2 - Some cognitive theories of content
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 December 2009
Summary
My taste is for keeping open house for all sorts of conditions of entities, just so long as when they come in they help with the housework.
H. P. GricePropositions are the sorts of things named by ‘that’-clauses (t-clauses). What would a concisely stated theory about propositions be like? It might begin by saying something about how the simplest expressions in a t-clause contribute to the proposition it names. Usually, a theory does this by explaining how to assign certain things – let's call them ‘contents’ – to such expressions. Next it gives a recipe for getting from the contents of the expressions in a t-clause, and the clause's syntax, to the proposition named.
Chapter 1 said a good deal that was relevant to the second part of such a theory, but not much that was relevant to the first. The conclusions of Chapter 1 strongly suggest that to the question
How do we get from a sentence and the contents of its simple expressions to a proposition?
we should give an answer that goes roughly
Replace the simple expressions with their contents.
It's time to turn to the question
What are the contents of simple expressions?
Much of the debate over propositions has revolved around this question. It has generated a distressing number of proposals about content.
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- Information
- Propositional AttitudesAn Essay on Thoughts and How We Ascribe Them, pp. 58 - 105Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990