Abstract
Perry contends that an utterance of (1) ‘It is raining’ must be assigned a location before being truth assessed. The location is famously argued to be an unarticulated constituent of the proposition an utterance of (1) expresses. My paper examines this view from a pluri-propositionalist perspective. The sentence (1) contains an impersonal pronoun, ‘it’ and the impersonal verb ‘to rain. I suggest that the utterance of (1) semantically determines ‘to rain’, which is an event, and that that event is instantiated at a time indicated by the tense at a location It is assumed that all event are located in space and time.
Highlights
Which, since has prompted an important literature.1 Let me remind you the famous example. 2 One Sunday morning, in Palo Alto, Perry’s son looked outside the window, and made an utterance3 of (1) It is raining
The location needed to truth assess the utterance must be an unarticulated constituent of the truth conditions of the statement, since it is not determined by a lexical item in (1)
The ‘rain’ sentence is peculiar because it contains the truth conditionally inert expression ‘it’, qualified as syntactic filler in ‘Thought Without Representation’ (Perry, 1986: 172)
Summary
In ‘Thought Without Representation’ (Perry, 1986), put forward the notion of ‘unarticulated constituent,’. No lexical item in (1) designates a place, and no location is a constituent of the proposition, or the truth conditions, expressed by the statement or an utterance of (1). The utterance of (1) is a counterexample to the converse of the principle of homorphic representation: the lexical element ‘it’ is a linguistic expression designating nothing and making no contribution to the proposition or truth conditions of the statement. My paper takes into consideration the utterance of (1)’s failing both the principle of homomorphic representation – questioned by the missing location - and its converse – questioned by the missing contribution of the lexical element ‘it’ to the truth conditions of an utterance of (1).
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