Can What is Asserted be a Sentence

IN discussing the question of what it is that has a truth value, philosophers have often gone to great lengths to avoid assuming that propositions exist, that is that there are abstract entities which are expressed by sentences (or by utterances of sentences) but which are not themselves part of any language. One might want to avoid such an assumption for any of a host of reasons: because propositions are abstract entities, or because their identity conditions are unclear, or because their assumption is not necessary for an adequate semantical account of a language. At the same time it seems quite plausible that what a person asserts is what can properly be said to be true or false.2 Those who hope to make do without propositions need not deny that things asserted are the truthbearers; a natural move on their behalf would be to claim that what a person asserts is nothing other than a sentence.3 In this paper I hope to make a contribution to the perennial problem of the nature of the bearers of truth and falsity. I will do this by laying to rest the claim that sentences are what we assert.4

Contemporary philosophy · Epistemology · General interest · Linguistics · Sentence · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Psychology

• Propositions, Numbers, And The Problem Of Arbitrary Identification

  Open Access•Joseph G Moore•Synthese•1999

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