Among philosophers, Fregeanism and sententialism are widely considered two of the leading theories of the semantics of attitude reports. Among linguists, these approaches have received little recent sustained discussion. This paper aims to bridge this divide. I present a new formal implementation of Fregeanism and sententialism, with the goal of showing that these theories can be developed in sufficient detail and concreteness to be serious competitors to the theories which are more popular among semanticists. I develop a modern (...) treatment of quantifying in for Fregeanism and sententialism, in the style of Heim and Kratzer, and then show how these theories can—somewhat surprisingly—account for “third readings” on the model of the “Standard Solution” from possible-worlds semantics. The resulting Fregean/sententialist proposal has a distinctive attraction: it treats data related to counterfactual attitudes —which have proven challenging to accommodate in the setting of possible worlds semantics—straightforwardly as third readings. (shrink)

Sententialism is the view that intensional positions in natural languages occur within clausal complements only. According to proponents of this view, intensional transitive verbs such as 'want', 'seek' or 'resemble' are actually propositional attitude verbs in disguise. I argue that 'conceive' cannot fit this mould: conceiving-of is not reducible to conceiving-that. I offer a new diagnosis of where Berkeley's 'master argument' goes astray, analysing what is odd about saying that Hylas conceives a tree which is not conceived. A sententialist (...) semantics cannot account for the absurdity in attitude ascriptions of this type: we need to acknowledge irreducibly non-propositional conceiving. (shrink)

Among the difficulties that sentential theories of belief face, the problem of clutter asserts that treating beliefs as sentences would make it difficult or impossible to literally fit the number of beliefs possessed by ordinary human cognizers into the mind-brain. I argue that concerns about clutter arise from a misunderstanding of how belief states, whether sentences or not, are causally related. Insofar as a weak computer model of the mind treats information states as virtual states, I explain how the ontology (...) of virtual states seriously mitigates the problem of clutter for sententialism. (shrink)

Propositional attitude sentences, such as (1) Pierre believes that snow is white, have proved to be formidably difficult to account for in a semantic theory. It is generally agreed that the that-clause ‘that snow is white’ purports to refer to the proposition that snow is white, but no agreement has been reached on what this proposition is. Sententialism is a semantic theory which tries to undermine the very enterprise of understanding what proposition is referred to in (1): according to (...) sententialists, in (1) reference is made to the sentence “Snow is white”. Sententialism is generally considered doomed. The two main reasons why are the famous translation argument, firstly suggested by Alonzo Church, and a problem raised by Stephen Schiffer. The purpose of this paper is to provide a unified solution to both criticisms. What I take to be the key ingredient sententialists may exploit is an observation that concerns the nature of languages and quotations: since quotation marks display the quoted material, if you are a speaker of the language the quoted material belongs to, you usually cannot but understand what is quoted. Moreover, I show that sententialists may appeal to that very observation also in order to answer another problem, pointed out by Kent Bach. I conclude that there are good reasons for resisting the temptation of introducing propositions in order to account for propositional attitude sentences. (shrink)

Bolzano holds that every sentence can be paraphrased into a sentence of the form "A has b". Bolzano's arguments for this claim are reconstructed and discussed. Since they crucially rely on Bolzano's notion of paraphrase, this notion is investigated in detail. Bolzano has usually been taken to require that in a correct paraphrase the sentence to be paraphrased and the paraphrasing sentence express the same proposition. In view of Bolzano's texts and systematical considerations this interpretation is rejected: Bolzano only holds (...) that the sentence to be paraphrased and the paraphrasing sentence must be equipollent ("gleichgeltend"). It is shown that even this modest view of paraphrase does not help Bolzano in sustaining his claim that all sentences have the form "A has b". (shrink)

Bolzano holds that every sentence can be paraphrased into a sentence of the form "A has b". Bolzano's arguments for this claim are reconstructed and discussed. Since they crucially rely on Bolzano's notion of paraphrase, this notion is investigated in detail. Bolzano has usually been taken to require that in a correct paraphrase the sentence to be paraphrased and the paraphrasing sentence express the same proposition. In view of Bolzano's texts and systematical considerations this interpretation is rejected: Bolzano only holds (...) that the sentence to be paraphrased and the paraphrasing sentence must be equipollent ("gleichgeltend"). It is shown that even this modest view of paraphrase does not help Bolzano in sustaining his claim that all sentences have the form "A has b". (shrink)

According to sententialism, ‘Otto said that I am a fool’ expresses the holding of a relation between Otto and the sentence ‘I am a fool’. Sententialism is generally considered doomed, but I will show that a suitably developed sententialist account can surmount the many objections that have been raised. I will also show how important it is to have a fairer attitude towards sententialism. For if sententialist accounts are recognised as real options, it should also be recognised (...) that the conclusion, drawn by many, that sentences such as the report above force us to introduce Kaplanian monsters is unwarranted. (shrink)

