ABSTRACT
The initial brief for propositions being the referents or denotations of sentential complements in these contexts is that we can report what people say and think indifferently in any suitably rich language. Sententialists about attitude reports aim to show that this is not an obstacle to taking the sentential complements to refer to sentencesprovided thatweare sophisticatedenough abouthowwe tell the story about the relation between the semantic properties of the complement sentence in the
K. Ludwig742 context of use and the state or utterance of the person we are reporting about, and are reasonably sophisticated about the point of translation. I have written about some of these matters in earlier work (Ludwig and Ray 1998). I focus here though on a particularly important objection introducedoriginally byStephenSchiffer in his 1987 book Remnants of Meaning, and repeated, in more trenchant form, in his 2003 book TheThingsWeMean, which he suggests is insurmountable. The objection focuses on problems that emerge in higher-order attitude attributions (§3). I will call this the Higher-order Attitude Objection. This is an objection to which I think there has been no completely adequate response to date.What I want to do is to show that a parallel puzzle arises for the propositionalist. I think that the usual resources for the propositionalist fall short, for interesting reasons, which have not been generally noticed. In particular, I argue that the usual appeal to something in the ballpark of a Fregean mode of presentation of a proposition must meet two requirements. It must present its object in away that is constitutively sufficient for grasping its object, and it must be plausible to assign it to sentential complements of attitude reports. I argue that it is implausible that anything satisfies the first requirement and that in any case nothing can simultaneously satisfy both, because anything that satisfies the first must make the appearance of the sentence in the complement inessential to how theywork in the language, but it is in fact essential. That is not the end of the story, but once we see what further solutions are available, we can see that analogous solutions are available for the sententialist. The nature of the solution and the parallels for the sententialist help us to see the cash value of talk of propositions. The positive solution for the sententialist shows, in anycase, thatwedonot need propositions to understand howhigher-order attitude attributions do thework that theydo for us.At theendof the day, propositions seem not to do much explanatory work, even in this more limited role, for a reason that is connectedwith their dispensability in semantic theory, or so I shall argue.
