Abstract
According to the classical account, propositions are sui generis, abstract, intrinsically-representational entities and our cognitive attitudes, and the token states within us that realize those attitudes, represent as they do in virtue of their propositional objects. In light of a desire to explain how it could be that propositions represent, much of the recent literature on propositions has pressured various aspects of this account. In place of the classical account, revisionists have aimed to understand propositions in terms of more familiar entities such as facts, types of mental or linguistic acts, and even properties. But we think that the metaphysical story about propositions is much simpler than either the classical theorist or the revisionist would have you believe. In what follows, we argue that a proper understanding of the nature of our cognitive relations to propositions shows that the question of whether propositions themselves represent is, at best, a distraction. We will argue that once this distraction is removed, the possibility of a very pleasing, minimalist story of propositions emerges; a story that appeals only to assumptions that are (or, at least ought to be) shared by all theorists in the relevant debate.
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Notes
The view that we will ultimately suggest has much in common with those accounts that take propositions to be ‘external indices’ that measure our PA-states in much the way that, for example, numbers can be used to measure certain physical quantities on the ‘mass-in-grams’ scale. See Matthews (2007). We reject these views precisely for the reason that they are incompatible with the essentiality of content thesis. See also Crane (1990).
In what follows, we will move freely between talk of propositional attitude/mental state tokens and types, though context should make clear which is at issue. We will use lowercase italicized schematic letters (e.g., ‘m’) as variables ranging over mental state tokens.
A full discussion of EC would require us to say much more about how exactly we are thinking of mental state tokens. Hopefully, however, the intuitive appeal of this thesis is clear. By way of comparison, consider the essentiality of origin. Rosa is Carla’s mother but of course it is not essential to Rosa that she had Carla as an offspring. It is however in Carla’s essence to have the very mother she has—more generally, for any mother-daughter pair 〈X, Y〉, it is essentially the case that X is the mother of Y. This fact flows from the essence of daughters, not mothers.
See Soames (2010, pp. 101–102). In Soames’s more recent work (2015) he explicitly considers, and rejects, this style of objection to the act-type account. Soames first attempts to give a diagnosis for why it is tempting to think that propositions could not literally be things we can do or things that can happen. He then argues that, given the other virtues of the act-type account, his favored error theory should be accepted (see especially pp. 209–215). His diagnosis is interesting and draws on points with which we are generally sympathetic, but we think it would be preferable, if possible, to avoid attributing wide-spread error in the first place. Our view (below) captures many of the benefits of the act-type views without the need for any such error theory. For those who think that it doesn’t simply seem false that propositions are things one does (or that happen) but rather think it is false, we hope to offer a more attractive alternative. Thank you to an anonymous referee for drawing our attention to Soames’s most recent reply.
See Caplan et al. (2014).
This is not to say that sets of worlds might not falter on other fronts. For example, they may still not be finely grained enough.
More specifically, Field (2001, 2016) suggests intentional entities might be abstracted from equivalence classes of synonymous expressions/sentences or “inner” correlates thereof. Also see Wrigley (2006) as well as Iacona (2002) for a discussion of how one might try to abstract propositions from sentences that mean the same. We agree with Wrigley that there are serious difficulties for any view that seeks to abstract propositions from linguistic entities such as sentence-types. Our own is not subject to the specific worries that Wrigley raises in his excellent paper.
Representing things ‘in exactly the same way’ is neutral on issues about the fineness of grain of the representational features of our mental states. Two theorists might both accept PC despite serious disagreements over how finely our mental states themselves represent. For example, some theorists might take the representational aspect of our mental states to concern only which objects and properties are represented; others, of a more Fregean bent, might disagree insisting on modes of presentation. The truth of PC does not settle this matter, nor should it. As will emerge below, PC serves to guarantee that the propositions are individuatively tied to any possible fact regarding representational sameness, or difference, whatever those facts turn out to be.
A similar thought can be found in a Multiple Relations Theory as advanced by Moltmann (2003).
And as Rumfitt (2016) points out, we don’t need ‘that’-clauses to speak about how an agent is representing either. We might, for example, specify how Carla’s belief represents by saying ‘Oscar, Carla believes, snores,’ or ‘Oscar snores, Carla so believes’.
