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Summary One approach to the nature of propositions takes them to be entities that exist pleonastically as a result of our practices of thinking and speaking.
Key works Schiffer 2003
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  1. (1 other version)From remnants to things, and back again.Thomas Hofweber - manuscript
    forthcoming in Meanings and other Things: essays on Stephen Schiffer Gary Ostertag (ed.) MIT Press 2007. Schiffer substantially changed his view about propositions and that-clauses somewhere between his two most recent books: Remnants of Meaning and The Things We Mean. I look at what problems his earlier view had, and what reason Schiffer gives for giving it up in favor of his more recent view. I argue that Schiffer’s reasons are not very good reasons, and that instead the problems for (...)
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  2. Pleonastic propositions and de re belief.Gary Ostertag - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (11):3529-3547.
    In The Things We Mean, Stephen Schiffer defends a novel account of the entities to which belief reports relate us and to which their that-clauses refer. For Schiffer, the referred-to entities—propositions—exist in virtue of contingencies of our linguistic practices, deriving from “pleonastic restatements” of ontologically neutral discourse. Schiffer’s account of the individuation of propositions derives from his treatment of that -clause reference. While that -clauses are referential singular terms, their reference is not determined by the speaker’s referential intentions. Rather, their (...)
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  3. Pleonastic propositions and the face value theory.Alex Steinberg - 2020 - Synthese 197 (3):1165-1180.
    Propositions are a useful tool in philosophical theorizing, even though they are not beyond reasonable nominalistic doubts. Stephen Schiffer’s pleonasticism about propositions is a paradigm example of a realistic account that tries to alleviate such doubts by grounding truths about propositions in ontologically innocent facts. Schiffer maintains two characteristic theses about propositions: first, that they are so-called pleonastic entities whose existence is subject to what he calls something-from-nothing transformations ; and, second, that they are the referents of ‘that’-clauses that function (...)
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  4. Properties and Propositions: The Metaphysics of Higher-Order Logic.Robert Trueman - 2020 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    This book articulates and defends Fregean realism, a theory of properties based on Frege's insight that properties are not objects, but rather the satisfaction conditions of predicates. Robert Trueman argues that this approach is the key not only to dissolving a host of longstanding metaphysical puzzles, such as Bradley's Regress and the Problem of Universals, but also to understanding the relationship between states of affairs, propositions, and the truth conditions of sentences. Fregean realism, Trueman suggests, ultimately leads to a version (...)
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  5. Force, content and logic.Michael Schmitz - 2018 - In Gabriele Mras, Paul Weingartner & Bernhard Ritter (eds.), Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics, Contributions to the 41st International Wittgenstein Symposium. Berlin: Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society. pp. 221-223.
    The Frege point to the effect that e.g. the clauses of conditionals are not asserted and therefore cannot be assertions is often taken to establish a dichotomy between the content of a speech act, which is propositional and belongs to logic and semantics, and its force, which belongs to pragmatics. Recently this dichotomy has been questioned by philosophers such as Peter Hanks and Francois Recanati, who propose act-theoretic accounts of propositions, argue that we can’t account for propositional unity independently of (...)
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  6. Propositional Platitudes.Gary Ostertag - 2016 - In Meanings and Other Things: Themes From the Work of Stephen Schiffer. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
  7. Propositions: Individuation and Invirtuation.Kris McDaniel - 2015 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (4):757-768.
    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 (...)
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  8. Some remarks on “language-created entities”.Iris Einheuser - 2009 - Acta Analytica 24 (3):185-192.
    Some entities, such as fictional characters, propositions, properties, events and numbers are prima facie promising candidates for owing their existence to our linguistic and conceptual practices. However, it is notoriously hard to pin down just what sets such allegedly “language-created” entities apart from ordinary entities. The present paper considers some of the features that are supposed to distinguish between entities of the two kinds and argues that, on an independently plausible account of what it takes to individuate objects, the criteria (...)
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  9. Review: Stephen Schiffer, The Things We Mean. [REVIEW]Nikola Kompa - 2008 - ProtoSociology 25:215-224.
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  10. Pleonastic entities: Fictional characters and propositions.Massimiliano Vignolo - 2008 - Philosophical Investigations 32 (1):65-78.
    Stephen Schiffer holds that propositions are pleonastic entities. I will argue that there is a substantial difference between propositions and fictional characters, which Schiffer presents as typical pleonastic entities. My conclusion will be that if fictional characters are typical pleonastic entities, then Schiffer fails to show that propositions are pleonastic entities.
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  11. Unwrinkling the carpet of meaning: Stephen Schiffer, the things we mean.A. Max Jarvie - 2007 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 37 (1):85-99.
    This article is a critical review of Stephen Schiffer’s monograph The Things We Mean . The text discusses some novel contributions made by Schiffer to the philosophy of meaning, in particular, Schiffer’s proposal for the reification of certain abstract entities and the application of his argument to the philosophical problem of vagueness in natural language. Special attention is paid both to Schiffer’s ingenious use of the notion of conservative extension , here employed as a criterion for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate (...)
