Structured propositions and trivial composition

Bryan Pickel

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Structured propositions are often invoked to explain why intensionally equivalent sentences do not substitute salva veritate into attitude ascriptions. As the semantics is standardly developed—for example,in Salmon (1986), Soames (1987), and King (1995), the semantic value of a complex expression is an ordered complex consisting of the semantic values of its components. Such views, however, trivialize semantic composition since they do not allow for independent constraints on the meaning of complexes.Trivializing semantic composition risks “trivializing semantics” (King and Stanley 2005, 123). Yet, proponents of structured propositions suggest a route to reimpose substantive compositionality. While the mapping from sentences to structured propositions is trivially compositional, there is a non-trivial mapping from the structured proposition to its truth-value. This non-trivial level of semantic composition allows the meanings assigned to complex expressions to impose substantive constraints on the meanings of the simple ones. I first articulate the basic desiderata: an account of structured propositions capable of explaining attitude attributions and delivering a non-trivially compositional semantics. I then show that the two-stage semantics proposed by standard proponents of structured propositions does not satisfy these joint goals.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1-16
JournalSynthese
Early online date13 Jul 2018
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 13 Jul 2018

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • semnatics
  • compositionality
  • structured propositions

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