Introduction

Abstract

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides a comprehensive overview of the philosophy of propositions, from contemporary and historical perspectives. It first discusses influential competitors to propositional realism, and identifies a more serious threat to realism in theories which identify non-propositional entities with the semantic contents of declarative sentences in context. The book reviews an instrumentalist view of structured propositions. Structured propositions have an internal structure that mirrors the syntactic structure of the sentences that express them. Investigations into medieval theories of propositions are complicated by the fact that many philosophers of the period followed Boethius in reserving the term 'proposition' for token acts of written or mental speech. On Hanks's theory, propositions are essentially classificatory devices for certain representational states or entities. Agents represent the world by performing token actions of various kinds, or by being in certain token states, classified under a certain type.