Cognitive propositions, truth functions and the Tractatus

ABSTRACT

Over a century ago Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein put propositions at the center of philosophy of language, logic, mathematics and mind. By 1912 Russell had become dissatisfied with his earlier efforts, which were at best models of what we assert, believe, and know. He was then struck with the idea that what unites the elements of assertion and belief, and gives them representational content are the minds of agents. Although he failed to capitalize on this idea, Wittgenstein was more successful. The tractarian theory of propositions was grounded in our use of linguistic, and other, artifacts to represent things as being one way or another. Despite remaining long submerged, his idea has now been revived in cognitive form by several philosophers. The present article is part of that revival. Although we have made great progress in the philosophy of mind and language, we still don't know nearly enough about propositions. If that progress is to continue we must develop our conception of propositions as primary bearers of truth conditions, objects of attitudes, and contents of some mental states. It is striking that classic texts like the Tractatus continue to shed light on this task.

KEYWORDS:

• Propositions
• cognition
• representation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Frege ([1879, 1967] 1879, 1967, [1892, 1970],

2 Russell (1912, 1997) Chapter 12. See also Soames (2010) Chapter 4 and Soames (2014) Chapter 9 Section 2.

3 See Soames (2014) Chapter 9 Sections 3 and 4.

4 See Soames (2016, 2018 Chapters 2 and 3).

5 See King (2007), King, Soames, and Speaks (2014), Soames (2015), Hanks (2015), Jesperson (2010, 2012, 2015) and Moltmann (2013).

6 Suggested in Soames (2016, 2018 Chapter 2).

7 The relationship between sentences and propositions in the Tractatus is discussed on 36–39 of Soames (2018).

8 See Sections 3.1 and 3.2 of Soames (2018).

9 The tractarian view of propositional attitudes is critically discussed on 91–96 of Soames (2018).

10 Though the examples are more complex we can get essentially the same result without ignoring existence (despite having no existence predicate and no quantifiers in L1).

11 Soames (2015), Chapters 3–5.

12 See Chapter 3 of (Soames 2015) plus the discussions of Perry, Lewis, Kripke and Kaplan in Chapter 9.

13 Soames 2015, 39–43 and 80–88.

14 Kripke, ‘A Puzzle About Belief’.

15 I here pretend that indicative conditionals in English are material conditionals. We could, of course, reconstruct the case with a real material conditional.

16 See Chapter 4 of Soames (2015)

17 The objection is presented in Soames ([1987, 2009]). A prominent objection is raised in Edelberg (1994), and refuted in Soames ([2008, 2009]).

18 Soames (2015) 18–19, 22–25, 73–79, 157–158.

19 These are cases in which the agent doesn't recognize the recurrence of the entity Venus in the agent's act of entertaining the proposition (or, sometimes, of recurrence of the same name in a sentence used to express it. See Chapters 6–8 of Soames (2015) for discussion.

20 See Section 4 of Soames ([1987, 2009]).

21 Unless we allow the Millian mode recognition of recurrence to distinguish cognitively distinct but representationally identical propositions, as discussed in Soames (2015), Chapters 7, 8.