Abstract
Hanks (Propositional content, Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 2015) develops a theory of propositions as speech-act types. Because speech acts play a role in the contents themselves, the view overturns Frege’s force/content distinction, and as such, faces the challenge of explaining how propositions embed under logical operators like negation. The attempt to solve this problem has lead Hanks and his recent commentators to adopt theoretically exotic resources, none of which, we argue, is ultimately successful. The problem is that although there are three different ways of negating the sentence “Mary’s card is an ace”, current speech-act theories of propositions can only accommodate two of them. We distinguish between (1) “It is false that Mary’s card is an ace” (sentence negation), (2) “Mary’s card is a non-ace” (predicate negation), and (3) “Mary’s card is not an ace” (content negation) and show that Hanks and his commentators cannot explain content negation. We call this Hanks’ Negation Problem. The problem is significant because content negation is the negation required for logic. Fortunately, we think there is a natural way for Hanks to accommodate content negation (and all the other logical operators) as successive acts of predication. The view solves Hanks’ Negation Problem with only resources internal to Hanks’ own view.
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Notes
For arguments that there are three distinct kinds of propositions associated with the different kinds of speech acts, see Hanks (2015: p. 26).
An important exception to this is Schmitz (2019) who argues that the focus on the theoretical has led to some problems.
Since Soames and Frege deny claim (I), they have no problem with this.
On Hanks’ view, propositions are act types, not token act instances, and one might worry here how we can stand back from an instance of something and then predicate not of the instance but of the type. To see how this is possible consider the following sort of case. Suppose that I am trying to explain how hard a bicycle kick is, but my audience does not even know what a bicycle kick is. I could perform one, then say “the kind of kick that I just performed is really difficult.” Here, just as in target-shifting, I token an action and then immediately predicate of its type. Thanks to an anonymous referee for encouraging us to clarify this point.
Reiland (2019) criticizes Hanks on this score claiming that it is not enough to token a proposition, we must also refer to it. We are somewhat sympathetic with Reiland’s objection here and unsure how committed Hanks really is to subtleties of his presentation. For our purposes, however, not much hangs on this issue. It is enough to note that force cancellation demands that the target of predication is shifted from o to Fo.
As we noted in footnote 6, Hanks himself wants to resist the idea that targeted propositions are referred to and prefers to use the language of tokening (2019: p. 1397).
Thanks to an anonymous referee for making this point clear to us.
Ultimately, we hold that there is something misleading in calling these “sentence negation” since we will show that when the sentences of first-order logic are negated they do not involve what Hanks calls sentence negation. But hopefully our point will be clear nonetheless.
Recall that for Hanks, < not, being-an-ace> is the application of a function, not, that takes the property being-an-ace to a different property, being-a-non-ace, which is then applied directly to Mary’s card.
See Horn (2001: pp. 21–22).
That is not to say that Reiland’s complaint is not fair. See footnote 6.
Recanati makes this same point in (2019: 1405).
References
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Alex Grzankowski, Peter Hanks, Robert May, and Joel Velasco for their helpful discussion and feedback, and special thanks to the anonymous referees at this journal whose instincts were spot on in helping us locate our thoughts in this larger debate.
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