Abstract
Peter Hanks and Scott Soames have developed a theory of propositions as structured cognitive event types, as have I in earlier works. They use the theory to offer similar accounts of transparent propositional relation reports, and very different accounts of opaque reports. For both, the sentences used to report propositional attitudes or speech acts are semantically unambiguous. Hanks invokes context-sensitivity, Soames pragmatics, to account for the different interpretations. I raise problems and offer solutions. Their accounts succumb to the non-compositionality of transparent reports, and wrongly predict that all propositional relation reports have both transparent and opaque interpretations. Soames’s pragmatic enrichment account of the opaque interpretation is unfounded, and forces him to conclude that competent speakers do not know what the sentences they use mean. The notion of an “object-dependent” or “bare” proposition is both problematic and unnecessary. I offer a new account, on which propositional relation reports have the semantic ambiguity characteristic of idioms, with the transparent interpretation being highly but not completely compositional.
About the author
Wayne A. Davis has been a Professor in the Philosophy Department of Georgetown University since 1979, serving as Department Chair from 1990–2015. His earned degrees include a B.A. from Michigan (1973) and the Ph.D. from Princeton (1977). Previous appointments include UCLA (1976), Rice (1977), and Washington University (1978). He is the author of An Introduction to Logic (Prentice-Hall 1986), Implicature (Cambridge 1998), Meaning, Expression, and Thought (Cambridge 2003), Nondescriptive Meaning and Reference (Oxford 2005), Irregular Negations, Implicatures, and Idioms (Spring 2017), and Indexical Meaning and Concepts (in preparation), plus articles on logic, philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophical psychology, philosophy of language, and pragmatics. He also serves as Editor of Philosophical Studies.
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