What is Meaning (Soochow University Lectures in Philosophy) * By SCOTT SOAMES

Abstract

The standard conception of propositions introduces them as meanings of sentences, bearers of truth and falsity and as objects of attitudes. Are there things which have all these properties? In his recent book What is Meaning Scott Soames offers rich food for thought on the foundation of propositions. The book is divided into two parts. In the first part, we find an elaboration of the claim that for more than a century philosophers have been working with a mistaken or puzzling conception of propositions. In the second part, a cognitive realist view of propositions is defended: propositions are certain types of certain act, i.e. acts of predicating something of an object or of applying a function to an argument. In the course of the book, foundational problems in the conception of propositions are revealed. Frege’s (1892) and Russell’s (1903) conception of propositions as complex entities composed of the meanings of the constituents of the sentences that express them stumbles with the problem of the unity of proposition. Davidson’s (1967) enterprise to dispense with propositions as entities in favour of a truth-theory of understanding a language is too weak to account for the difference in meaning among extensionally equivalent sentences. An expansion of Davidson’s project so that one takes truth conditional theories to range over metaphysically possible as well as epistemically possible world states is still too weak to account for the difference in meaning between metaphysically necessary or a priori equivalent sentences. On the other hand, any conception of propositions as a formal system, either as sets of some sort or as functions of some sort is, according to the author, a dead end. Propositions are intrinsically representational, they are intrinsically truth-value bearers, while sets or functions are not.