ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on developing the contours of central question – what are propositions/what is propositional content – drawing heavily from the excellent recent volume by Jeff King, Scott Soames, and Jeff Speaks, entitled New Thinking about Propositions (2014). The earliest structured-propositioners, such as Frege and Bertrand Russell, were troubled by a quasi-mereological problem. If propositions have constituents, then you can ask how the constituent parts stick together. One reason why this problem bothered Russell so dearly was because he found it hard to conceive of a mode of composition for the parts of his structured-propositions that wouldn't force the proposition to be true. Soames's insight, which he claims was little understood by Russell and Frege, was that the special quality of a proposition isn't unity, for unity is easy to achieve, but rather their curious ability to represent. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
