Propositional Constituents Research Articles

Acquaintance and Descriptions in Early Philosophy of Bertrand Russell

The aim of this article is to offer an analysis of early Russell’s theories of acquaintance and description. He tried to offer a solution to the Meinong’s problem of non-existent entities and used formal logic to develop a theory of definite descriptions which was related to the epistemological principle of acquaintance. I agree the view that the historical Russell changed some of his views but the principle of acquaintance remained “the structural core” in his philosophy. I try to argue that acquaintance is also a regulative principle in his logical atomism, even if at the first glance his main interest was another. The problem of the so called propositional constituents brings to light this hidden presupposition and reveals again his empiricist view fixed in a relational framework.

Problems for Russellian act-type theories

ABSTRACT I here discuss two problems facing act-type theories of propositions, and argue that Fregean act-type theories are better equipped to deal with them than Russellian ones. The first relates to complex singular terms like '2+2', which turn out not to pose any special problem for Fregeans at all, whereas Soames' Russellian theory currently has no satisfactory way of dealing with them (particularly, with such ‘mixed’ propositions as the proposition that 2+2 is greater than 3). Although one possibility stands out as the most promising one, it requires that the Russellian treat complex properties as constituents of propositions. This leads to the second major problem for Russellians: that of proliferating propositions. I show how the most direct solution to this problem, that of rejecting complex predicative propositional constituents is available to Fregeans but very implausible for Russellians, since this means rejecting complex properties.

Articulating a framework for unarticulated constituents

The truth‐conditions of many utterances have components that do not correspond to any uttered morpheme. This happens because linguistic acts are always a supplement to whatever else is available to agents engaged in a conversation. Unarticulated constituents result from the informational trade‐off between what is available in the situation of utterance and what needs to be linguistically articulated. Unarticulated constituents are constituents of propositions, that is, of classifying tools that are neutral with respect to the way in which what is given in a situation interacts with the words uttered.

Expressivism, Inferentialism and the Simulation Game

Expressivism, Inferentialism and the Simulation Game

Liberated Presentism

The article gives a novel argument to show that there is sense of "exists" suitable for posing a substantive issue between presentists and eternalists. It then seeks to invigorate a neglected variety of presentism. There are seven doctrines, widely accepted even among presentists, that create problems for presentism. The doctrines are that only existents can belong to sets, be referred to, be quantified over, have properties, bear relations, be constituents of propositions, and serve as truth-makers. Without distinguishing existence and being, presentists can comfortably reject all seven doctrines. Doing so would dispose of the majority of presentism's problems. Further, it would enable presentists to reduce A-judgments to B-judgments, thereby insulating presentism from doubts about the intelligibility of A-theories. For reasons indicated very briefly, it might also make presentism less difficult to reconcile with special relativity, though the point is not pursued here.

CONCEPT DESIGNATION

Abstract The paper proposes a way for adherents of Fregean, structured propositions to designate propositions and other complex senses/concepts using a special kind of functor. I consider some formulations from Peacocke’s works and highlight certain problems that arise as we try to quantify over propositional constituents while referring to propositions using “that”-clauses. With the functor notation, by contrast, we can quantify over senses/concepts with objectual, first-order quantifiers and speak without further ado about their involvement in propositions. The functor notation also turns out to come with an important kind of expressive strengthening, and is shown to be neutral on several controversial issues.

Cognitive propositions and semantic values

ABSTRACT In recent work, Scott Soames has declared that we need a new conception of propositions to overcome critical objections to traditional theories of semantics and propositional attitudes. Propositions must be cognitive to account for their inherent intentionality, structure, and epistemic accessibility, and to overcome Frege’s and Russell’s problems. I have previously worked out a foundational semantics in which cognitive propositions are what sentences express. My objective in this paper is to identify some of the limitations of Soames’s theory, and show how they can be overcome within the cognitive framework. Soames’s conception of propositions is needlessly encumbered by identifying them with acts rather than objects. Soames has not fully exploited the possibilities opened up by embracing cognitive propositions, and is still too attached to Russellian propositions and Millian semantics. As a result, his conception of the constituents of propositions is untenable, and his semantics still faces Frege’s and Russell’s problem, which are easily avoidable with the resources of cognitive propositions. Soames was led astray by a mistaken assumption about transparent attitude reports.

Mediational contents as propositional constituents

The objectives of the present paper are, firstly, to question the conception according to which propositional constituents are exhausted by the assignment of referential contents. Secondly, to argue that introducing the notion of mediational content is useful to provide a theory of meaning for expressions of a natural language. In order to achieve those objectives, I address the following issue: in what sense are mediational contents relevant to the determination of truth-conditions and to compose assertions?

