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Boudakian, Max M.
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Davidson's Theory of Propositional Attitudes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
One commonly stated reason for thinking that there are abstract entities such as propositions is that they are needed to account for undeniable facts about propositional attitudes and the sentences reporting such attitudes. According to the propositional theory, belief, doubt, assertion and other attitudes are relations between individuals and propositions. In sentences reporting these relations the words in the content-sentence (e.g., ‘p’ in sentences of the form ‘S said that p’) refer to concepts or other abstract things and the entire ‘that-clause’ refers to a proposition. According to a common rival account, propositional attitudes are complex relations between individuals and sentences and each that-clause refers to the content-sentence it contains. The words in the content-sentence either fail to refer or refer to themselves. A striking implication of both the propositional theory and the sentential theory is that the words and phrases in the content-sentence of a sentence expressing a propositional attitude fail to refer to the familiar things to which they ordinarily refer.
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References
1 In Words and Objections: Essay on the Work of W. V. Quine, ed. by Davidson, D. and Hintikka, J. (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel 1969) 158–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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3 See Haack, ‘On Davidson's Paratactic Theory of Oblique Contexts,’ Nous 5 (1971) 358,CrossRefGoogle Scholar Lycan, 138, Bigelow, 17, and Blackburn, 187.
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5 ‘On Saying That,’ 171
6 Using a colon for this purpose was first suggested in Haack, 353.
7 Another possibility is to make truth a property of utterances rather than sentences.
8 There are some circumstances in which ‘S said that’ can serve as a complete sentence without the speaker supplying a referent for ‘that.’ I might say something and you might then say ‘Someone else already said that.’ In your utterance, ‘that’ refers to my utterance. Davidson begins ‘On Saying That’ with a similar example.
9 In ‘Davidson on Saying That.’
10 Lycan, 139
11 Notice that, as formulated, this objection assumes that a sentence such as (1) can be true relative to a world. But part of Davidson's theory is that such sentences contain demonstratives and thus their truth must be relativized to speakers and times (as well as to worlds). To formulate the objection in a way that is compatible with this feature of the theory would require claiming that (1) is true in W relative to an index at which there were no utterances. Since there are difficult issues concerning the evaluation of sentences at such indices, evaluation of the objection formulated in this way would lead to complexities best ignored here. I will instead discuss the truth of the sentence relative to the world.
12 See Haack, 358; Lycan, 138; and Bigelow, 17.
13 See Haack, 358 and Blackburn, 187.
14 Blackburn, 187
15 Even if this argument is sound, it does not follow that the theory is incorrect. All that follows is that it does not have the ontological advantage it appears to have.
16 Davidson makes a similar point in ‘True to the Facts,’ Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969) 748-64; see p. 763.
17 See Thompson, James F. ‘Truth-Bearers and the Trouble About Propositions,’ The Journal of Philosophy 56 (1969) 737–47,CrossRefGoogle Scholar esp. 745-6. Notice also that in cases in which a person utters an ambiguous sentence but does intend one of its meanings, the theory yields exactly the right results: if you report such an utterance and mean by your content sentence what the original speaker meant by it, then your report is true.
18 There are other questions about samesaying that need to be resolved. For example, suppose you utter ‘P and Q’ and I report that you said that P. The theory seems to require that your utterance of ‘P and Q’ be a samesaying of my utterance of ‘P,’ if my report is to be true. But it seems that they are not samesayings, although my report is true. There are a variety of ways to deal with this problem. One might define ‘samesaying’ in such a way that these utterances are samesayings. Another possibility is to deny that my report is really true. In any case, the propositional theory faces similar problems.
19 See Haack, 355-8; see also Gallie, 23f.
20 See Arnaud, Guttenplan, Davidson and Harman, and Hornsby.
21 In ‘Reply to Davidson,’ in Davidson and Hintikka, 333-5.
22 Leeds, 51
23 An earlier version of this paper was read at the Western Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Milwaukee in April, 1981. I am grateful to Stephen Leeds for his helpful comments. I would also like to thank Earl Conee, Peter Markie, Paul Weirich, and Ed Wierenga for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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