
Relativism and Monadic Truth.Herman Cappelen & John Hawthorne - 2009 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK. Edited by John Hawthorne.

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