ABSTRACT
It won’t be possible in this paper to give a full presentation of this alternative to the traditional account of propositional content.2 My present aim is to get this approach off the ground by responding to some fundamental objections. First, many philosophers think that acts of judging or asserting are not the sorts of things that are true or false. Many think that it’s a category mistake to attribute truth or falsity to judgments and assertions considered as actions. If that were so then my approach to propositional content would be a non-starter. Second, even if we grant that particular acts of predication have truth-conditions, one might still deny that types of these actions have truth-conditions. Perhaps a token act of predicating a property of an object has truth-conditions; according to the second objection, it is a mistake to think that this type of action also has truth-conditions. If that were right then, again, my approach to propositions would fail. Propositions are not the primary bearers of truth-conditions but they are still bearers of truth-conditions, a fact that any account of the nature of propositions must accommodate. I am going to argue, then, that not only are token acts of predication bearers of truth-conditions, but types of these actions are as well. Finally, I will show how the former explains the latter. Types of acts of predication have truth-conditions because their tokens do, and the types inherit their truth-conditions from their tokens. One of the goals of this paper is to clarify what this means.
