ABSTRACT
What makes the topic of public monuments philosophically interesting is the demand that a public monument meet two independent requirements: we ask that it be beautiful but also that it make a point. Public monuments are assertoric: they convey messages and teach lessons. Assertion requires a language and hence every monument has a title, a label, an accompanying text. Architecture in general is often characterized as didactic: a severely modernist building will be said to "make a statement," but here the phrase is a metaphor. What it means is that the building suggests-perhaps is meant to suggest-thoughts of a general kind about art, the human condition, the meaning of life, and related conceptions. But no monument can, in this metaphorical sense, make a statement unless it is tagged with what is literally a sentence, or at least an identifying phrase, in English, French, or German. A pyramid, an obelisk, a tholos may be in itself an imposing structure but does not count, one might say, as a monument until a verbal message is affixed.
