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Belief and Propositions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Arthur Pap
Arthur Pap*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

The repudiation of propositions as “obscure entities” which is prevalent among logicians and philosophers of “nominalistic” persuasion, is frequently justified by pointing out that no agreement seems ever to have been reached about the identity-condition of propositions. And if we cannot specify, so they argue, under what conditions two sentences express the same proposition, then we use the word “proposition” without any clear meaning. Quine, for example, feels far less uneasy about quantification over class-variables than about quantification over attribute-variables and propositional variables, because there is a clear criterion for deciding whether we are dealing with two classes or with only one class referred to by different predicates: two classes are identical if they have the same membership. And such a criterion of identity is alleged to be lacking for intensions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , April 1957 , pp. 123 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © 1957, The Williams & Wilkins Company

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References

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A correction has been issued for this article:

Correction

Arthur Pap