I also made vegetarian sushi the other night, and it was glorious. I look forward to much more wonderful cooking in the next few months.
In preparation for the first meeting of my metaphysics seminar, I read Scott Soames contribution to the Routledge Companion to Metaphysics, titled simply "Propositions". Soames, who is one of the main writers we'll be engaging in this seminar, was helpful in setting the scene, and I thought I'd use this first post to re-hash some of the major points I took from Soames, in order to introduce the dialectic in which we'll be participating this fall. I am very new to this topic, so this should post should read as me trying out my sea legs, not me presenting myself as an expert that warrants being listened too.
The problem of the proposition (for me at least) begins quite familiarly, but gets strange soon. We can say things like "I believe everything you've said" or "What she said was offensive". When we refer to 'what is said' we do not refer to 'what is uttered'; we do not treat a sentence as the referent of 'what is said'. Consider: Eric utters "I made 5.1 million dollars last year" and, later Joe exclaims that "Eric told me that he made more than five million bucks". Here, Joe utters something true, although his report of what Eric said includes several words that Eric never uttered. Thus, Joe cannot be describing the words that Eric uttered; rather Eric represented the world as being a certain way, and Joe reported the way that Eric represented the world as being. The proposition is the entity that the sentence expresses. There is no mapping from sentences to propositions; one proposition can be represented by multiple sentences and a single sentence can express multiple propositions in multiple contexts of utterance.
So propositions are things said. We commonly say that they are structured entities. For the longest time I hadn't the foggiest what that meant, and it's still rather unclear to me. But as i understand it, sentences are supposed to be capable of expressing propositions, and so we need propositions to display the same sort of compositionality that sentences display. Thus, just as subjects and predicates are combined to make sentences, we need somehow to capture the sense in which a property is is combined with a particular in order to make a proposition. Concerning sentences, the rules that govern such combination are just our ordinary grammatical rules, but it's less clear what governs the construction of propositions.
If you ask Frege and Russel, the most pressing reason to provide an account of these rules is the prospect of accounting for the fundamental unity of propositions. That is, consider the proposition that a is different from b. This proposition is supposed to be, importantly, a single thing, which can play a single unified role in theories, in thought, and in language. It is in virtue of this unity that propositions are alleged to be capable of representing the world. And yet, what we have here is an aggregate of words, which in turn refer to an aggregate of particulars, relations and properties. In order for the proposition to be essentially unified, we must show why it is that this proposition isn't a mere aggregate of stuff, a particular, a property, and an instantiation relation.
One way to account for the unity of propositions is to outline a structure and then we can argue that the singularity of the proposition is the same as the singularity of the represented structure. So, perhaps, one develops a notation, or one builds a diagram, the intention of which is to show, not just that a relates to b by way of the 'is different from' relation, but in particular to show that a is the instantiating particular, and that 'different-from-b-ness' is the instantiated property. But in order to solve our problem this structure needs to be able to play a role that it, in fact, cannot play. The structure articulated is supposed to represent a proposition in all its glory. The structure should have the properties that the proposition has. But in order to read our proposition off of our structure, we have to endow the structure with meaning; we must provide an interpretation of the structure. The structure itself does not predicate anything of anything. It is in virtue of our interpretation that the structure picks out a, for instance, as the argument, rather than anything else. But if our interpretation of the structure is doing all of the work, then the structure itself hasn't done any work. We endow the structure with meaning, but that's enough to show that the structure doesn't have the properties of propositions, because propositions are alleged to be intrinsically representational; we endow them with nothing.
Fregean senses were offered as a solution to this problem, because (so the theory went) Fregean senses were intrinsically predicative. A Fregean sense could not occupy a non-predicative role. Thus (it was hoped that) Frege's structure could succeed, where Russell failed, at modelling the sense in which the proposition already specified the instantiation of the predication relationship, between a particular and a universal, independent of any interpreation that we may add to it. If a sense could not be non-predicative, then the presence of a sense as a constituent of a proposition is sufficient to show that the sense was being predicated of the the proposition's other constituent.
But the idea of an intrinsically predicative constituent of a proposition is nonsense, since to even talk about or characterize a Fregean sense was to assign the sense to a non-predicative role in a proposition. Building intrinsically predicative constituents into a theory of propositions is impossible, since intrinsically predictive constituents cannot be talked about, and a fortiori cannot be theorized about. This 'self-refutation' argument struck me initially as a cheap shot, but it didn't take me long to see that it actually, and impressively, gets to the heart of the matter: There's no way that you can articulate the predication relationship that inheres in a structured proposition by arguing for different sorts of things being the proper occupiers of subject and predicate roles, because it is essential to the theoretical role played by propositions that we can talk and think about predicates. The entities referred to by predicates (properties) are stubbornly flexible; they will not be put in an intrinsically predicative corner.
That's as far as i'll write about this today. I happen to know from reading ahead that this dialectical point is going to effect a split. On the one side will be folks like Jeff King, who attempt to articulate a more satisfying propositional structure that can give propositions their unified, intrinsically representational status. King will, in effect, be attempting to solve the problem that Russel and Frege were grappling with. On the other side will be folks like Soames, who think that our obsession with the unity of propositions has been a result of our misassigning 'intrinsic representationality' to propositions, rather than those cognitive states whose content is captured by the proposition.
I don't understand the last paragraph at all. The rest of it i think I have a novice's grip upon. I certainly don't feel prepared to offer any insight into why one ought to care about all of this. But I hope and suspect that I will have much more to say about that in time.
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