Peacocke (1992) considers, but quickly rejects, an account of propositions based on PC. Peacocke claims that a “Wright-like” bi-conditional can’t serve to ground the ontology of propositions because (a) if m1 and m2 only range over actual empirical mental states, we can’t get enough propositions, but (b) if they range over all possible token mental states – as we would have it – we must make “antecedent” appeal to the ontology of concepts and propositions (pp. 101–105). As indicated in the text, we see no good reason for thinking the story of how a possible mental state represents must make ‘antecedent’ appeal to propositions.
There is a large literature on what it takes for such biconditionals to be successful in introducing entities into our ontology. See, for example, Hale and Wright (2001). For present purposes, note that PC is seemingly consistent and conservative with respect to the underlying facts regarding the mental states over which we are abstracting. Roughly put, to say that an abstraction principle is conservative is to say that ‘it entails nothing new about object’s other than the referents of terms in [its] left-hand side’ (Rayo 2005, p. 227, fn. 51). On this front, PC looks no more suspect that (a) and (b).
We owe this terminology to Jon Litland.
Though Field’s discussion of these matters is one of our primary sources of motivation, he would almost certainly balk at our proposal in the text given his worries regarding whether we can make determinate sense of an interpersonal notion of having the same content as an equivalence relation in the way needed for an approach of the sort we favor (Field 2016) (and see Rumfitt 2016 for a related worries). In large part, his skepticism is based on (i) Quinean worries about translation between languages of radically different structure, or in which the relevant speakers vary dramatically in their background theories, and (ii) that in our ordinary practice of attributing content, we seem to be primarily interested merely in approximate similarity of content, rather than the more strict equivalence relation we appeal to in PC. Regarding (i), we think that Quinean considerations show, at most, that representing exactly the same as is vague; not that there is no such relation. Accommodating this vagueness on the minimalist account might be accomplished by supervaluating over the relation of representing-exactly-the-same, but showing how this might go is work for another day. Regarding (ii), we are happy to entertain the possibility that our ordinary attributions of content are justified by facts about (1) representational similarity rather than (2) exactness in co-representation. As best we can see, (1) is only sensible if we can antecedently make sense of (2); moreover, we think there are compelling independent arguments for the existence of propositions and it is only in terms of (2) that we can implicitly define these entities. That being said, we agree with Field that the notion of proposition is no more (or less) determinate than the notion of representing-the-same.
As Jon Litland has shown us, we can flesh out this idea as follows: Suppose we have a set of states S of an agent. These states are individuated functionally (or one might instead look to internal constitution or phenomenology, to name two other candidates). We then have two equivalence relations on S: the co-representationality relation, ≈ P, and the co-attitudinalitity relation, ≈ A. Two states can be co-attitudinal without being co-representational and vice versa. On the basis of ≈ P and ≈ A, abstraction principles can then be laid down for two operators P and A such that P takes a state s and gives us an object – intuitively the proposition that is the content of s, whereas A takes a state and gives us the relevant PA-relation. Roughly put, the idea then is that in terms of these two abstraction principles, we can say that a thinker bares PA-relation F to the proposition p iff she is in a state that is both in the equivalence class of all states co-attitudinal with F, as well as in the equivalence class of all states that represent p.
Strictly speaking neither we nor the classical theorist are in a position to derive the essentiality claim. Nevertheless, we think that all parties are in a reasonably good a position to motivate the acceptance of EC given the tenets of their respective views. Both accounts can establish that it is a necessary truth that a token mental state with such and such representational features couldn’t but help having the content that it does. In order to motivate EC, both theorists should then argue that this necessary truth plausibly flows from the nature of p itself, from facts about p’s essence, in conjunction with the nature of the attitude relations one bears to it. In the present dialectic, we are happy to be on a par with the classical theorist in this regard.