Priority and Unity in Frege and Wittgenstein

In the following article I intend to examine the problem of the unity of the proposition in Russell, Frege, and Wittgenstein. My chief aim will be to draw attention to the distinction between Russell’s conception of propositional constituents, on the one hand, with Frege and Wittgenstein’s on the other. My focus will be on Russell’s view of terms as independent, propositions being built up out of these building blocks, compared with Frege and Wittgenstein’s ‘top down’ approach. Furthermore, I will argue that, contra certain other commentators, Frege’s metaphor of saturation and unsaturation does not serve as a solution to the problem of unity, and that the extension of this metaphorical language to Wittgenstein is, therefore, inappropriate.

Frege and propositional unity

ABSTRACTThis paper identifies a tension in Frege’s philosophy and offers a diagnosis of its origins. Frege’s Context Principle can be used to dissolve the problem of propositional unity. However, Frege’s official response to the problem does not invoke the Context Principle, but the distinction between ‘saturated’ and ‘unsaturated’ propositional constituents. I argue that such a response involves assumptions that clash with the Context Principle. I suggest, however, that this tension is not generated by deep-seated philosophical commitments, but by Frege’s occasional attempt to take a dubious shortcut in the justification of his conception of propositional structure.

The Virtues of Thisness Presentism

Presentists believe that only present things exist. But opponents insist this view has unacceptable implications: if only present things exist, we can’t express singular propositions about the past, since the obvious propositional constituents don’t exist, nor can we account for temporal passage, or the openness of the future. According to such opponents, and in spite of the apparent ‘common sense’ status of the view, presentism should be rejected on the basis of these unacceptable implications. In this paper, I present and defend a version of presentism (‘Thisness Presentism’) that avoids the unacceptable implications. The basic strategy I employ is familiar—I postulate presently existing entities to serve as surrogates (or ‘proxies’) for non-present entities—but some of the details of my proposal are more novel, and their application to these problems is certainly novel. One overarching thesis of this paper is that Thisness Presentism is preferable to other versions of presentism since it solves important problems facing standard iterations of the view. And I assume that this is a good positive reason in favour of the underlying thisness ontology.

XII-The Weight of Truth: Lessons for Minimalists from Russell's Gray's Elegy Argument

Minimalists, such as Paul Horwich, claim that the notions of truth, reference and satisfaction are exhausted by some very simple schemes. Unfortunately, there are subtle difficulties with treating these as schemes, in the ordinary sense. So instead, minimalists regard them as illustrating one-place functions, into which we can input propositions (when considering truth) or propositional constituents (when considering reference and satisfaction). However, Bertrand Russell's Gray's Elegy argument teaches us some important lessons about propositions and propositional constituents. When applied to minimalism, these lessons show us why we should abandon it.

What Incompleteness Arguments are and What They are Not

AbstractCappelen and Lepore (2005) maintain that Incompleteness Arguments for context sensitivity are fallacious. In their view, Incompleteness Arguments are non sequitur fallacies whose conclusions are not logically related to premises. They affirm that the conclusions of Incompleteness Arguments are metaphysical claims about the existence of entities that might be constituents of propositions, while their premises concern psychological data about speakers' dispositions to truth evaluate sentences in contexts of utterance. Cappelen and Lepore reject Incompleteness Arguments because psychological data have no bearing on metaphysical issues. I do not dispute Cappelen and Lepore's claim that psychological data have no relevance to metaphysics. Nonetheless, I argue that Cappelen and Lepore's criticism is vitiated by a misunderstanding of the nature of Incompleteness Arguments that makes them overlook the link between semantics and linguistic competence. I try to shed light on the real nature of Incompleteness Arguments by pointing at the failure of Cappelen and Lepore's criticism. My aim is not to defend Semantic Contextualism, but to bring to attention the link between semantics and linguistic competence that should never be overlooked in debates in the field of semantics.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Recent Work on Structured Meaning and Propositional Unity

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: <i>Recent Work on Structured Meaning and Propositional Unity</i>

What is wrong with unarticulated constituents?

Abstract It is quite popular nowadays to postulate various kinds of unarticulated constituents that have essential bearing on truth conditions of utterances. F. Recanati champions an elaborated version of contextualism according to which one has to distinguish two kinds of unarticulated constituents: those that are articulated at the level of the logical form of a given sentence and those that are truly unarticulated. Recanati offers a theory which explains the manner of incorporating truly unarticulated constituents into the propositions expressed. This theory invokes variadic functions. The present paper shows that variadic functions are unnecessary because no constituents are truly unarticulated in the sense assumed by Recanati. An alternative explanation is offered according to which all propositional constituents are either explicitly or implicitly represented at the syntactic level.

Is there a Problem about Propositional Unity?

The problem of the ‘Unity of the Proposition’ is the problem of explaining the difference between a content-expressing declarative sentence and a ‘mere list’ of referents. The prevailing view is that such a problem is to be solved metaphysically, either by reducing our ontology to exclude propositions or universals, or by explaining how it is possible for a certain kind of complex entity – the ‘proposition’– to ‘unify’ its constituents. I argue that these metaphysical approaches cannot succeed; instead the only viable approach is linguistic, identifying features of the (type–) sentence itself that enable it to express a content. Thus the problem of the ‘Unity of the Proposition’ (distinguishing sentences from lists) is distinct from the problem of ‘propositional unity’ (explaining how the constituents of propositions form a unified content). I suggest that, while the latter problem is not pressing, the former does not permit of an answer which applies in generality in all languages; we can only fully explain the Unity of the Proposition for single languages or groups of similar languages.

Russell on Substitutivity and the Abandonment of Propositions

One of the main arguments Russell offers for the Theory of Descriptions in “On Denoting” is that it can be used to solve a puzzle about substitutivity. This article argues that, owing to a widespread mischaracterization of the substitutivity principle Russell means to be defending, neither the puzzle itself nor Russell's solution to it have been well understood. The principle Russell seeks to defend concerns not the substitution of expressions in a sentence but rather the substitution of propositional constituents in a Russellian proposition. This article further argues that Russell's solution requires him to adopt certain substantive views about the nature of the referents of what are usually called “logically proper names.” In particular, Russell's solution will work only if the referents of such names are given to one who understands them in a manner that is entirely “aspect-free.” Russell's notion of acquaintance, since it fits this bill, is therefore motivated by his solution to the puzzle, as is his choice of sense-data to be the referents of genuine Russellian names of particulars. Finally, the article argues that since a version of the George IV puzzle arises for propositions, Russell's solution commits him to regarding some instances of sentences as incomplete symbols and to denying that we have acquaintance with propositions. This in turn leads Russell in Principia Mathematica to adopt the Multiple Relation Theory of Judgment, and thus to embrace agnosticism about propositions. His further move to the stronger position of full eliminativism concerning propositions is motivated only by his late-in-the-day espousal of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

Cross‐cognitive Aspects of Discourse Comprehension: Semantic Post‐representation

Four related sciences, cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics and neurobiology, are compared in a cross‐cognitive way with respect to their approaches in the study of discourse comprehension, in particular its final product, semantic post‐representations. The nature and structure of these, as they are built in a human mind after processing a short piece of discourse (one or a few sentences), seem to be best described in the framework of activation models, a family in which the basic processes of comprehension are considered to be activation of semantic units from long‐term memory, predication and construction of higher‐level propositional constituents. The notion of “activation level”, applied to such representational units in working memory, is particularly fruitful in this framework. Besides, a satisfying neural interpretation of this psychological type of model can be proposed. The paper shortly presents a series of experiments, involving a semantic probing technique and three main categories of factors, with results that support the semantic post‐representation view, in addition to others. A critical comparison of this analysis with neurofunctional imagery data confirms the necessity of cross‐cognitive exchanges.

The function of acquaintance in Russell's philosophy

Russell's Principle of Acquaintance puts a restriction on the under standing of meaning. His theory about the meanings of words is in general realist: the meanings of most words actually are things, which become constituents of propositions when the words occur in sen tences.1 The restriction is "that every proposition that we can under stand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted".2 Because acquaintance comprises perception, intro spection and certain kinds of memory, the effect of the restriction is that a de re theory about the meanings of words becomes an empiri cist theory. So far the function of acquaintance is tolerably clear: it is the way in which the mind apprehends things which in the case of perception and memory of perception originate as input. However, Russell then gives acquaintance another function, which makes a different demand on its nature. It is also the way in which the mind grasps basic truths about those things.3 The combination of the two functions is not easy to understand, and it should be remembered that in the development of Russell's philosophy the second one came later. Acquaintance was primarily the way of understanding meanings and only secondarily the way of grasping basic truths. One topic of this paper will be the relation between the two functions of acquaintance. But this will lead immediately into another topic, logical atomism. Russell came to believe that the ultimate constituents, or perhaps the only real constituents of propositions, are simple particulars and simple qualities and relations. If a particular is simple its name will be simple too, because it has no parts possessing separate meanings and cannot be analyzed into parts possessing separate meanings. He took much the same view of simple qualities and relations and their names. He then identified sense-data as simple particulars and held that some (but not all) of their qualities and relations are simple.4 This theory is evidently a by-product of his theory of meaning. But of which part of it? Did he take it to follow from his realist theory

Are Particulars Constituents of Propositions?

Are Particulars Constituents of Propositions? Get access Lucius Garvin Lucius Garvin Brown University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar The Monist, Volume 44, Issue 2, 1 July 1934, Pages 248–254, https://doi.org/10.5840/monist193444214 Published: 22 December 2014