Singular Propositions and Modal Logic

Abstract

According to the prevailing view in the philosophy of language nothing mediates semantically between a proper name (in a speaker's mouth) and its reference. Rather, the reference of a name is determined directly; there is no more to the semantics of a name than the object referred to. A thesis that often accompanies this widely shared view is that the meaning of a sentence p is an abstract entity, the proposition p it expresses. If p contains a name, the proposition expressed is said to be singular. This thesis in tum is often supplemented with the metaphysical thesis that propositions, singular propositions in particular, are structurally complex; that is, roughly, (i) that they have, in some sense, an internal structure that corresponds rather directly to the syntactic structure of the sentences that express them, and (ii) that the metaphysical components, or constituents, of that structure are the semantic values-the meanings-of the corresponding syntactic components of those sentences. Let us refer to these three related theses jointly, for better or ill, as Russellian semantics.