ABSTRACT
Recently, there’s been a lot of interest in a research program that tries to understand representation with propositional content in terms of the subject’s performance of sub-propositional mental acts like reference and predication (e.g. Burge 2010; Hanks 2015; Soames 2010, 2015). For example, on one version of the view, for a subject to predicate the property of being a composer of Arvo just is what it is to perform the basic propositional act of judging that Arvo is a composer (e.g. Hanks 2015). In this paper, I first present my own variant of this view and contrast it with alternatives. I then argue that we must clearly separate the thin predication-resultant notion of judging (S(emantic)-judgment) from a much richer notion used in epistemology (E(pistemic)-judgment). The former is just the act of thinking a forceful thought. The latter is the act of making up one’s mind about how things are, a way of concluding theoretical or doxastic deliberation. I argue that these differ in three ways: levels of propositional attitude, objective vs subjective norms, and the possibility of subpersonal occurrence.