According to sententialism, ‘Otto said that I am a fool’ expresses the holding of a relation between Otto and the sentence ‘I am a fool’. Sententialism is generally considered doomed, but I will show that a suitably developed sententialist account can surmount the many objections that have been raised. I will also show how important it is to have a fairer attitude towards sententialism. For if sententialist accounts are recognised as real options, it should also be recognised (...) that the conclusion, drawn by many, that sentences such as the report above force us to introduce Kaplanian monsters is unwarranted. (shrink)

An important objection to sententialist theories of attitude reports is that they cannot accommodate the principle that one cannot know that someone believes that p without knowing what it is that he believes. This paper argues that a parallel problem arises for propositionalist accounts that has gone largely unnoticed, and that, furthermore, the usual resources for the propositionalist do not afford an adequate solution. While non-standard solutions are available for the propositionalist, it turns out that there are parallel solutions that (...) are available for the sententialist. Since the difficulties raised seem to show that the mechanism by which sentential complements serve to inform us about attitudes and about sentence meaning does not depend on their referring to propositions, this casts doubt on whether talk of propositions should retain a significant theoretical role in the enterprise of understanding thought, language and communication. (shrink)

Sententialism: An adequate semantic theory for a language assigns semantic values to complex expressions (typically on the basis of the semantic values of the syntactic parts of those complex expressions), with the assignment process culminating in the assignment of appropriate semantic values (typically propositions or truth conditions) to entire sentences. Sententialism is so-called because it takes the task of semantic theory proper to be exhausted once semantic values have been assigned to full sentences. Beyond the sentence may lay (...) further linguistic phenomena broadly construed, such as various discourse properties and relations, but any such phenomena are relegated to the pragmatics. Sententialism thus typically goes hand-in-hand with a larger philosophical perspective according.. (shrink)

In this foundational work on the theory of linguistic and mental representation, Stephen Schiffer surveys all the leading theories of meaning and content in the philosophy of language and finds them lacking. He concludes that there can be no correct, positive philosophical theory or linguistic or mental representation and, accordingly advocates the deflationary "no-theory theory of meaning and content." Along the way he takes up functionalism, the nature of propositions and their suitability as contents, the language of thought and other (...) sententialist theories of belief, intention based semantics, and related issues in ontology. Stephen Schiffer is Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

This book offers a comprehensive primer for the study of intensionality. It explores and assesses those key theories of intensionality which have been developed in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Each of the examined theories is tested as to whether it can account for the problems associated with the intersubstitution salva veritate of co-extensional expressions, and existential generalisation. All of these theories are subsequently compared so as to determine which of them comes closest to successfully solving these problems. The (...) book examines four kinds of intensionalist approaches: the Fregean approach ; the possible-worlds approaches of Carnap, Montague and Cresswell; the theory of properties relations and propositions devised by Bealer; and the Meinongian approaches put forward by Zalta and Priest. The book also proposes an alternative to intensionalism: sententialism. Sententialists argue that the problems of intensionality could be solved by appealing to linguistic items rather than intensional entities. Drawing on the works of Quine, Davidson, Scheffler and R. M. Martin, it explores the viability and value of sententialism as an alternative to intensionalism. (shrink)

The question, ‘Is cognition linguistic?' divides recent cognitive theories into two antagonistic groups. Sententialists claim that we think in some language, while advocates of non linguistic views of cognition deny this claim. The Introspective Argument for Sententialism is one of the most appealing arguments for sententialism. In substance, it claims that the introspective fact of inner speech provides strong evidence that our thoughts are linguistic. This article challenges this argument. I claim that the Introspective Argument for Sententialism (...) confuses the content of our thoughts with their vehicles: while sententialism is a thesis about the vehicles of our thoughts, inner speech sentences are the content of auditory or articulatory images. The rebuttal of the introspective argument for sententialism is shown to have a general significance in cognitive science: Introspection does not tell us how we think. (shrink)

The paper discusses what kind of truth bearer, or truth-ascription, a deflationist should take as primary. I first present number of arguments against a sententialist view. I then present a deflationary theory which takes propositions as primary, and try to show that it deals neatly with a wide range of linguistic data. Next, I consider both the view that there is no primary truth bearer, and the most common account of sentence truth given by deflationists who take propositions as primary, (...) and argue that they both attribute an implausible type of ambiguity to “true”. This can be avoided, however, if truth-ascriptions to sentences are taken as a certain form of pragmatic ellipses. I end by showing how this hypothesis accommodates a number of intuitions involving truth-ascriptions to sentences. (shrink)

Maloney undertakes to defend Sententialism, "a version of the Representational Theory of the Mind... that favors treating mental representations as if they were sentences encoded in the central nervous system...". Arguing initially from perceived similarities between beliefs and declarative sentences and a desire to retain the belief/desire model of explanation, the author disputes especially those who reject "folk psychology" as either an account of what there is or an explanatory model of behavior.