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  12. Schiffer’s New Theory of Propositions. [REVIEW]Thomas Hofweber - 2006 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (1):211–217.
    Every fifteen years or so Stephen Schiffer writes a state of the art book on the philosophy of language, with special emphasis on belief ascriptions, meaning, and propositions. The latest is his terrific new book The Things we Mean. It is again full of ideas, insights, arguments, expositions, and theories. For us, however, who believe that that-clauses are first and foremost clauses, not referring expressions, and that they thus do not refer to propositions or anything else, The Things we Mean (...)
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  13. The things we (sorta kinda) believe. [REVIEW]John Macfarlane - 2006 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (1):218–224.
    On Schiffer’s new view, propositions are easy to come by. Any that-clause can be counted on to express one. Thus, trivially, there are vague propositions, conditional propositions, moral and aesthetic propositions. And where propositions go, truth and falsity follow: barring paradoxical cases, Schiffer accepts instances of the schemata “the proposition that p is true iff p” and “the proposition that p is false iff not-p.” What isn’t easy to find, Schiffer thinks, is determinate truth. By the end of the book, (...)
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  14. (2 other versions)Précis of the things we mean. [REVIEW]Stephen Schiffer - 2006 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (1):208–210.
    In The Things We Mean I argue that there exist such things as the things we mean and believe, and that they are what I call pleonastic propositions. The first two chapters offer an initial motivation and articulation of the theory of pleonastic propositions, and of pleonastic entities generally. The remaining six chapters bring that theory to bear on issues in the theory of content: the existence and nature of meanings; knowledge of meaning; the meaning relation and compositional semantics; the (...)
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  15. Stephen Schiffer, The Things We Mean. [REVIEW]Robert J. Stainton - 2006 - Philosophical Review 115 (1):124-127.
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  16. Propositions: What They Could and What They Could not Be.Massimiliano Vignolo - 2006 - Abstracta 2 (2):129-147.
    I defend the Fregean model of propositions: propositions are the referents of that-clauses and structured entities made of concepts. Schiffer has presented a group of arguments against the Fregean model and advanced an alternative view: propositions are unstructured pleonastic entities. My purpose is twofold: to counter each of his arguments sketching the guidelines for a theory of concepts as basic constituents of propositions; to maintain that the notion of pleonastic entity is not robust enough for claiming the existence of propositions.
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  17. Review of Stephen Schiffer, The Things We Mean[REVIEW]Peter Pagin - 2005 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2005 (7).
    After Meaning, 1972, and The Remnants of Meaning , 1987, The Things We Mean is Stephen Schiffer's third major work on the foundations of the theory of linguistic meaning. In simplest possible outline, the development started with a positive attempt to base a meaning theory on a modified Gricean account of utterance meaning, but took a negative turn, with the problems of belief sentences as a major reason for thinking that a systematic (compositional) semantic theory for natural language was not (...)
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  18. Pleonastic Explanations. [REVIEW]Mark Sainsbury - 2005 - Mind 114 (453):97-111.
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  19. Propositional content.Stephen Schiffer - 2005 - In Ernie Lepore & Barry C. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
    To a first approximation, _propositional content_ is whatever _that-clauses_ contribute to what is ascribed in utterances of sentences such as Ralph believes _that Tony Curtis is alive_. Ralph said _that Tony Curtis is alive_. Ralph hopes _that Tony Curtis is alive_. Ralph desires _that Tony Curtis is alive_.
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  20. The Things We Mean. [REVIEW]Wayne Wright - 2005 - Disputatio 1 (18):191-197.
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  21. The things we mean.Stephen Schiffer - 2003 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Stephen Schiffer presents a groundbreaking account of meaning and belief, and shows how it can illuminate a range of crucial problems regarding language, mind, knowledge, and ontology. He introduces the new doctrine of 'pleonastic propositions' to explain what the things we mean and believe are. He discusses the relation between semantic and psychological facts, on the one hand, and physical facts, on the other; vagueness and indeterminacy; moral truth; conditionals; and the role of propositional content in information acquisition and explanation. (...)
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  22. Propositions.Andrea Iacona - 2002 - Name.
  23. The concrete modal realist challenge to platonism.Matthew McGrath - 1998 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 76 (4):587 – 610.
  24. Language created, language independent entities.Stephen Schiffer - 1996 - Philosophical Topics 24 (1):149-167.
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  25. Schiffers’s unhappy face solution to a puzzle about moral judgement.Michael Smith -
    where, according to Schiffer, the concept of an F is pleonastic just in case the concept itself licenses entailments of the form: S ⇒ ∃xFx. These are what he calls "somethingfrom-nothing" entailments and the various practices in which such entailments are made are what he calls "hypostatisizing practices" (p.57). The concept of a proposition is pleonastic, according to this definition, because it licenses the move from a claim like 'Fido is a dog,' a claim containing only the singular term 'Fido' (...)
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  26. The Things We Mean, by Stephen Schiffer.Robert J. Stainton - unknown
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