Propositional Attitudes
FACTS AND STATES OF AFFAIRS
Common Three-Way Equivalence:
Sentence meanings
The objects of the attitudes
The referents of ‘that’-clauses
Propositional Attitudes
Agent + Attitude + Content
Attitudes = belief, knowledge, desire, hope, etc.
The functionalist consensus
What are the objects of the attitudes (contents)?
Propositional Attitude Ascriptions
Subject + Attitude Verb + ‘that’-Clause
Attitude Verbs = “believe,” “know,” “desire,”
“hope,” etc.
Attitudes distinct from their ascriptions
Contents of ‘that’-clauses objects of attitudes?
Evidence for Equivalence
Anaphora:
“Today is Tuesday but John doesn’t know it.”
Conjunction Reduction:
“It’s true that it’s raining and John believes that
it’s raining.”
“It’s true that, and John knows that, it’s raining.”
Correspondence Theory
Truth as ‘correspondence with the facts.’
Sentences/ statements are true/ false
No semantically evaluable semantic entities
Obtaining
Sentences mean facts?
Facts
Objects, properties, and relations
“Going together in the world”
Instantiation
The Unity of the Fact (problem thereof)
Plato’s Third Man
a is F
a instantiates F-ness
<a, F-ness> instantiate instantiation
<<a, F-ness>, instantiation> instantiate
instantiation
etc.
“We note that when a detective says ‘Let's look
at the facts’ he does not crawl round the carpet,
but proceeds to utter a string of statements.”
(Austin, “Truth”)
The Multiple Relations Theory
No such thing as false facts.
What do we believe when we believe something
false?
Belief is a relation to “semantically unjoined”
objects, properties, and relations.
Problem of unity: order.
States of Affairs
Like facts, but don’t need to actually exist, only
possibly exist.
Problems for SofA
Problems for SofA = Meanings
No impossible states of affairs
(“going together” again)
Problems for SofA = Objects of Attitudes
Coarse-grainedness of SofA
Problems for SofA = Referents of ‘That’-Clauses
Compositionality
Truth-Evaluable?
Sentences are true vs. sentence meanings are
true
What I believe is true vs. my belief is true
(You can believe what I believe, but you can’t
have my belief)
“John believes something true” vs. “John’s belief
is true.”
Propositionalism
Maintain equivalence
Propositions fine-grained, truth-evaluable–
more language-like
Still mind-independent
A new type of “going together”
Mind-Independence
a proposition (“gedanke”) “is like a planet which,
already before anyone has seen it, has been in
interaction with other planets.”
“when one apprehends or thinks a [proposition]
one does not create it but only comes to stand
in a certain relation… to what already existed
beforehand.”
Ordinary Language Scruples
“I imagined [F: the proposition] that a purple
donkey was nibbling on lettuce.”
“I was surprised [*the proposition/ F: at the
proposition] that John never came to the party.”
PROPOSITIONS AS SETS OF
POSSIBLE WORLDS
Possible Worlds Semantics
Possible worlds: Lewis and Stalnaker
Possible worlds semantics: Carnap and
Montague
Analysis of necessity and possibility
Meanings as “truth-conditions”
Functions from worlds to truth-values
Sets and characteristic functions
Problems
The deduction problem
The “aboutness” problem
Directly referential expressions collapsed into
rigid expressions
Even less coarse-grained than SofA: all
necessities equivalent, all impossibilities
equivalent.
Going diagonal (or metalinguistic)
Still get all provable truths equivalent, for those
who accept the axioms.
Lewis’s Two Gods
“Consider the case of the
two gods. They inhabit a
certain possible world,
and they know exactly
which world it is.
Therefore they know
every proposition that is
true at their world. Insofar
as knowledge is a
propositional attitude,
they are omniscient…”
Lewis’s Two Gods
“…Still I can imagine them to suffer ignorance:
neither one knows which of the two he is. They
are not exactly alike. One lives on top of the
tallest mountain and throws down manna; the
other lives on top of the coldest mountain and
throws down thunderbolts. Neither one knows
whether he lives on the tallest mountain or the
coldest mountain; nor whether he throws
manna or thunderbolts.”
De Se Exceptionalism
1. The manna god knows exactly which world
she inhabits.
2. She does not know that *I am the manna
god.*
3. Therefore, *I am the manna god* is not
solely about which world she inhabits.
4. Therefore, the de se is special and subject to
special semantic treatment.
STRUCTURED PROPOSITIONS
Structured Propositions
Like SofAs: objects, properties, relations
Structural isomorphism w/ sentences
New kind of “going together”
Limits: articulated non-constituents
“John is a tall ballet dancer”
Limits: unarticulated constituents
Benefits
Systematicity: if you can think aRb, you can think
bRa
Reverse compositionality
Conflating contexts: ‘watch’ + PAST vs. ‘watch’ +
PROG + PAST
Grainedness
SPs strictly more fine grained than SofAs
SPs determine sets of possible worlds, not vice
versa (composition post-linguistic)
No logical omniscience, deduction, aboutness
problems
Too much grain? A & B vs. B & A
Names and natural kind terms, a = b vs. a = a
Problems
Which set-theoretic objects? (order
arbitrariness)
Why do some set-theoretic objects have truthconditions and others (regular ones) not?
Is the “going together” really not set-theoretic?
If not, then what is it?
Overly Linguistic-y?
If propositions have a largely linguistic
structure… do they get it from language?
If so, are they really mind/ language dependent?
If so, did the proposition that dinosaurs exist not
exist until we did?
And can animals think?
INTERPRETED LOGICAL FORMS
Interpreted Logical Forms
Linguistic syntax
LFs vs. surface structure (not particularly
important)
Interpreted LFs
No new “going together”
Benefits
Strictly greater grain the SPs
(Hence same or worse grainedness problems,
same or better benefits)
Names and natural kind terms, a = b vs. a = a
Meaningful sentences with empty names?
Sensible why they have truth-conditions
Problems
Compositionality?
Speakers of different languages no longer
expressing the same proposition, believing the
same things
Data: “I believed that even when I was a
monolingual French speaker!”
Attitudes, propositions dependent on language
Pierre and “Londres est jolie”