ABSTRACT
E.J.Lemmon, Beginning Logic, Nelson, 1965. (See its index.) E.J.Nelson, ‘Intensional relations’, Mind, 1930. (Consistency as involving both of two
propositions.)
. See VARIABLE.
. See SPEECH ACTS.
. A term whose use has altered between its appearance in the nineteenth century and its present-day uses. Prepositional attitudes (attitudes which involve propositions, like belief, desire, fear, doubt, thought, imagination, surmise) have something which they are or consist in and something (real or unreal) which they are of or directed towards. Meinong called the former the idea and the latter the object; he then distinguished within the idea the act itself and the content, being among the first to insist on this distinction between content and object. Later writers, however, use ‘content’ rather differently, and more in the sense in which Meinong used ‘object’. The content of a belief is the proposition or state of affairs towards which it is directed, while the object is the thing (real or unreal) which the belief is about; both of these seem nearer to what Meinong meant by ‘object’, and the content is no longer part of the propositional attitude (or ‘idea’) itself. If I believe that Napoleon won at Waterloo, you believe that Wellington won at Waterloo, and Smith believes that Don Quixote won at Waterloo, then the contents of our respective beliefs are the propositions that Napoleon won at Waterloo, that Wellington did so, and that Don Quixote did so, while the objects of the beliefs are respectively Napoleon, Wellington and Don Quixote.
