Summary
Form ever follows function.
Louis Henri Sullivan, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered”Assume that in an attitude ascription, that is, in sentences such as
John believes that Patty is pretty,
Jane wishes that Mick were dead,
Hob says that all is right with the world
the ‘that’-clause (t-clause) functions as a term. Call what such terms name ‘propositions’.
One would like to know what sorts of things propositions are. This chapter makes a start at an account; it takes up the question whether propositions have structure. Two views on this predominate. One is that propositions have no interesting structure, even though their canonical names, ‘that’-clauses, do. This view is held, for example, by those who take t-clauses to be names of sets of possible worlds. The other view is that propositions have a structure that more or less recapitulates the structure of a sentence. Those who identify propositions with sentences, Russellian propositions, structured intensions, or certain sets of equiformed sentence tokens are in this pigeonhole.
I think that what a t-clause names is sententially structured; in this chapter I attempt to make a case for that view. I carry on the argument within the framework of possible-worlds semantics. This is mostly for the sake of convenience, although I am sympathetic with the view that the framework is as good a one for natural language semantics as we have.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Propositional AttitudesAn Essay on Thoughts and How We Ascribe Them, pp. 7 - 57Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990