I critically explore various forms of the language of thought (LOT) hypothesis. Many considerations, including the complexity of representational content and the systematicity of language understanding, support the view that some, but not all, of our mental representations occur in a language. I examine several arguments concerning sententialism and the propositional attitudes, Fodor's arguments concerning infant and animal thought, and Fodor's argument for radical concept nativism and show that none of these considerations require us to postulate a LOT that (...) is innate or otherwise distinct from spoken languages. Instead, I suggest that we maintain the more conservative hypothesis, supported by introspection, that some of our thoughts occur in the languages that we speak. (shrink)

Inhaltsverzeichnis/Table of Contents: Vorbemerkung/Preface. Dagfin FØLLESDAL: Bolzano's Legacy. Jan BERG: Bolzano, the Prescient Encyclopedist. Jan SEBESTIK: Bolzano, Exner and the Origins of Analytical Philosophy. Paul RUSNOCK: Bolzano and the Traditions of Analysis. Peter SIMONS: Bolzano on Collections. Ali BEHBOUD: Remarks on Bolzano's Collections. Mark SIEBEL: Variation, Derivability and Necessity. Edgar MORSCHER: Bolzano's Method of Variation: Three Puzzles. Rolf GEORGE: Bolzano's Programme andObjects. Mark TEXTOR: Bolzano's Sententialism. Wolfgang KÜNNE: Propositions in Bolzano and Frege. Michael DUMMETT: Comments on Wolfgang Künne's Paper. (...) Carsten Uwe GIESKE: Bolzano's Notion of Testifying. (shrink)

Propositional and notional attitudes are construed as relations (-in-intension) between individuals and constructions (rather than propositrions etc,). The apparatus of transparent intensional logic (Tichy) is applied to derive two rules that make it possible to export existential quantifiers without conceiving attitudes as relations to expressions (sententialism).

This paper develops — within an axiomatic theory of properties, relations, and propositions which accords them well-defined existence and identity conditions — a sententialist-functionalist account of belief as a symbolically mediated relation to a special kind of propositional entity, theproxy-encoding abstract proposition. It is then shown how, in terms of this account, the truth conditions of English belief reports may be captured in a formally precise and empirically adequate way that accords genuinely semantic status to familiar opacity data.

Can all truths be stated in precise language? Not if true indirect speech reports of assertions entered using vague language must themselves use vague language. Sententialism – the view that an indirect speech report is true if and only if the report’s complement clause “same-says” the sentence the original speaker uttered – provides two ways of resisting this claim: first, by allowing that precise language can “same-say” vague language; second, by implying that expressions occurring in an indirect speech report’s (...) complement clause are not used. I reject the first line of resistance, but argue that the second is successful if one accepts sententialism. (shrink)

In this paper, we outline an approach to giving extensional truth-theoretic semantics for what have traditionally been seen as opaque sentential contexts. We outline an approach to providing a compositional truth-theoretic semantics for opaque contexts which does not require quantifying over intensional entities of any kind, and meets standard objections to such accounts. The account we present aims to meet the following desiderata on a semantic theory T for opaque contexts: (D1) T can be formulated in a first-order extensional language; (...) (D2) T does not require quantification over intensional entities­i.e., meanings, propositions, properties, relations, or the like­in its treatment of opaque contexts; (D3) T captures the entailment relations that hold in virtue of form between sentences in the language for which it is a theory; (D4) T has a finite number of axioms. If the approach outlined here is correct, it resolves a longstanding complex of problems in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

The Representational Theory of the Mind arises with the recognition that thoughts have contents carried by mental representations. For Abelard to think, for example, that Pegasus is winged is for Abelard to be related to a MENTAL REPRESENTATION whose content is that Pegasus is winged. Now, there are different kinds of representations: pictures, maps, models, and words ‐ to name only some. Exactly what sort of REPRESENTATION is mental representation? (see imagery; connectionism.) Sententialism distinguishes itself as a version of (...) rep‐resentationalism by positing that mental representations are themselves linguistic expressions within a ‘language of thought’ (FODOR, 1975, 1987; Field, 1978; Maloney, 1989). While some sententialists conjecture that the language of thought is just the thinker's spoken language internalized (Harman, 1982), others identify the language of thought with Mentalese, an unarticulated, internal language in which the computations supposedly definitive of cognition occur. Sententialism is certainly a bold and provocative thesis, and so we turn to the reasons that might be offered on its behalf. (shrink)

This thesis presents an account of the nature of structured propositions and addresses a series of questions that arise from that proposal. Chapter 1 presents the account and explains how it meets standard objections to such views. Chapter 2 responds to the objection that this version of propositionalism is really a form of sententialism by arguing for the distinct advantages of the propositionalist view. Chapter 3 argues against a closely related view of propositions by way of general principles about (...) how to construct such theories. Chapter 4 illustrates how a theory of propositions of the sort proposed can be defended against a recent argument that propositions need not play a central role in linguistic theory. (shrink)