For a different variety of deflationism regarding propositions see Schiffer (2003). According to Schiffer, propositions are “pleonastic entities” that arise as “something from nothing transformations”, for example from ‘It is true that p’ to ‘The proposition that p is true’. The affinities between Schiffer’s account and the work of neo-Fregeans in the philosophy of mathematics have led some critics, such as Rumfitt (2016), to assimilate the two. In response to Rumfitt, however, Schiffer (2016) is explicit that he does not endorse an abstractionist approach like the one sketched above, nor does he think that his pleonastic propositions, being (according to him) vague objects, need, or can have, criteria of identity. As best we can see, for all objects x—vague, or otherwise—there must be some account of what makes x the object it is, rather than something else and we think PC provides this for propositions. A full discussion of Schiffer’s view and how it relates to our favored proposal will have to wait for another occasion. For more on Rumfitt’s worries regarding the abstractionist line he attributes to Schiffer, see footnote 16.
As an anonymous referee has pointed out to us, not just any specification of a proposition will provide information about how a mental state represents. For example, being told that Carla is in a mental state which has as its content Oscar’s favorite proposition might not reveal to you how Carla represents. Something more substantive is required; something like a way of getting at the proposition that reveals which, amongst all the propositions, it is. For those who hold that propositions represent (primitively or derivatively), it is natural to assume that this knowledge will require knowing how the proposition itself represents. For the minimalist, that knowledge will plausibly require knowing which particular abstraction the proposition is, which in turn requires knowing something of the class of representational mental states from which it is an abstraction.
Recently, Soames himself says that propositions represent in a “derivative” sense. So long as this is merely a convenient way of talking and not a serious commitment to the idea that propositions really represent, we can happily follow suit. For example, we can talk as if a proposition has such and such truth-conditions just in case it is an abstract from a state that has those truth-conditions. We worry, however, that such talk – talk that takes center stage in presentations of act-type accounts – is misleading and should be avoided. Soames’s talk of propositions representing has naturally lead critics to worry about how, if at all, propositions could literally inherit representational properties from token acts of predication. We doubt that any plausible such story can (or need) be given. That being said, if an act-type theorist gives up the claim that propositions qua-act-types really represent their view is much closer to the abstractionist line advocated here. They are still, however, saddled with the unpleasant consequence that propositions are things we can do, or that can happen, however. On our abstractionist view, propositions are not instantiated by the token mental states that have them as their content nor are they things one does or that can happen.
We think a parallel line should be taken on propositional constituency. Notice that PC does not provide us with entities that are “structured” entities or that have “parts” in any metaphysically interesting sense of those terms. A minimalist can, however, countenance a derivative, or second class, sense in which propositions are structured and have parts in just the way she can allow for a suitably deflated sense in which propositions represent. For example, if p is a proposition that is abstracted from the a class of mental states each of which represents Oscar, we might speak, derivatively, of p having Oscar as a constituent. This idea is very much in keeping with a recent distinction drawn between “lightweight constituency” and “heavyweight constituency” in Keller (2013). See Speaks’s Chapter 11 in King et al. (2014) for more in the same vein.
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Acknowledgements
We received important suggestions and criticisms from the participants at the worksop on The Role of Content in Mind, Language, and Metaphysics at Birkbeck, as well as at Meanings & Other Things: A Conference Celebrating the Work of Stephen Schiffer hosted by the New York Institute of Philosophy-NYU. We also want to thank audiences at the Birkbeck WIP group, the University of Arizona, UNLV, the University of Manchester, The University of Southampton, and The University of York. Additionally, we have benefited a great deal from conversations and correspondences with Mark Balaguer, Lucy Campbell, Tim Crane, Sean Crawford, Sinan Dogramaci, Frances Egan, Craig French, Laura Gow, Amanda Greene, Bob Hale, Peter Hanks, Cory Juhl, Robert Matthews, Raamy Majeed, Eliot Michaelson, Michelle Montague, Anne Quaranto, Alex Rausch, Gurpreet Rattan, Indrek Reiland, Stephen Schiffer, Jeremy Schwartz, David Sosa, Florian Steinberger, and Crispin Wright. Special thanks are owed to Jon Litland for many very helpful discussions. Finally, we are indebted to an anonymous referee for their helpful suggestions and questions.
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Grzankowski, A., Buchanan, R. Propositions on the cheap. Philos Stud 176, 3159–3178 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1168-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1168-6