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Propositions and Propositional Acts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

D.K. Johnston
D.K. Johnston*
Affiliation:
University of Victoria, Victoria, BCV8W 2Y2, Canada
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Extract

Suppose that John asks, ‘Is the window open?’ and Mary replies, ‘The window is open.’ Then John and Mary have produced two distinct utterances, and in doing so, they have performed two different kinds of speech act. But clearly there is something that these utterances have in common. According to the standard theory of speech acts, in these utterances different illocutionary forces have been applied to the same propositional content. Similarly, if John and Mary both believe that roses are red, the same propositional content is attributed to their individual mental states.

The propositional contents of utterances and beliefs have traditionally been identified with propositions. In turn, propositions have been characterized as language-independent particulars that can be re-identified in different contexts. In this article, I will argue that various phenomena that have hitherto been explained by propositions are better understood in terms of propositional acts.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , September 2009 , pp. 435 - 462
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2009

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References

1 For example, see John, Searle Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1969).Google Scholar

2 The complex structure of propositional acts is noted by Searle (ibid.), but he seems to ignore this structure in favour of propositional entities. See his Chapter Two, especially 22-33.

3 Old hands will recognize much of the terminology in this section as deriving from Austin, J.L. ‘Truth,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 24 (1950).Google Scholar I have chosen to use it for historical reasons only: the letters ‘X,’ ‘Y,’ and ‘Z’ would serve equally well to designate the different components of a propositional act.

4 According to traditional grammar, every complete indicative sentence must have a subject and a predicate, and thus will include words and inflections that correspond to all three of these basic components. And in predicate logic, the demonstrative and descriptive components of a propositional act are both represented in the atomic form Φx.

5 Demonstrative, descriptive, and temporal components may also be attributed to an individual utterance, provided that the utterance constitutes the performance of a propositional act.

6 Not every utterance will constitute a propositional act. Similarly, some propositional acts are not performed by utterances: for example, written inscriptions, or non-verbal signs and gestures.

7 Contexts here should be understood to include both actual and possible contexts. Nothing prevents a propositional act analysis from making use of the notion of a ‘possible world’ or ‘conceivable situation’ to account for modal properties, just as many propositional analyses do.

8 Obviously this does not prevent us from talking about Athena, for we can still instantiate propositional act types whose identity criteria stipulate the name ‘Athena’ as their demonstrative device.

9 The identity criteria for propositional act types may well range beyond language and the world. As we have seen, the criterion for a type might require that speakers have certain beliefs or intentions, if their utterances are to count as instances of that type.

10 As we have seen, a criterion of type identity need not assign a value to every parameter. Some identity criteria assign values only to the demonstrative and descriptive correlate parameters, while others specify only the sentence that must be uttered.

11 Since T may not be instantiated in the actual world, the second analysis requires that we also consider utterances in other possible worlds. The admission of such possibilia is a feature of many analyses of modal properties.

12 Kripke, Saul Identity and Necessity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1971).Google Scholar

13 The arguments for these points are well known, and I will not repeat them here.

14 According to Nathan Salmon, the identity sentence is incidental to Frege's puzzle: he argues that the same difficulties arise with sentences like, ‘The author of Hamlet wrote Hamlet’ and ‘Shakespeare wrote Hamlet.’ See Nathan Salmon, Frege's Puzzle (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1986).

15 Although there are many different propositional attitudes, belief seems to be generally regarded as the paradigm case. Consequently, I will make belief the focus of my remarks here.

16 In cases where there is no demonstrative correlate, such as with beliefs about unicorns or Santa Claus, an identity criterion might instead specify a demonstrative device, or even the sense that a demonstrative device must have.

17 Again we assume that the name ‘Venus’ is a rigid designator. Note that T1 is a ‘pure’ de re type, while T2 has features of both de dicto and de re types.

18 If their belief states do have the same propositional content, then it follows trivially that these states are expressible by the same utterance.

19 Conditions (i) and (ii) together imply that an utterance of p in c would express S’s belief.

20 Other accounts that attribute structure to propositions, such as Mark Richard's ‘Russellian annotated matrices’ can be readily re-interpreted in the same manner. See Richard, Mark Propositional Attitudes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar