On Being True or False: Sentences, Propositions and What is Said [1 ed.] 1527541770, 9781527541771

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Introduction
I. Opening the Case for a Non-Linguistic Truth-Bearer
II. The Case for Sentences as Truth-Bearers
III. What is a Sentence?
IV. Passing Sentence on Sentences
V. Beliefs as Truth-Bearers
VI. Propositions
VII. Truth-Bearers and Their Nature
Notes

Citation preview

On Being True or False

On Being True or False: Sentences, Propositions and What is Said By

Merrill Ring

On Being True or False: Sentences, Propositions and What is Said By Merrill Ring This book first published 2020 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2020 by Merrill Ring All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-4177-0 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-4177-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 I. Opening the Case for a Non-Linguistic Truth-Bearer .......................... 3 II. The Case for Sentences as Truth-Bearers ........................................... 31 III. What is a Sentence? ............................................................................ 53 IV. Passing Sentence on Sentences ......................................................... 87 V. Beliefs as Truth-Bearers .................................................................. 111 VI. Propositions ..................................................................................... 133 VII. Truth-Bearers and Their Nature ...................................................... 165 Notes....................................................................................................... 191

INTRODUCTION

The question about what sort of thing has a truth-value, what kind of thing it is that is true or false, extends quite far back into the history of philosophy. At some periods of that history it has been a more prominent question than at others. We seem to be at a time when there is not much thought being expended on the topic. There are the usual scraps of discussion scattered here and there, but on the whole philosophers today are not much engaged with the issue, letting it lay fallow. That situation is probably the result of a stalemate, something that occurs in philosophy when no one has an idea that can break through the settled pattern of differing views as to the correct answer to a question. The one sign of a possible thaw is the recent reissuing (2009) of C.J.F. Williams What is Truth?1, a work, and I believe the only one, that does attempt to think through at some length what kind of thing a truth-bearer is. On the other hand, Williams’ book isn’t comprehensive enough. One major topic he dismisses out of hand is the view that sentences are the bearers of truth-value and that are consequently philosophically important items. The aim of the present book is to make the topic of what sorts of things have a truth-value more central to current philosophical occupation. The route to doing that is to provide for the first time a critically comprehensive look at the historical options and to produce an answer that goes far beyond anything that even the current best attempt, namely Williams’, has to offer. The examination here can’t be said to be complete-in raising many of the issues that must be examined in pursuit of a satisfactory answer, I have come to realize that some topics can’t be considered or adequately dealt with in a reasonably compact book. I think the major omission here is the topic of thoughts: to have tried to be fairly comprehensive about that really difficult problem would have impossibly extended this work. My initial idea was that pursuing the topic of truth-bearers was only a preliminary to the question of What is Truth? However, in attempting to do more than toss out some ideas, I came to realize that the matter was very rich, requiring investigation of many issues that at first glance seemed remote from the main concern. Who knew how much needed to be done in disentangling the contrasting conceptions of what a sentence is in philosophy and in linguistics and in arguing for a wholly new position? Can the notion of a proposition be freed from its metaphysical baggage (being a

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transcendent object existing quite independently of human talk and thought) and retain a respectable possibility as something with a truth-value? What does Moore’s Paradox have to do with beliefs as truth-bearers? Those are some of the diverse topics that came to be examined as I tried to think my way through the larger issue. One further matter must be mentioned in these introductory remarks. I began this book quite a few years ago and have finished it only upon retirement from professing. A previous reader noticed that I had more references to philosophers writing some years ago and less to current work. That is true. However, as I mentioned above, that is one sign that there is currently a stalemate about how philosophically to proceed on the issue. I have not aimed at producing a book that is expected to become old fashioned, out of date, in a few years. My aim has been to write about the issues, about sentences, propositions, beliefs, being true or false, etc. As it had to be written at a certain time and place, no doubt many references will disclose that fact. But it is nonetheless about the topics discussed and it must be judged by the arguments and analyses concerning those matters and not the incidental references to particular people who have expressed views on those matters. I would like to thank especially Stephen Simon and William Hyde for their continuing interest in and criticism (often exasperated) of what I have to say here.

I OPENING THE CASE FOR A NON-LINGUISTIC TRUTH-BEARER

1. Sorting Out the Issues The ultimate aim of an inquiry into the nature of truth must be that of making sense of the human practice of calling things true (or false). It has turned out, however, in consequence of philosophical attempts on that issue, that what looks to be a simple preliminary is more difficult than anticipated. That preliminary topic concerns what it is that is (in modern terminology) the bearer of truth-value. The question of what sort of thing is true or is false is not only troublesome but pregnant with implications and connections to a variety of other philosophical issues. Thus, an inquiry into truth-bearing is valuable in itself, though it is still preparatory to an investigation of the nature of truth.1 We may be tempted to put the question about truth-bearers as: what is it that is true or false? (The “or” is important since nothing can be both true and false-except, e.g., that William can be both a true Irishman and a false lover.) But that version, taken literally, would be satisfied by producing a long list of truths and falsehoods. What is philosophically wanted is not a list, but a characterization of the kind of thing that can be spoken of as true or false, the sort of thing that is subject to being true or being false. Still, that is not good enough as a guide to what we are philosophically after. For, as in the parenthetical remark above, “Irishman” and “lover” qualify as kinds of thing that are true or false. And yet it is not those kinds of thing, and other similar ones, which are relevant to the philosophical problem at hand.2 The cases of truth-bearing about which philosophical troubles arise are not those of, e.g. Irishmen or lovers, but those which start from someone's having said something, for example “He has no sense of humor”, to which a second person responds “That's true” or “That's not true” or “That's false”or employs any of the many idiomatic variants of those expressions.3

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Such situations constitute the paradigm cases of truth talk, the basic phenomenon for an inquiry into what sort of thing truth-bearers are. Because such cases are the home ground for our talk of truth and falsity, we can say that what is displayed there is the primary use of the predicates “is true” and “is false”.4 To remind ourselves that the central occurrence of truth talk is in response to a claim that this is how things are, consider the alternatives. Philosophers often write as if the form “p is true/false” is the fundamental truth locution. Although that idea is an important source of redundancy theories of truth–if anyone actually were to say “Cows give milk is true”, that strange way of talking could only be understood to mean “Cows give milk”-that form of words probably never occurs outside of philosophical writing. Its occurrence there is most likely an unfortunate conflation of the conversational situation in which someone says something and a respondent comments on whether what was said is true or not: i.e. she says “Cows give milk”, someone says of that (of what she said) “That’s true”. Conflating the two remarks produces the misshapen “Cows give milk is true”. Just because “That” refers to what she said, namely “Cows give milk”, does not entitle one to conflate the words appropriate to two quite different acts, that of saying something and that of commenting on what was said.5 Of course “is true” is a predicate and perfectly appropriate in some linguistic contexts: “That’s true” is one such case, the widely recognized case of “Everything he said is true’” is yet another. But in (say) “Cows give milk is true” the “is true” is neither redundant nor eliminable: it simply has no place there, just as the square root sign does not. (I shall later reject on other grounds the disquotational variant “’p’ is true” where the “p” is to represent a sentence rather than what someone says.) It should also be noted that “true” can, with some nouns, occur attributively: “true belief” seems the most common case. To say “He has a true belief that p” is both to mention some belief of his and to offer the equivalent of a “That’s true” comment on it. The attributive form thus is a variant of what is paradigmatic. Philosophers often talk as if the basic occurrence of “is true” is in “It is true that…”. Although, unlike the “p is true” model, “It is true that” does make sense. However, it is not the paradigmatic occurrence of the predicate. If anyone gazing at the sky on a lovely day were to remark, not “The sky is so blue today”, but “It is true that the sky is so blue today”, the audience would be rightfully puzzled: not because there are unneeded (redundant) words there, but because the prefaced “It is true that” is an operator to be used only in a special context. It is, normally at least, followed by a “but”– “It is true that they will get married, but they won’t be happy”. The primary

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use of “It is true that…” is to make an admission or concession and so is not the paradigmatic manner of declaring that something has the truth-value true.6 Quite some years ago now, J.L. Austin famously said “In vino possibly veritas but in a sober symposium verum”.7 It does not follow, however, that veritas, truth, should have no place in philosophical inquiries such as this. The noun form “The truth is that…” is related to the paradigm “That’s true” (“He’s a fool, that’s the truth”) but typically has reference to a more remote conversational situation and often seems to offer at least a partial corrective to something previously said or implied (possibly even said or implied by the speaker): “The truth is that he ran a poor campaign”. (An important use of the noun occurs in “Tell me the truth about her income”–talking of the truth about something, specifically the future, will become relevant in the final chapter.) Lastly, there is the adjective “truly” as in “He spoke truly when he said...”. Though an adverb, it does not modify the verb (as does the adverb in “He spoke slowly”) but rather is a comment on what was said. None of the above remarks would be adequate if the aim were a thorough mapping of truth language. But the point here is simply to offer a reminder that the varieties of truth language are secondary phenomena, the central form of words being “That is true”. It should be noted here that I (perhaps misguidedly) will not be discussing falsehood in what follows. There are quite a few asymmetries between talking of falsehood and truth: for instance the negatives: “It is not true that” and “It is false that” seem to be more closely related to the paradigmatic “That’s false” than the concessive “It is true that” is to “That’s true”; and “The truth is that…” is intelligible while “The falsehood is that p” and “The falsity is that p” are outright odd. But I won’t be pursuing those issues here. It is now possible to state the fundamental form of the philosophical problem about truth-bearers accurately: what kind of thing are we referring to in such paradigmatic situations by the word “That” when we say “That's true” or “That's not true, that's false”? The problem of what sort of thing can have a truth-value concerns what sort of thing is the referent of the demonstrative “That” when it is said “That's true”, etc. It is obligatory to respond to that question by noting first that there are a large number of characterizations of the referent of “That” that make perfectly good sense in connection with the adjectives “true” and “false”. For example, beliefs, claims, judgments, etc. etc., sometimes even words, can all sensibly be praised or dammed as true or false. Philosophers are usually not pleased with that variety and tend to go on to ask “But what is

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the most basic of these various possibilities?” And it is equally obligatory to point out that the answers to that have also been quite various. However, within the class of historically prominent answers to the question about what, at bottom, it is that has truth-value, there is a major division. On the one hand, there is the answer (or set of answers) that claim that it is words or sentences that are truth-bearers. That view is to be contrasted with all the other suggested referents of “That is true/false”, items such as judgments, thoughts, propositions, statements, beliefs. The distinction between the two basic types of answer is typically conceived of as the difference between a linguistic referent and a non-linguistic one. Drawing the distinction in those terms is useful for a while and so I shall adopt it. In the long run, however, attempting to mark the line between the two types of answer in that terminology causes misunderstanding, so ultimately clarification will be required. A potential answer on the linguistic side, one that emphasizes that we can say such things as “Truer words were never spoken”, is that words are what are true or false. That candidate is quickly excluded from serious consideration on the grounds that such an expression is a mere idiom, since no word by itself, or phrase for that matter, e.g. “which” or “dark” or “a man” or “from the cave” etc., can sensibly be taken to be true or false. That piece of elimination leaves only sentences as the serious representative of the class of linguistic subjects for the predicates “is true”, “is false”. On the other hand, it is clear that propositions, judgments, etc. do not belong to some language or the other. Hence answers which characterize the bearer of truth-values in those terms can be thought of as specifying a nonlinguistic referent. There is a long enough history of philosophical dispute about whether the linguistic or one or the other of the non-linguistic solutions to the problem is correct. Each has had its day although at any given time there are others defending a minority position. My sense is that presently the dominant view is that it is sentences that are the truth-bearers, although, once again, there are significant defenses of a non-linguistic solution, chiefly holding propositions to be the truth-bearers. My aims and the organization of this work can now be made out in terms of that distinction. I shall engage in an extended argument against the linguistic thesis, against the idea that it is sentences that are (characterized as) “true” or “false”. That negative thesis shall occupy the first four chapters of the book. In the remaining chapters, the discussion shall focus on, and respond to, various significant troubles that seem to afflict the non-linguistic answers, both individually and jointly. The first task, in particular, shall take us through many topics. Given that what I have to say about sentences and

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given the well-entrenched position of the notion of a sentence in so much contemporary philosophical theorizing, there will be a good number of important conflicts generated. For my argument to succeed, to be persuasive, those conflicts will have to be addressed, often at some length. The aim of the book, then, is to show that the referents of expressions of the form “That's true” and “That's false” are not sentences but rather some other sort of thing, something so far characterized only as non-linguistic. But satisfaction of that aim is some way off and it would be convenient to have available, from the start, a more precise specification of what that “something else, something non-linguistic” will turn out to be. Sadly, convenience cannot always be easily served. So to satisfy the quite reasonable desire that I fill in a few blanks early on, I will have recourse to a more complex strategy. For purposes of the working out of the negative thesis that it is not sentences that are true or false, I shall treat what is said as their nonlinguistic rival. As I work through the arguments it is not vital that “what is said” is used: what so-and-so wrote, what is asserted or claimed, what she told me, what is implied, etc. are variants that I shall employ. In the end, however, I shall argue that the “what is said” formulation is basic. My choice of what is said to be the contrast with sentences in this early going is not arbitrary. There are three considerations behind it. The first is that what is said is the best initial answer to the question about what kind of thing has a truth-value. For as I have already noted, the basic occurrences of “is true” and “is false” are in the remarks “That's true” and “That's false”, said in comment on and with reference to what someone has said (or written, signed, alleged, noted, etc.). The second reason for sending out what is said as the representative of the non-linguistic camp is simply that, for most philosophers, it carries less philosophical baggage than do its fellows. Talk of propositions, especially, but also of beliefs, statements, and so on sets off too many alarm bells and is more likely to raise issues before their time. The prima facie best candidate for bearing truth-value, namely what is said, also has the virtue of having been less employed in that role in previous philosophical discussions of the topic and so may succeed in starting fewer hares before they must be.8 In the latter part of this essay, having disposed of the attempt to treat sentences as truth-bearers, I turn to the question of what kind of thing we should philosophically take to be the referent of “That's true/false” where the remaining candidates will all be of the non-linguistic variety. Now it might turn out, following reflection, that we need to modify what was initially the best answer in favor of one of the other non-linguistic answers such as propositions, judgments, etc. (or even come to the conclusion that it

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is pointless to seize upon one kind of item as favored). So as not to be disingenuous, I must note that the third reason for my starting with the notion of what someone says as the bearer of truth-value is precisely that, by the end of the book, I shall be arguing that what is said remains, given suitable understandings, best suited for the post of truth-value bearer in philosophical thought. But that should not influence what I have to say in the more negative enterprise to be undertaken first. While I claim the above advantages for using the notion of what is said as the contrast with sentences in the next chapters, the choice has a disadvantage too. A certain awkwardness of expression will often be discerned in the following chapters: “what is said” is not nearly as flexible a noun (phrase) as, for instance, “statement” or “claim”. To break the stylistic tension, I shall frequently enough have recourse to those more relaxed noun forms. Neither sentences nor what is said can, without qualification, be held to be truth-bearers. No philosopher thinks that all sentences can perform the function. Those who say that sentences have a truth-value mean that it is, roughly, declarative sentences that are true or false. Even that limitation is not enough. For it is possible to make a truth claim in words that qualify as an interrogative sentence: “He's a failure, isn't he?” Moreover, not even every declarative sentence is assessed in terms of truth-value: e.g. “I promise to be there tonight” is declarative but is not truth-bearing and neither is Chomsky's nonsense sentence about colorless green ideas. On the other hand, what is said is also not universally a candidate for being either true or false. We may ask what someone said and be told “He said ‘Shut the door!’” and we do not thereby think that what he said, namely “Shut the door!'” is either true or false. Thus, both sentences and what is said require some smoothing around the edges to satisfy our theoretical concern for a perfect candidate for truthbearing. But I do not propose to try to repair their corresponding afflictions here and now. No part of the confrontation to follow between sentences and what is said will engage those kinds of shortcomings. Only clear cases of potential truth-bearing will be considered: for example, is it the sentence “The cat is on the mat” or is it what someone says when they say “The cat is on the mat” that is the bearer of truth-value? It is possible to think that the enterprise of answering that question is doomed from the start, since it presupposes what some philosophers have denied, namely that there is a difference between a sentence and what is said. Philosophers as different as Ryle and Quine agree that there is no such distinction to work with: "Sentences are things that we say", “Statements are sentences.”9 Others, Dummett for example,10 do not provide an explicit

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identification but simply slide from “sentence” to “statement” and back, showing that they accept some form of such identification. Given those moves to identify sentences and what is said, we need to be assured that there is a difference here to work with before getting on with the attempt to answer the question “Which, a sentence or what is said, is the bearer of truth?” It should first be noted that there are no arguments for identifying what is said with a sentence. There is, however, a motive. Those who allege that what is said is nothing other than a sentence are likely to be those who think that sentences cannot be truth-bearers and so cleave to some non-linguistic solution. But that immediately puts them at risk of being called Platonizers, of producing a solution that requires transcendent entities. To escape that charge, they proceed to identify what is said with a sentence, with an actually uttered or written sentence to be sure.11 However, that there is a distinction between a sentence and what is said has been clearly established in the philosophical literature. Among the conceptual differences between them, three are most useful in showing that such attempts to identify them won't do. Let me begin with a too bald version of one major difference between sentences and what is said. On the one hand, every sentence belongs to some language or the other: the sentences I write here are English sentences, not Urdu or Latin. On the other hand, while what is said must be said in some language, it does not belong to that or to any other language: my assertions here are made in English but are not English assertions, nor do they belong to Latin or any other language. That claim about sentences being part of a language needs toning down. Not every sentence we can construct does belong to one particular language. For example, my attempts to speak French sometimes result in a sentence that is a mixture of French and English, both in its vocabulary and even, too frequently, in aspects of its grammatical structure (e.g. location of adjectives). Although such amalgamations must be recognized, they do not count against the conceptual point made above. For in cases such as my hybrid French-English creations, although neither language would claim those sentences, their status as a mixture of two particular languages can be sensibly investigated and their different features parceled out to one or another of the two languages. In short, while hybrid sentences do not, contrary to the original argument, belong to one particular language, it is not as though they do not belong to any language at all. They are not nonlinguistic entities. In this respect, they differ from what is said, for that cannot be allocated to one or to more than one language.

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Other cases of peculiar sentences, sentences that cannot, without discomfort, be said to belong to some particular language, are also subject to explanation in terms of particular languages. Lewis Carroll's “Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe”, for example, must be understood as a sentence constructed in light of the English language and not in connection with, say, Urdu or French. Here we have a sentence which is not a hybrid of two languages, but one which has the grammatical form and some of the vocabulary of one language with a significant number of nonsense words, i.e. words not belonging to English or to any other language, mixed in. It is important to Carroll's aim that even the nonsense words he creates are conceivably English (unlike “zbreq”) though they in fact are not English. Once again, there is nothing here that we can regard as non-linguistic in the way in which what is said is non-linguistic. While “brillig'” et al cannot be allocated to any particular language, they are only in fact not constituents of the English language. Or, if you wish, it is false that “brillig” is an English word. By contrast, what is said, for example what I say (or try to say) in producing my franglais sentence (perhaps in telling the concierge that I have locked my key in my room), does not fail in fact to be a constituent of the French language or of English or any other. All predicates and their denials which specify particular languages, e.g. “is French”, “is not French”, “is not English”, “is Urdu”, are not sensibly applicable to, and not merely false of, what someone says. There is a second, though connected, conceptual difference between a sentence and what is said which can be cited to show that those who attempt to identify them are mistaken. One and the same thing can be said in different languages or in different words and constructions within a single language. That is, the identity of what is said does not entail the identity of the words and sentences in which it is said. Conversely, that it is the same sentence that occurs more than once (different places, times or speakers) does not establish the sameness of what is said (does not even establish that anything is said). In short, we count what is said and sentences differently. Consequently, what is thereby counted, namely things said and sentences, must be different. There is a third major conceptual difference between sentences and what is said, perhaps less explicitly remarked in the literature. Consider the definite descriptions “the sentence...” and “the assertion...” We saw above that it makes sense to insert into the one but not the other description an adjective specifying a language: we can speak of, for example, “the English sentence” but not “the English assertion”. It is also important conceptually to realize how differently those definite descriptions can be continued by

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way of identifying which sentence or assertion is being referred to. We say “The sentence ‘She is home’...” where conventional devices, here quotation marks, are used to exhibit which sentence is being referred to. But we cannot identify the sentence intended by using a “that” clause. “The sentence that she is home...” is impossible. “That p” is not part of the logical space of the concept of a sentence. It is, rather, an element in a wholly different way of talking. What does make sense are such expressions as “What he said was that p”, “The assertion that p” or “He said that p”. There is a sharp conceptual boundary between sentences and what is said in connection with the matter of “that” clauses. All three of those lines of argument are ways of unpacking the original recognition that the difference between a sentence and what is said is the difference between something linguistic and something non-linguistic. Attempts by (at least some of) those who maintain that what people say is the bearer of truth to avoid a charge of Platonizing through the tactic of alleging that what is said is (really) nothing but a sentence is a desperation move which involves conflating two realms of being, things of different categories, thereby committing a category mistake. Avoidance of Platonism, a desirable end, must be accomplished by some means other than identifying sentences with what is said. Realizing that there is a distinction between sentences and what is said, recognizing that they are not identical, is one thing: it is not yet, however, to have achieved clarity about the nature of their relationship. Over and over again throughout this book, it will be necessary to return to the issue of understanding how a sentence is related to what is said.

2. The Initial Position and Its Consequence Having put down those foundations, what next? It should be first noticed that there is a rather immediate consequence of the manner in which what is said was introduced as the prima facie best representative of the nonlinguistic camp in disputes about what sort of thing has truth-value. Given that the paradigmatic situation in which truth talk occurs is a situation in which someone remarks “That's true” or “That's false” in comment on, and thus in reference to, what someone has said, it follows that the paradigmatic bearer of truth-value is what someone says. The basic occurrence of the predicates “is true” and “is false” is in reference to what is said and, since what is said cannot be identified with a sentence, it follows that sentences are not the fundamental and paradigmatic bearers of truth. Consequently (or so it seems), the philosophical issue of whether truth-bearers are linguistic, i.e. sentences, or whether they are non-linguistic, i.e. what is said, is easily

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resolved. Crudely put, sentences are a non-starter, the mother of battles will not take place. Before casting a modestly critical eye upon that consequence, let me observe that I am not the first to have noticed it. Among those who have realized that, in the paradigm situation, talk of truth or falsity occurs with reference to what someone has said, Richard Cartwright has seen the same consequence. It is instructive to consider what he does. Early on in his paper Cartwright says: "To what, then did [someone, say B, who said 'That's true'] refer? In a way the question presents no difficulty. To answer it, it is sufficient to identify that to which B referred; and this is easily enough done. We may say that B referred to what A said (asserted, stated)...." At the end of the paper he comes back to the same point: "And with this we may return, finally, to the question which generated these technicalities-the question 'What was that to which B referred and of which he predicated truth?' The answer is surely obvious: the subject of B's predication of truth was...the statement that A made. This, indeed, was evident enough at the outset; and nothing subsequently said should be taken as an effort to prove it.”12 That is, when one starts an inquiry into truth-bearing with an eye to the paradigmatic situation in which truth-predicates occur, the conclusion that what bears truth is what is said is obvious and need not be further argued for. What, then, did Cartwright find to do between the start and the finish of his paper? What was it that he "subsequently said"? He said: "But the matter cannot very well be left here. For, although we all know well enough how to identify what B referred to, we nevertheless find it easy to mistake other things for it.... In order to guard against these mistakes, it will be helpful to draw a number of distinctions." Again, at the end, after drawing the distinctions: "The advantage gained, so far as that question is concerned, is simply the protection we now have against confusing [what is said with any of the other items distinguished above].”13 Is it proper, however, to conclude at this point that the inquiry is almost over, that, apart from a few further distinctions, it has already been established that it is what is said, and not sentences, which are true or false? Perhaps we have here one of those situations Sellars was alluding to when he said "The crux of a philosophical argument often appears to be a Dedekind cut between a series of 'as I will show's and a series of 'as I have shown's’. In a sense the preliminaries are the argument, and there is no crux apart from their perspicuous deployment. A few more introductory remarks, therefore, and my job will be done.”14 I do not want to slight the importance of what Cartwright (and others) have accomplished: they (more or less) forcefully attempt to make philosophers

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attend to the fact that there is no equality of opportunity in the contest for being truth-bearers; that the obvious answer is that it is what someone has said and not a sentence which has truth or falsity predicated of it; that if anyone wants to hold the other view, the burden of proof falls upon them. But quite independently of all that, it would not be prudent to conclude that the jig is already up. No matter how things stood when Cartwright wrote, and no matter how I might be inclined to allocate the obligations of taking the next step in any further disagreement about truth-bearing, today one could expect a vigorous attack upon drawing that conclusion with nothing more said. When Cartwright wrote, a descriptive view of philosophy was in the saddle.15 He could describe how things are, namely that paradigmatically truth or falsity is ascribed to what is said, add a few distinctions, and then draw the inquiry to a close. In the intervening years, the pendulum of philosophical perspectives has swung strongly to the revisionist side. The rise to orthodoxy of the idea that sentences are the bearers of truth-value has been part of that revisionist surge. It would not be intellectually safe today, when discussing this issue, to conduct and conclude the investigation as swiftly as Cartwright did fifty some years ago.16 Under contemporary conditions, the most that a descriptivist, as I am, is entitled to conclude at this point in the discussion is that I attach a great deal more weight than does the dominant revisionist view to the fact that in our practice we refer to what people say, and not to sentences, as true or false. There is a second, and deeper problem, in Cartwright's procedure. One might thereby settle, at least for the descriptivist, the issue of what has truthvalue, but the manner in which he goes about the affair is of no help in understanding the historical dispute between the linguistic and the nonlinguistic solutions. Cartwright's technique provides, even from the descriptivist perspective, no assistance in grasping why it has been strongly held that sentences are the bearers of truth-value. Cartwright implies that it has only been a bit of misunderstanding caused by failing to notice a few distinctions that has generated the dispute. Surely, given the persistence of the disagreement, there must be more to it than failure to observe some distinctions. If so, unless the sources of the inclination to accept sentences as bearers of truth-value are understood, it will be impossible to make a genuinely satisfactory response to the manner of thinking there involved. More must then be done-the inquiry is not on the verge of completion. There are two ways one might here proceed. One would be to imagine how critics might respond to the claim that the language of truth is paradigmatically tied to references to what someone has said. I say "try to imagine how they might respond" since I do not know whether they have

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made any response to Cartwright (or others) about this. To pursue that route would take us into a huge set of contentious issues about the nature of philosophy and how it is to be practiced. While I have nothing against such topics, discussing them now would not directly assist examination of the question of what has truth-value. That is sufficient reason for not adopting that mode of procedure here. At the very end of the book, however, it will be useful to take up, even if incidentally, some of those broad issues about philosophy. Instead of that route, I propose the following tactic. Let me set aside for now, though without in the least disowning, the recognition that “That's true/false” paradigmatically refers to what was there said. Let us suppose instead that there is a level playing field for the two contestants and then try to discover, as the first phase in a much longer investigation, whether there is any other argument that should initially incline us to one side rather than the other. In so proceeding, the hope is that a much more extensive assortment of those issues which are involved in the dispute can be developed and examined.

3. Reviving the Argument from Indexicals (I) Despite the fact that a mere description of the problem clearly determines that it is was is said and not sentences which are, in human practice, called true or false, it is philosophically wise, everything taken into account, to search for a more traditionally argumentative manner of deciding between the candidates. That does not mean looking for an argument that is knockdown drag-out, for there is no such beast in these parts. Rather what is wanted is a line of thought which can establish a decently strong presumption in favor of one view but which will also lead into a discussion of the various difficult issues that divide the two parties. Consider the following argument against the possibility of sentences having truth-value. “Suppose that it is said at time T1 (or at place P1 or by person H1) ‘My arm hurts’ and it does. If it is sentences that are true or false, the sentence ‘My arm hurts’ would be true. Suppose, however, that it is said at time T2 (or at place P2 or by person H2) ‘My arm hurts’ and there is no pain. The sentence would then be false. Since one and only one sentence is in question, that sentence would be both true and false. But that is impossible. Therefore, sentences cannot be what have truth-value.” I shall call that the argument from indexicals. It should be noticed that it is a more robust form of what the current literature calls the argument from indexicals. That shall be explained later.

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Variations of it (the robust form) were widely accepted in mid-20th century analytic philosophy.17 Even those who did not accept it worried about it: Davidson, seeking to defend the view that sentences are truthbearers, found the argument set out above to be “[a] very large fly in the ointment” of accomplishing that aim.18 More recently, though, the argument has seemed to suffer from two major difficulties and, as presented above, is not advanced today. My aim in the remainder of this chapter is to resuscitate the argument in its original form by showing that the standard criticisms of it fail. That argument's first phase goes: “Suppose it is said at T1 (etc.) ‘My arm hurts’ and it does. The sentence ‘My arm hurts’ would be true. Suppose, however, that it is said at time T2 (etc.) ‘My arm hurts’ and there is no pain. The sentence would then be false. Since one and only one sentence is in question, it would be both true and false. But that is impossible....” How would a contemporary critic respond to that? By saying something like “Look, ‘My arm hurts’ when said (uttered or inscribed) at T1 (or at P1 or by H1) is a different sentence-token from ‘My arm hurts’ said at T2 (or P2 or by H2). Consequently, while there is only one sentence-type involved, there are two distinct sentence-tokens. There is no incompatibility derivable from holding that one of those tokens is true, the other false. Hence there is no logical difficulty, as the argument alleges, in holding sentences to be the bearers of truth-value, as long as it is understood that it is sentence-tokens and not sentence-types that are meant.”19 It is obvious what differentiates the original argument and the criticism of it: the employment of the type-token terminology. The supporter of the argument thinks that it demolishes the possibility of sentences having a truth-value. The response, however, by invoking the type-token distinction, makes it look as if the argument, though partially successful in that it does show that sentence-types could not have a truth-value, fails to touch the other candidate, sentence-tokens. So, the criticism goes, the argument fails to establish its conclusion, that sentences could not be bearers of truth-value. The history of that extended episode of development and criticism has been lost from view. What remains, and is today called the argument from indexicals, is a reduced version of the original, a version that is used to show that sentence-types cannot be what has a truth-value. That it was originally aimed at sentences generally is forgotten. I shall here revive and defend the older robust form. To support the original argument in this day and age will then mean attacking, in some fashion or the other, the type-token distinction. Threatening such an attack must appear quite quixotic given the deeply entrenched position of that terminology in today's philosophical world.

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Nonetheless, I shall argue that the distinction, in its employment in criticism of the argument in question, irredeemably fails. Whether the inadequacies of the type-token distinction in this context have any bearing upon its value when employed in other philosophical contexts is not an issue that I have any interest in pursuing here. The core of the argument can be briefly represented as “In the relevant stories or examples it is seen that a given sentence would be true here and false there, so it would be both true and false.” Opponents treat what is taken for granted there, namely that there is one and only one sentence involved in each of those stories, as plainly mistaken, as exhibiting a simple failure to notice the relevance and consequences of the distinction between sentence-types and sentence-tokens. But to see the argument through the lens of the type-token distinction is to be unable to notice that there is something that does justify talking about a single sentence being involved in the stories relied upon by the argument. What lies behind, and justifies, the idea that there is but a single sentence involved in the relevant cases is the language of occurring. In that language, that terminology, a single sentence, such as “My arm hurts”-and there is only one English sentence “My arm hurts”-may well occur at different times, places or in different people's mouths. There is nothing in the slightest extraordinary (or technical) about talking and thinking of words and sentences as occurring or as not occurring. We do it all the time in the relevant contexts. The same sentence or word may occur not at all or once or many times and in many places. Some words occur frequently in, say, a given author's work while others occur there only rarely. For instance, Martha Nussbaum discussing her claim that Antigone is a play about practical reason: "Eleven words connected with practical deliberation, occurring a total of 180 times in the seven plays of Sophocles, occur a total of 50 times in the Antigone.... The word phronema occurs six times in the Antigone and in no other play; dusboulia and euboulia occur twice each in the Antigone and nowhere else; phren has 17 of its 58 occurrences in the Antigone.”20 The recurrence of sentences is much more infrequent than that of words: Chomsky has observed that most sentences that occur in works held by the Bodleian will occur in all its books only once.21 The language of occurring includes a noun form as well: we can talk not only of a given word or sentence occurring, but can also derivatively speak of its occurrences (see the quote from Nussbaum above). For example, from a column about new English words: "A study of news stories in major papers going back ten years reveals numerous occurrences of the phrase crash and burn referring specifically to air and auto accidents.”22

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Occurrence language is not the only one ordinarily available, though it is perhaps the most common (i.e. it is what most commonly occurs). One can also speak of sentences (and words) appearing. From a book on the Hebrew of the Biblical period: "Outside of the Old Testament itself, little survives of the Hebrew of the Biblical period. About 1,000 words appear in the Bible just once and cannot be checked in any other biblical passage.”23 Or one can speak of a single word or sentence being repeated or met with, found, encountered, etc., more than once, occasionally, repeatedly, rarely, etc. It is also possible to speak of using a word or even a sentence and thus of its, that particular word or sentence, being used here, there and everywhere. In short, everyday practice has a rich vocabulary for discussing the fact that a single word or sentence may turn up more than once. The argument from indexicals in its strong form presupposes the possibility of using that vocabulary. It reaches its conclusion by trading on the idea that a given sentence can occur at two times, at two places, in the mouths of two speakers. By reminding us of the possibility of the same sentence occurring more than once, the argument invites us to see the consequences of then thinking that truth and falsity apply to the sentence itself. There are not, in the vocabulary presumed by proponents of the argument, two things, a sentence and its occurrences - there is but one thing, a sentence which occurs now or here or uttered by H and which may well occur once again then or there or uttered by someone else. When it, the specimen sentence, occurs here, it would be true; when it occurs there, it would be false; it cannot, however, be both; hence it, the sentence, is neither. There is thus no illegitimate move in the argument that can be exposed by invocation of the type-token terminology. Instead there is on the part of critics of that argument a failure to see how it is constructed at the crucial point, to see what notions the argument does draw upon, and in consequence a too hasty resort to the ever handy type-token distinction. The argument, at least up through the step that is standardly criticized, is valid, even sound. Critics of the argument have simply assumed that there are no descriptive resources, other than the Peircean, i.e. type-token, terminology with which to understand the relation between the sentence “My arm hurts” (etc.) as uttered by Sue and as uttered by Joe. What I have done is to point out that there is available a quite extensive range of terminology within which that relation is ordinarily expressed and understood and that it is precisely that language which is relied upon by proponents of the argument from indexicals. Thus, there is no descriptive gap that must be filled by talking of sentence-types and sentence-tokens.

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Finding the logical space occupied by a native population, it still might be held that civilized thought would be better off if the native occupants were displaced. That is, it might be recommended that talk and thought of sentences occurring and recurring and the variants thereon be replaced by talk of sentence-types and sentence-tokens. That terminology would then be treated, not as closing a hole in our vocabulary, but rather as an alternative mode of conceiving the relation between, e.g., Sue's “My arm hurts” and Joe's “My arm hurts”. More precisely, the suggestion would be that talking of types and tokens is the superior alternative, preferable to the languages of occurring, appearing and all such. Of course, since those who might make that suggestion have not been aware that their preferred manner of conceptualizing the matter is at best an alternative to existing arrangements, they have not been in a position to offer any reasons in support of a proposal to substitute Peirce's technical terms for talk of a sentence occurring, etc. And it is not clear just what specific reasons might be advanced. The only reason that suggests itself is that by coming to talk in the Peircean way, instead of as we do, it would be possible to render a certain valid argument invalid. That style of justification, however, is intellectually disreputable and so unavailable. But failure to discern possible reasons in favor of the move is not the only flaw in any attempt to replace talk of sentences occurring with talk of types and tokens. If one consults works that attempt to explain the typetoken terminology, it turns out that the meaning of those technical terms has typically (though not universally) been explained by the more primitive, and supposedly inadequate, language of occurring. Simon Blackburn, for instance, in The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, sets up the introduction of the type-token terminology by asking “How many words occur in the works of Shakespeare?”24 Again, consider the following sample of such explanations, found in a variety of standard reference works, and note how the explanations resort to the notion of occurring. "A token-sentence is ... a particular set of sounds or marks occurring at a definite time or existing for a definite period. A type-sentence is a sentence in that sense in which the same sentence may be said to occur many times....”25 "Token. A specific utterance of a given linguistic expression or a written occurrence of it. An expression type, on the other hand, is an entity abstracted from all actual and potential occurrences of a linguistic expression.”26 "...let us pause to recognize an ambiguity in the very term 'sentence'. The ambiguity can be brought to light by asking how many sentences occur in the box below.”27 Quine, in Quiddities (his philosophical dictionary), not only explains types and tokens in occurrence language, but also uses two of the variants

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on that, mentioning that a single word may “turn up” or “be inscribed” more than once: "In this second sense of the word word it is not two words der that turn up in the inscription, but one word der that gets inscribed twice. Words in the first sense have come to be called tokens: words in the second sense are called types.... The word der figures as an article in its first occurrence and as a relative pronoun in its second.”28 It is so natural to speak of words and sentences occurring that those writers are not conscious that they resort to that language in explaining the invented terms. Quine seems to have been the first to have realized that the possibility of words and sentences occurring needs accounting for. Having completed his above account of types and tokens, he says "It is seldom appreciated that occurrence is a third thing.”29 However, even upon noticing that some discussion is owed here about what occurrences might be, he asks "Just what sort of thing, then, is an occurrence?”30 Since he has already committed himself to the type-token terminology, he can only conclude that an occurrence (of a word or a sentence) really is some "third thing", something over and above types and tokens. Had Quine clearly realized that just previously he had used “occurrence” (and its variants) in explaining what a type and its tokens are, he might have been led to a quite different, and more accurate, account of how the two systems of talk are related. Recently, there has arisen an objection to that practice of introducing the distinction by talking of sentences/words occurring.31 Linda Wetzel has noticed what I pointed out above, namely that occurrence language is the standard terminology in which the distinction is drawn. However, she disapproves of it. “Unfortunately, tokens are often explained as the ‘occurrences’ of a type….”32 What does she find “unfortunate” about such explanations? “…not all occurrences of types are tokens.” What she has realized is that a word occurring in a sentence-type cannot be a spatial-temporal object since types are not spatial-temporal things. Then, she defines tokens as spatial-temporal things: “Tokens are concrete particulars…they have a unique spatiotemporal location.” It follows from that realization and that definition that a word that occurs in a type-sentence cannot be a token. It is true that in the standard explanations (see explanations above) of Peirce’s distinction it is typically asserted (and never denied) that a token is in space and time and so has other spatial-temporal characteristics. There is, however, no implication in those accounts that “tokens” are being defined as spatial-temporal things. Rather, given a failure to notice the case that Wetzel has spotted, the authors of those explanations fail to see that they cannot correctly claim that tokens are universally spatial-temporal beings.

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Those who have explained tokens in the standard manner, as occurrences of types, can say in reply to Wetzel that “We do not define ‘token’ as a spatial-temporal being. What you have made us realize is that in calling tokens spatio-temporal things we have not been taking into account the words of which a type sentence is constructed. We now see that there are tokens that are not spatial-temporal. Thanks for the correction.” Notice that none of her discussion explains or justifies her disapproval of using occurrence language in the explanation of the distinction. For whatever reason she simply does not want to employ the notion of occurring in explaining what a token is. She could rightly say that what she has discovered is that not all occurrences of words are spatio-temporal things. In short, her rejection of the standard and natural practice of saying that tokens are occurrences of types is based not on an argument but is done for no discernible reason. Given, then, that the usual way of introducing the type-token terminology is not in question, there is a significant consequence. That way of explaining the distinction makes the language of occurring primitive, more fundamental, than that of types and tokens. Consequently, the project of replacing talk of occurring with talk of types and tokens and making philosophical progress thereby must be abandoned. Our understanding of the replacement language is standardly created by the other terminology. The ladder cannot be thrown away. It might be objected here that the type-token terminology must be something more than a mere verbal variant on talk of occurring. If it meant precisely the same, its use would not render the indexical argument invalid. That objection must be partially conceded: “sentence-type” and “sentencetoken” are only partial replacements for talk of sentences occurring. They, being substantives, replace the noun form “occurrence” only-the new terminology has not been extended to replace the verb “to occur” in which one can speak of a sentence occurring. If one could say of sentences-types “it tokens”, the two languages would be nothing more than verbal variants and then the argument would remain valid. While the verb “to token” has been created, it is used not so that a sentence tokens, but as something a person does-“She tokens” is a new barbarism for “She says”. So, the Peircean terminology is not something more than that of the existing terminology of occurring-it is rather something less. That talk of sentence (or word) types and tokens does not cover precisely the same range as talk of occurring and occurrences does nothing toward making it a superior alternative to the going way of understanding the relation between the sentence “My arm hurts” occurring on Joe’s lips and on Sue's. Once again, the only obvious reason why one might think it a

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preferable way of talking and thinking is that it renders what is, from one point of view, an undesirably valid argument invalid. That, however, is no better reason at this phase of the argument than it was previously. Henceforth I shall not speak of sentence-types and sentence-tokens, except perhaps as a parenthetical reminder of how we should not be talking. The appropriate terminology for the problem at hand is that of sentences and of sentences occurring (appearing, etc.). One must exercise care at this point however. With our predilection for substantives we philosophers are apt to treat the noun “occurrences” as the preferred expression. And then, with the history of type and token talk embedded in our practice, we can continue on as if “occurrence’” were nothing but a newfangled way of talking of tokens. But that is a mistaken. Tokens are treated as entities separate from types – that is why the truth-value of a token cannot be predicated of the type. There are not, however, two things, a sentence and its occurrences: rather the sentence occurs at times and places. We can, of course, talk of an occurrence of S. That, however, is a nominalization of “the sentence S occurred” and not an ontologically superior manner of speaking–and it is the occurrence of the sentence after all. This investigation was undertaken because it has been thought that the type-token terminology renders invalid the robust form of the argument from indexicals which concludes that sentences cannot be truth-bearers because they would then be both true and false. I have argued that the philosophically invented type-token distinction is employed there in place of the natural talk of sentences occurring–and is in fact normally explained by the original, ordinary, terminology that the full argument rests upon. Since the only point to the continued use of the Peircean terminology would be to make the argument invalid, we must abandon it and the objection built upon it.

4. Reviving the Argument from Indexicals (II) It is too soon, however, to claim that the argument from indexicals does work for there are two more objections to consider. Let me start with a perplexity. The argument contends that if a sentence occurring at some place or time were to be true or false, then truth or falsity would be an ineradicable property of the sentence, so that if it had the opposite truth-value in another occurrence it would be both true and false. However, there are some things that are true of a sentence in a certain occurrence that we do not hold to become ineradicable features of the sentence: e.g. the sentence “She had pickles for lunch today” might be

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written in green ink somewhere but we do not think that therefore it becomes a permanent property of the sentence “She had pickles for lunch today” that it is written in green ink. Why does the indexical argument treat “is true/false” differently from “is written in green ink”? A critic might now go on to say that there is no good reason to treat them differently, that the model is “is written in green ink”, that “is true” does not thereby become a permanent property of the sentence, and so the argument from indexicals fails at this point even if not earlier.33 Now it is true that some predicates are applicable to sentences only as found in a particular environment – “is written in green ink”, “was spoken so softly”, “had a lengthy pause between the fourth and fifth words”. Other predicates, however, are true of a given sentence in any occurrence or even as considered without reference to local circumstances: “is composed of five words”, “is English”, “has two adjectives”. The indexical argument sorts “is true” and “is false” with “is composed of five words” and not with “is written in green ink”. What justifies that allocation? The truth predicates are not entirely like the ones applicable to a sentence no matter when and where occurring, e.g. “is English”. For “is true” would not serve to mark out the identity of a given sentence as does “is composed of five words”. On the other hand, truth predicates do not sort at all with “is written in green ink”, etc. For it is possible, makes sense, to say “the sentence was written in green ink”, “It will be written in green ink” as well as “is written in green ink”. That is, the predicates that are only variably true of a given sentence admit of past, future and present tenses. However, the “is” of “is true/false” is tenseless. The “is” in “is true/false” has no contrasting “was false” or “will be true” and hence is not in the present tense. Suppose that a sea battle will occur tomorrow–someone might concede that by saying “It is true that a sea battle will occur tomorrow (but)...”. However, it is senseless to say “It will be true that the sea battle will occur tomorrow” or “It was true that the sea battle occurred yesterday”: what can be said is “It is true that the sea battle will occur tomorrow” and “It is true that the sea battle occurred yesterday”. “Was true” and “will be false” and so on are not part of truth talk.34 That feature of the truth predicates is what justifies their assimilation by those offering the robust form of the argument to the predicates that identify a given sentence as the sentence it is: “is composed of five words” is not tensed, there is no “The English sentence ‘The cat is on the mat’ used to be composed of seven words but has only six at present.” As the allusion to Aristotle is intended to make clear, the discussion of these issues needs to be conducted at significantly greater length. But that

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must be done elsewhere. While it may seem to the critic that truth-values are as evanescent as ink, that is not so. The argument at issue depends on recognizing that “S is true/false”, if true of a sentence, would be timelessly true of it and hence that sentences such as “My arm hurts” would be both true and false. While the argument from indexicals does conclude from what has so far been argued that sentences are not what is true or false, critics have raised an objection to that final move in the argument. Even allowing that my defense of the original argument is successful, what has so far been said does not, those critics will hold, entitle the conclusion that no sentences have a truth-value. The argument leaps, they would say, from “Not all sentences have a truth value” to “No sentences have a truth-value.”35 Why is it thought that the argument commits a logical leap? Let us divide sentences that might conceivably have a truth-value into two kinds: call them “general sentences” and “indexical sentences”. Examples of general sentences are “Cats love fish” and “Females bear children” as opposed to the indexicals “Cats in this room love fish”, “My shoulder hurts”, “It was raining” (or even “John Smith died yesterday”). Given that division, objectors will point out that the argument turns upon noticing that a single sentence might have different truth-values if uttered in different places or at different times or by different people. But such variation in truth-value would be possible only for indexical sentences-and in fact all the examples used by those offering the argument from indexicals to establish that possibility of variation involve indexical sentences. On the other hand, general sentences, were they truth-bearers, would have the same truth-value no matter when, where or by whom uttered. Hence the argument, though it works (let us now admit) for indexical sentences and does show them incapable of being truth-bearers, fails to cover the case of general sentences. Nonetheless, it fallaciously concludes that even those sentences cannot be truth-bearers. Let me grant that the argument works solely through a consideration of what would happen if indexical sentences were truth-bearers and also allow that it does come to a broad conclusion that concerns even general sentences. But the criticism that it thereby baldly leaps from “not all” to “none” is unjustified. For that criticism presumes that the argument is straight-forwardly deductive. However, the best, most charitable, representation treats it as an inference to the best explanation. Those who advance the indexicals argument have in fact assumed that one can make sense of the impossibility of indexical sentences having truthvalue only by seeing that sentences generally will not do as truth-bearers. (Even Davidson, who does not advance that argument, assumes that what

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works for indexical sentences works for all when he searches for a way to get round its conclusion.36) What needs to be produced, and has not been, is a defense of that assumption. It is clearly not necessary to think that the argument applies to general sentences as well as to indexicals. It would be possible, that is, to dig in and insist that, while the considerations embedded in the argument are successful for the case of indexical sentences, those considerations are not extendable beyond those cases, are not applicable to general sentences. One might develop that recalcitrance as follows. Let it be granted that indexical sentences cannot be bearers of truthvalue, that when such a sentence is uttered, it is not the sentence itself which is true or false, but something else, say, what is said. The maneuver here in question would go on to say that, despite that success of the argument, when it is a general sentence which is uttered, it is the sentence itself and not something else, say what is said or a proposition or whatever, which is either true or false. So, the idea goes, we must accept a fundamental bifurcation within the class of truth-bearers: indexical sentences are not in the class although general sentences are. That is not an argument claiming that the defenders of the argument from indexicals cannot do what they think they can, namely treat general sentences in the same fashion as indexical ones. Instead, it is an assertion that we do not have to take the final step if we are willing to accept the consequence of such a refusal, if we are willing to accept the view that some (declarative) sentences are and some are not truth-bearers. That particular expression of the view is too strong: it is assumed there that a successful case has already been made out that general sentences are truth-bearers-but the case for any type of sentence being capable of that function waits until the following chapters for both presentation and evaluation. At best someone could here say that, given the main body of the argument, although indexical sentences cannot be truth-bearers, general sentences might be. However, even in that attenuated form this manner of escaping the conclusion won't do. While we philosophers are constitutionally prone to misguided assimilations and thus frequently fail to respect differences, in the present case there are no relevant differences to be respected. For there is no discernible reason which would support the thesis that while one variety of declarative sentence, the indexical, is not a bearer of truth-value, the other variety of declarative sentence, the general sentence, is, or might be, a carrier of truth and falsity. The claim that there is a split within the class of truth-bearers has nothing to recommend it (except if one believes that avoiding the conclusion that no sentences are truth-bearers at all costs

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is the sole desiratum). While simply refusing to accept the assimilation of general to indexical sentences in this problem situation and being willing to live with a divided doctrine is a formal possibility, it is not a defensible maneuver, not a live possibility. There is a second strategem available which would produce an evasion of the conclusion that no sentences are truth-bearers. While no one seems to have actually adopted the formal possibility above, no doubt because it is so lacking in rationale, this second route has a proper philosophical backing. What I have in mind as a second way round the conclusion is a tactic paradigmatically expressed in Quine's proposal for the eternalization of sentences. Between defenders of the argument from indexicals and those such as Quine who urge that all truth-bearers be treated as general sentences, there is agreement that we should produce a unified account concerning what it is that bears truth. Both parties join in holding that it is not acceptable to say, as the previous maneuver did, that general sentences are true or false, but indexical sentences are neither. Both sides accept the unity of doctrine as a goal in this matter, but they produce quite opposed solutions to that end. The Quinean process of eternalization is a mechanism for systematically replacing indexical sentences with a (kind of) general sentence. It is a mechanism employed in order to avoid the consequences of the indexical argument by philosophers who have a prior commitment to taking sentences to be what are true or false. A plausible case could in fact be made that avoidance of the argument’s conclusion (recall Davidson’s characterization of the argument as a “very large fly in the ointment”) was Quine's aim in devising the process of eternalization.37 However, it is not my purpose here to pursue a question about the history of the matter. I shall refer to the eternalization process as the Quinean response to that argument. As an aid to grasping the logic of the situation, let me imagine that Quine, upon encountering the argument, reasoned as follows: “Our philosophical ends require that sentences be the bearers of truth-value. But the argument establishes that indexical sentences cannot be what are true or false. How then do I save the view that it is sentences that play the role of truth-bearer? Well, it would be possible to outflank the argument by simply jettisoning indexical sentences, by replacing them with a kind of general sentence. The success in regard to indexical sentences would thus be hollow. Only general sentences would remain and they would be the truthbearers.” Once again, there is not here an argument that the assimilation of general to indexical cannot work-and also again, the conclusion is too strong since we have not yet (though we shall in the next chapter) seen any reasoning to

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support the idea that sentences are truth-bearers. What we have here is another attempt to evade the conclusion denying that sentences have a truthvalue, but one that is more philosophically sophisticated than the first. The technique by which indexical sentences are to be jettisoned is that of eternalization. Quine: "Any casual statement of inconsequential fact can be filled out into an eternal sentence by supplying names and dates and canceling the tenses of verbs. Corresponding to 'It is raining'... we have the eternal sentence 'It rains in Boston, Massachusetts on July 15, 1968'... where 'rains' is to be thought of as tenseless.”38 If one treats the sentence “It is raining” as what is true or false, then it will have incompatible truth-values since it can occur at different times and places. But the eternal sentence “It rains in Boston ...” will not be subject to variation in truth value no matter when or where it occurs. Thus, the difficulties in holding indexical sentences to be truth-bearers are avoided by “converting” them into eternal sentences-and, despite the assumption that the argument can be extended to general sentences and so to sentences generally, there has yet been nothing said, Quineans would point out, as to why we should accept that assumption. Quine's maneuver, however, has, at least on the initially plausible interpretation of its intent, an embarrassing consequence. To anticipate the next chapter, one of the attractions of the view that it is sentences which have a truth-value is that sentences (occurrences) are, as it were, there: a sentence is an empirical entity, something available to inspection and observation, something quite unmysterious compared with the other candidates for being true or false (e.g. propositions). Nonetheless, on the eternalization scheme, it is not the spoken or written indexical sentence that has truth-value after all. Someone says 'Johnny has a fever today' and someone else says “Yes, it's too bad” (or “No he doesn't-he's faking”). It turns out, however, that the sentence the person, either person, actually uttered was not at all what is true (or false). Rather what is true or false in that circumstance is some sentence which never actually appears in our talk, roughly the sentence “John Jones, born in Peoria, Illinois on September 27, 2007 and resident at 4330 Tealeaf Lane fevers on June 27, 2008”. The attractions of the sentence view wane swiftly when the defense of it is such that the indexical sentences we do actually utter are neither true or false, that instead it is some unuttered sentence, some sentence not hitherto encountered in the course of our experience, which is what actually is true or false. That line of criticism, however, quite likely misrepresents Quine's intent in talking of the eternalization of sentences. For it presumes that Quine is holding that such eternalized sentences are the bearers of truth or falsity.

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But, despite Quine's frequent and perhaps studied ambiguity on such matters, it is probably best to take him as offering only a recommendation about how things should be handled in "the canonical notation". That is, Quine's claim is probably best represented as the thesis that, in an ideal language, sentences such as “It is raining” would be replaced by sentences such as “It rains in Boston June 28, 1973....” Yet understanding Quine's aim as a revisionary move makes the eternalization strategy quite irrelevant to the project being pursued here. For the present issue concerns what (kind of thing) we are, in our practice, with our present language and our understanding of it, referring to when we say “That's true”. How we ought to talk and think in some hypothetical future practice is a different matter, surely of great interest at some time and place, but not of any concern to the attempt to articulate the nature of our present practice. In sum, no matter whether taken as a description of what is referred to in our practice by the “That” of “That's true” or as a recommendation of how we ought to speak in a (supposedly) perfect language, eternalized sentences fail to provide a satisfactory technique of resistance to the application of the lessons of the argument from indexicals to general sentences. The situation is this. The best attempt, the Quinean, to get around the conclusion that it is not sentences of any sort that are true or false is not at all satisfactory. Yet we are faced with an intellectually respectable requirement that there be a unified doctrine on this topic, that it either be sentences all the way down or never sentences which are truth-bearers. Indexical sentences are already eliminated as candidates. Hence the reasonable move at this point is to surrender the criticism that the argument involves an illegitimate step from ‘Not all sentences are truth-bearers’ to ‘No sentences are truth-bearers’. There is no logical leap in the argument. What there is is a recognition that indexical sentences are the paradigm: given the need to avoid a bifurcated account of truth-bearers, it follows that no sentences are the bearers of truth-value. (If one wishes to classify the inference to this ultimate conclusion, it is not, as we have seen, a deductive move, as the critics assume, but rather a version of an inference to the best explanation.) It is not as if were sentences to be abandoned, there is no safe haven, no alternative view as to the nature of truth-bearers. Quite clearly there is: those traditional views which have here been classified as asserting that truthbearers are non-linguistic somethings, exemplified above as the thesis that it is what is said which is either true or false.

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So far the argument has been that indexical sentences such as “It is raining” cannot be either true or false because they would then be both true and false. What must now be made evident is what there is about such sentences which would produce that unhappy consequence if they were truth-bearers. Obviously, the difficulty resides in the fact that such a sentence, in and of itself, fails to specify something which is necessary to the assignment of truth-values. For example, the sentence “It is raining” does not itself specify when or where the rain is falling. Yet such a specification is necessary to truth-value appraisal. Similarly, the sentence “My arm hurts” cannot be either true or false independently of particular sets of such specifications (otherwise it would be both true and false)-and it cannot be determined whether “My arm hurts” is true or is false until it is known who is saying that and when. However, those specifications are completely extra-sentential. That is, the essential referential connections that enable us to engage in truth-value determination are not part of the meaning of the sentence, are not understood when we understand the sentence. Rather, the indexing, the connecting of words to world, can occur only in some context and different connections are made in different contexts. Hence, the same sentence may occur in different places and at different times, while truth-value will “attach” to something only in consequence of different referential connections, connections that exist only in a given context of utterance and are not given by the sentence, are not included in the meaning of the sentence. Quine, of course, sees all that. What he attempts to do in response is to stuff those extra-sentential materials into the sentence itself. But, as we have seen, that move constitutes an alteration of our practice, produces a new sentence which does not actually occur in the human commerce in which truth-value appraisals are sought and offered, and so does not help us understand that form of human activity. On the other hand, what we ought to see in light of those facts concerning the extra-sentential connections for truth-value appraisal is that sentences are but pieces of language and thus inert with respect to matters of truth and falsity. However, to cite that as the lesson is precisely to make the questioned inference. Put that way, we can see that the best way of representing the inference is that it goes from what is seen in the case of one form of sentence to what can be said about sentences generally. What the final move of the argument from indexicals comes down to is a claim to an insight about language, about those elements of language called “sentences”. Expressed that way, there is no doubt that the generalization is simply not capable of inducing universal rational assent. The inference is not an unjustified logical leap as the critics hold, but it is a move which needs

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buttressing by other considerations capable of influencing the intellect. I have cited one such: that the other alternatives, that of holding a split doctrine about truth-bearers or that of adopting a Quinean revision of how we are to think and speak, are implausible or irrelevant. I suspect that there is another such additional consideration: the inference is much more plausible for someone who has also felt the force of the first considerations produced above concerning truth-bearers, namely that the best initial answer to the question “What is it to which we are referring when we say ‘That's true’?” is what is said. Notice that what is said (1) has independent reason for being treated as what has truth-value, (2) what is said cannot be identified with a sentence and (3) therefore what is said is something extralinguistic. As further argument has shown, what produces truth-value, at least assuredly in connection with one of the major classes of sentences, is something extra-linguistic, the two arguments, the one from practice and the one from indexicals, go hand-in-glove toward establishing that pieces of language are not truth-bearers. Nonetheless, there remains one further inquiry crucial to making the inference to “Sentences are not bearers of truth-value” as compelling as possible. That is an inquiry into sentences. Notice that those opposed to drawing the conclusion share a prediliction for thinking that it is sentences that are the best initial answer to the question “What is the referent of ‘That’ in ‘That's true’?” Those who might claim that while the indexical argument proves that indexical sentences are not truth-bearers, that we do not have to extend the argument to general sentences, act as if sentences hold the logical high ground and are only partially expelled by the opposition forces. Quine too acts as if sentences must be saved as bearers of truth-value from the effects of the argument in question-as if sentences are the rightful holders of the position. Nothing said so far, either here or in the literature generally, has tended to be a critical investigation of the idea that it is sentences that are the prima facie best candidate for the post of truth-bearers. Until that idea is explored, even the revitalized argument against them playing that role will not be as conclusive as possible. The next chapters will then be given over to just that investigation of what produces the idea that it is sentences to which we are referring when we say “That's true”.

II THE CASE FOR SENTENCES AS TRUTH-BEARERS

1. Why Sentences? The issue is the old philosophical dispute over whether it is linguistic entities or something non-linguistic-beliefs, propositions, judgments, statements, etc.-that are true or false. There is a compelling case, though certainly not decisive, developed in the preceding chapter, for rejecting the linguistic candidate, sentences of the declarative sort, and holding that truthbearers are not pieces of language. Despite the force of those considerations, a significant penumbra of uncertainty remains and requires removal before any ultimate conclusion about sentences can be fairly attained. The chief reason for that the lack of conclusiveness at the closure of the key arguments that sentences cannot be truth-bearers is a consequence of the fact that critics of the argument assume that the prima facie right to the post of truth-bearer is held by sentences, that sentences have first call for the job and that to conclude otherwise would require defeating what on the face of it holds the logical high ground. I do not think the friends of sentences have their prima facies right. Taking these matters at their face value, the best initial answer to the question of what the “That” in “That's true” refers to is what is said or asserted or claimed or.... From that perspective and despite typical philosophical sentiment to the contrary, sentences have no pre-philosophical standing for what is true or false. Yet until the opposition's reasons for thinking otherwise are examined, the considerations developed in the preceding chapter will not be as persuasive as desired. The case against sentences, then, cannot be complete until there has been an investigation of the roots of the claim that sentences are the objects subject to appraisal as true or false. Well, why have sentences been held by so many philosophers to play this role? The fact of the matter is that there are no arguments for holding sentences to perform that function that are direct competitors of the two

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considerations presented previously to support the non-linguistic answer. No argument in favor of sentences has the same kind of bearing on the issue as does that derived from asking and answering “What, in the normal practice of truth talk, do we identify as the referent of ‘That's true/false’?” Nor is there any argument of a more traditionally philosophical character for sentences as truth-bearers which addresses the matter in a manner similar to that of the argument from indexicals. The case for treating sentences as truth-bearers has a programmatic quality: considerations that normally would be appealed to in order to adjudicate the issue are replaced by considerations derived from some larger project or program. It is only in light of a quite specific philosophical program that there is any reason at all for thinking sentences to be truthbearers. Thus, in order to grasp why it is that for a significant number of philosophers, sentences have, and their non-linguistic rivals do not have, philosophical appeal as truth-bearers, the entire question must be located within a certain set of philosophical aims. What, then, is that larger context, that philosophical program? What set of aims and concerns does dispose so many philosophers to the idea that sentences are what have truth-value? Only a modest acquaintance with the relevant philosophical thought is necessary to reveal the answer. The dispute about linguistic versus nonlinguistic truth-bearers is dominated by worries about the propriety of accepting abstract entities in philosophical schemes. It is the widespread distaste for abstract objects and a consequent program for doing philosophy without mentioning them which has produced the present orthodox position on the issue. It is widely held that only by treating sentences as that which have truth-value can we in philosophy avoid the intellectual danger of, in Quine's words, hypostatizing obscure entities. Sentences, on this view, are concrete, unproblematic objects and as such are the only fundamental pieces of furniture included in the pool of candidates for the post of truth-value bearer. Hence, it is sentences that must be assigned that role by any down to earth philosophy. Not all philosophers, of course, share the particular conception of philosophy that informs the above view. Those who do not are likely to think it of small significance that sentences are more concrete than their rivals for the job of being true or false. Such philosophers prefer to let the issue be decided by non-programmatic arguments bearing on the legitimacy of the various contenders, namely such arguments as those presented in the preceding chapter. In light of those arguments, it is concluded by this strain of philosopher that we must approve some candidate other than sentences, even though the cost is recognition of some abstract entities.

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While I have considerable sympathy with that view, in the end it fails to get at least one crucial matter right. It concedes a point, one that if abandoned rather than conceded would undermine the orthodox case for taking a sentence to be the bearer of truth or of falsity. That crucial thesis which is conceded to the linguistic camp is that it is sentences that are the concrete entities, that are ontologically fundamental. Both parties to the contemporary version of the dispute agree that sentences are more rockbottom in the scheme of things than are all the other items proposed as truthvalue bearers. One group of philosophers, accepting that, therefore opts for sentences as truth-bearers; the other group, accepting the same assumption but not the program, shrugs its collective shoulders and says “So what?” To get at my aim in this and the following two chapters, let me first invoke the terminology preferred in the preceding chapter. There it was held that it is what is said by someone which is paradigmatically the referent of “That” in “That's true”, etc. Further, there is a clear distinction between the notions of what is said and the sentences in which it is said. The issue cast in those terms, there is a widespread assumption in current philosophy that sentences are concrete while what is said is abstract, that sentences are ontologically more fundamental than what is said. One view, presently in the ascendancy, holds that, for the very reason that sentences are ontologically more basic, they are to be characterized in well-conceived philosophical stories as that which is true or false. Another view, in opposition today, concedes that what is said is more abstract than a sentence, but maintains that nonetheless the weight of argument tells decisively against sentences and in favor of what is said as being that which has a truthvalue. I intend to argue that the view shared by both parties concerning the relation of sentences to what is said is wrong and wrong-headed. What is said is not something abstract, some mysterious and airy-fairy piece of ontological furniture, while sentences are not, by contrast, down-to-earth, perfectly familiar, objects of human experience. Instead, I shall contend that sentences are ontologically dependent entities, something intelligible only in light of the notion of what someone says. The concept of a sentence is, if you will, the result of an abstraction from the saying of things and is thus more abstract than what is said. That last is not quite right. I do not mean that the notion of a sentence is dependent upon the notion of what is said where that is construed, as it has been here, as a potential bearer of truth-value. That would not wash. The idea of an interrogative sentence, for example, is not dependent on the idea of an assertion. Since in much of what follows, I shall be concerned with the general notion of a sentence, I shall most often broaden the notion of

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what is said to cover other types of speech acts than assertion. I do not think that any confusion is caused thereby and I shall note when I return to a more narrow use of the phrase. Three final warnings. So far I have flung around the terms “abstract” and “concrete” and also the idea of relative ontological status. It would be possible to criticize a thesis about the relative abstractness and the relative ontological status of sentences and what is said on the grounds that the notions of abstractness and ontological hierarchy are so ill-defined that they cannot support the weight put on them by any such thesis. That, however, is not the tack I shall take here. On the other hand, those notions are sufficiently obscure that what they amount to, especially that of abstractness, will have to be given some explicit consideration later. Secondly, in the above announcement of my aims, I did not sort out two different conclusions I intend to argue. One is that the concept of a sentence is dependent upon the concept of something's being said; the other is that a sentence is a more abstract entity than what is said. While those contentions are connected, they are different. For the sake of clarity, during much of the investigation, I shall be focusing on the formulation that concerns the ontological subordination of sentences to what is said. Only at the finish of that discussion shall I address issues of relative abstractness. Thirdly, the point of the proceedings that follow is to show that the presumption in favor of sentences and hence against what is said as that which has truth-value has its major assumption completely backward. Establishing to the contrary that it is a sentence that is 'ontologically dependent', that it is sentences which are 'abstract entities', will not be taken by me to prove that sentences do not have truth-value. To think that would be to subscribe to the program that the more concrete is always to be preferred in philosophy. I have already indicated my doubts about that. Of course, success in my enterprise here might incline those who do subscribe to that principle to switch sides and agree that it is what is said, and not sentences, which should be accorded the palm. But I am not encouraging such a migration on those grounds. It is probably desirable here to insert the notice that the aims and arguments cited above will occupy the remainder of this as well as the ensuing two chapters. What will be found in these chapters is an extended examination of the notion of a sentence, something hitherto missing in philosophy. The consequence of the inquiry shall be a trans-valuation of the importance contemporary philosophy places upon the notion of a sentence in its relation to what is said (or, as one previous reader said, preferring a Kantian to a Nietzschean analogy, a Copernican Revolution in the relations between sentences and what is said).

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I shall begin the inquiry by examining the support that might be offered for the widely shared view that sentences are concrete entities, more surely rooted in the nature of things than what is stated or claimed or said by people. So far I have spoken of that as an assumption, but that is not wholly fair. While no one has hitherto felt a need to marshal favorable arguments, a wide reading in the literature reveals two lines of thought which could be used to show that sentences are more basic items of reality than things said. Although the two lines are not in conflict and while both are or would be relied upon by some philosophers, they do have some tendency to appeal to different constituencies. Here I shall emphasize their compatibility rather than their differing appeal. Both of those considerations are captured succinctly in the following piece of reasoning. “A sentence is a physical object, what is said is not. Hence a sentence is more concrete, more basic than whatever gets said by using the sentence.” Sentences are thought to have a more fundamental kind of being for one or both of two reasons: (1) because of their status as physical objects and/or (2) because they are after all the instruments by means of which things can be said. Let us start with the second of those reasons.

2. On Using Sentences It is widely accepted in recent philosophical literature that people use sentences in order to conduct their discourse. My own favorite instance of how broadly shared the view is comes from the extremely contentious disagreement between Dummett on the one hand and Baker and Hacker on the other about the proper interpretation of Frege and his significance for contemporary philosophy. Although they disagree sharply about an extensive range of philosophical issues, both parties accept that sentences are used. "A sentence is a linguistic unit: it is the smallest bit of language one can use to say anything." (Dummett) "A person's uttering 'p' constitutes an assertion... because his utterance is the use of a sentence in appropriate circumstances...." (Baker and Hacker)1 It becomes clear from those lines that the idea of sentences being used is not a throwaway bit. The idea functions as the centerpiece of significant stretches of philosophical theory. In particular, the appeal to the use of sentences is to elucidate how speech acts are performed, how things get said in human communication. "Sentences, not words, are used to say things." "To convey information, ask a question, issue a command, etc., one uses a sentence. The sentence is the basic unit of communication."2

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Not everyone has acquiesced in holding that we use sentences. As far as I can determine Ryle was the dissenter, the only one. In two important papers, he held that the “meaning is use” slogan does not apply to sentences because they, unlike words, are not used in speech.3 Ryle's criticism of the idea that sentences are the basic instruments through which communication is produced called forth some replies4 That brief exchange, however, has passed into ancient philosophical history without significant notice. Unanimity that sentences are used to talk has come to reign. The very broadly shared, yet largely untested, idea that sentences are used to say whatever is said forms an important piece of the background to the thought, central to the dispute over what sort of thing has truth-value, that sentences are more basic entities than what is said. For those who practice their philosophical trade in a climate where it goes without saying that sentences are used, it will seem obvious that the tools employed to say whatever gets said have a more fundamental place in the scheme of things than the assertions, claims, etc. which are products of their employment. No one may ever have thought of explicitly citing that bit of the present normal philosophical atmosphere in support of holding that sentences are more ontologically fundamental than other possibilities for bearing truth, but nonetheless it functions as a significant piece of support. As my aim is to argue that sentences are not such (relatively) basic entities, it will be necessary to remove that means of support for the view, to object to the philosophical practice of thinking of sentences as things used in human communication. Before turning to that criticism, it will be worth making some observations about the role that the notion of the use of sentences has had for those who have gone on to deny, rather than affirm, that sentences are truth-bearers. Those who have treated propositions (or thoughts or whatever) as what truth and falsity primarily attach to have attempted to specify how a given proposition, e.g. the proposition that crocodiles have sharp teeth, is related to certain sentences, e.g. the English sentence “Crocodiles have sharp teeth”. The long accepted account of that relationship is that the sentence expresses the proposition. Now while that formula verbally fills the lacunae, it does nothing more. For while we can grasp what is being claimed when it is said, e.g., that a face expresses sadness, it is, and has been, left wholly obscure what is meant by saying that a sentence expresses a proposition. Thus, one of the perceived advantages of substituting talk of assertions or of statements for talk of propositions is that it thereby becomes possible to make clear the relationship between the sentence and the truthbearer which the notion of expression left mysterious. In the alternative

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terminology, which draws upon the idea that sentences are used, one can straightforwardly specify the connection between, e.g., the sentence “Crocodiles have sharp teeth” and the assertion or statement that crocodiles have sharp teeth, by declaring that the sentence is used to assert or state, is used to make the assertion or statement. The appeal to the use of sentences and the associated terminology of assertions and statements as things made brings with it a second advantage. Platonizers favor the language of propositions. In their eyes, propositions are eternal, transcendent entities and as such are more primitive constituents of reality than the transitory sentences in which they are expressed. So Frege: "The thought, in itself immaterial, clothes itself in the material garment of a sentence and thereby becomes comprehensible to us."5 Talk of using sentences to assert or to make statements is attractive to those disinclined to Platonize because it reverses the order of priority between a sentence and what is asserted. Sentences appear to be the primitive member of the pair. For it is their use that produces assertions; it is by the use of sentences that statements are made. Given that terminology, it becomes more difficult to Platonize, a result that is one of the motives for talking of using sentences. (Of course, the maneuver is not sufficient for those who insist that sentences must be taken to be what has truth-value. In their eyes Platonizing may be rendered more difficult by talking of sentences as used to say things, but it not yet made impossible precisely because of the continuing talk of what is said, of assertions and statements. Does not that talk, it is thought, countenance additional entities, over and above the sentences used to say things?) The upshot is that commitment to the idea of sentences being used to say things has had large advantages for those philosophers who have found the arguments against sentences being truth-bearers decisive. And because of those benefits they will be reluctant to abandon talk of sentences being used, even though it plays into their opponents' hands. For talk of using sentences clearly makes sentences more basic than what is said (or assertions, statements, etc.), yet it is the very core of their opponents' view that the more basic must be preferred as the answer to philosophical questions, including the question “What kind of thing is it which is true or false?” Whoever clings to the thought that sentences are used to say things must face an uphill battle to maintain that nonetheless it is not sentences that have truth-value. I shall then argue that sentences are not used to say things, to assert, to inform (or, even more broadly, to ask questions, make promises, etc.) That is, I shall here defend Ryle's position. While I shall not employ Ryle's arguments to that end-those are inadequate to the task-some of the lines of

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reasoning I will develop are improvements on moves he initiated. Similarly, I will use his long-ago critics as a source of objections to the Rylean thesis. It is important to preface the argument with a consideration of the question “What, precisely, is meant by the thesis that we do not use sentences to say things?” To deny that sentences are used is not, of course, to deny the obvious, namely that discourse (at least written) is overwhelmingly composed of sentences.6 Nonetheless, the truth of that does not establish that the constituent sentences of a piece of discourse have been used to say whatever is there said. And surely those who hold that sentences are used mean more than that a standard piece of discourse can be analyzed into its constituent sentences. What more, however, is meant? It seems decently clear that a parallel between words and sentences is being relied upon in talk of sentences being used. The root idea is that words are used, an idea which is often expressed through analogies with tools, sometimes analogies with ingredients or money. The point of holding that sentences are used is to assimilate them to words in the above respects. Both words and sentences are to be conceived of as linguistic items which we have in our possession and which are employed on appropriate occasions as the tools whereby discourse is produced-or as ingredients in the construction of talk or as analogs of coins in the carrying out of a linguistic transaction. (Notice that Searle, above, does not deny that words are used-he denies that they are used to say things: it is not the function of the word 'promise' to promise.) What I shall then be denying is that we can properly assimilate sentences to words as things used. Sentences, I will argue, are not items that we possess and which are then put to work in saying things. Analogies between sentences and tools (or ingredients or currency) are wholly misguided. There is a second necessary preliminary concerning what is intended by my denial that sentences are used. Upon encountering that thesis, critics will immediately commence searching for counter-examples. It will not be difficult to find ostensible falsifiers. They come in three types. The first sort involves legitimate talk of using sentences; e.g., it might be required of someone that they write an essay using the sentence 'It was a dark and stormy night.' The second class of counter-examples involves reference to one-word sentences ('Run!') and to stock phrases ('Thank you!'); it is thought (wrongly, I believe) that in such cases sentences are being used. A third group consists of philosophical attempts to represent our normal practice as exhibiting frequent talk of using sentences; these, I would argue, are all misrepresentations. For example, it has been said “Hemingway used short sentences”7-the truth of the matter is, at best, only that Hemingway

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had a preference for short sentences. (Probably we should not even invoke sentences here and say instead “Hemingway had a taste for being laconic”.) But no matter. I do not intend the claim “Sentences are not used” in such a way that it is to be falsified by the discovery of a contrary case. Rather, the contention is that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, we talk by using words not sentences. The preceding sentence, and this one too, are wholly typical of human discourse by being composed, constructed, with occasional pain and some revisions. They were not simply taken from my vocabulary bank and inserted into the text. Well-established counterexamples would show only that there is a fringe of cases in which sentences, not words, are used. Those peripheral cases would not impugn the chief point of the argument, which is to show that the orthodox idea that the use of sentences is typical of and central to human discourse is a mischaracterization of how such discourse is normally and ordinarily produced. Before beginning criticism of that orthodoxy, it is worth asking how the view became entrenched in philosophical consciousness, what there is in favor of it. In the present case those questions do not come to the same thing. That is, the current philosophical custom of so talking did not emerge out of a background of philosophical argumentation designed to establish that we do use sentences. I suspect that those who talk about the use of sentences would have no idea where to find a defense of the custom. On the other hand, to claim that talk of using sentences has not been subjected to argumentative testing is not to say that it has been incorporated into philosophical practice without any sanction whatsoever. It is possible, though inappropriate here, to trace the origin of the idea back to Frege, Bradley, Russell, the Tractatus, with another tributary coming from Wittgenstein's later work. But even if the idea that sentences are employed to produce human discourse became established by being assumed and not argued, surely it could be defended. What case would be developed in support of the received idea that sentences are used? Consider what was said by critics when Ryle first denied that we use sentences to speak. Strawson simply dismissed Ryle's contention, saying "Certainly we do use sentences", but did so immediately after having said "There is a class of interrogative sentences (sentences of which the standard use is to ask questions...)."8 Presumably, Strawson would also have said that declarative sentences are those whose standard use is to make statements, that imperative sentences are those standardly used to give orders, etc., that exclamatory sentences are those used to exclaim. Having thus defined interrogative sentences as those used to do such-and-such, and having

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suggested that all the grammarian's sentence-types are defined by their standard use, it becomes perfectly clear why Strawson immediately claims that Ryle is obviously wrong in holding that sentences are not used. Alan White, Ryle's chief critic on this score, entered a protest of a piece with Strawson's. "We do use sentences, for example, to describe scenes, to give accounts of our journeys, to publicize the results of our research, to express our feelings, to issue orders, pass verdicts, etc."9 I think it fair to say that those comments are fully representative of those who talk of the use of sentences. The core idea is that sentences are used to say things, more specifically, to perform speech-acts. Any explicit defense of the notion that sentences are used would surely be based on the claim that it is only by the use of sentences that we can be said to perform the various speech-acts in which discourse consists. Hence, to argue as I shall, that we do not use sentences in speaking will involve showing that the performance of speech-acts does not presuppose that sentences are used. Speech-act theory, in its broadest form, is not all that seems to demand that we accept the idea that sentences are used in talk and writing. If, as I shall soon argue, words rather than sentences are the coin of our language activities, then what becomes of the hard-won and widely shared realization that "the concept of a whole utterance (e.g. a sentence) is more basic than that of a meaningful utterance-part (e.g. a word)"?10 Any thoughtful defense of the notion that sentences are employed to produce human communication would support the view by arguing that only thus can it be held that whole utterances are more basic than words. Although this topic shall be deferred until Chapter 4, I shall argue then that even though it is words not sentences that we use to say things, it does not follow that the concept of a word is more basic to the idea of language than the concept of a whole utterance. It is time to turn to criticism. Let me begin with a few considerations designed to soften up the ground. Rejecting the idea that sentences are items removed from the speaker's vocabulary bin for the purpose of saying something enables us to comprehend how certain features of the phenomenology of speech are possible. For example, sometimes we pause to find just the right words as we speak-a phenomenon incompatible with the view that it is an entire sentence that is employed. So too with revising what we have just said as we continue to talk: “He will be here next Monday-no Tuesday is the 21st-next Tuesday for a brief stay.” What we were going to say, even did start to say, is checked and altered as we talk, in mid-sentence even. Again: we say things that are grammatically awkward because we forget the grammatical construction with which we began or had plotted out. Similarly, the Reverend Spooner did not produce spoonerisms by using the sentences he uttered: the (probably significant)

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psychological phenomenon he exhibited is not that of using some sentence other than the one he intended (it was not that he intended to select for use “You've wasted the whole term” and instead mistakenly chose “You've tasted the whole worm”), but of the misconstruction in a fascinating way of what he was attempting to say. Nor do we less original mis-speakers, in the otherwise uninteresting cases of intentional alteration of words which is called “pig Latin”, use the sentence thereby created. In a different line, we talk of choosing our words carefully, but not of choosing our sentences carefully. A mother might say to her child “I don't want to catch you using that word again” but “I don't want to catch you using that sentence again” would require a very special context to make sense. Obviously what would normally be said would be “I don't want to catch you saying that again”. It seems quite impossible to see how these and other phenomena could occur on the assumption that we use sentences. These same phenomena are quite intelligible when it is recognized that we use only words, not sentences, to craft what we say. While such considerations are significant (more so than current philosophical practice allows), they are not the most important shortcoming of the idea that we communicate by using sentences. The central problem concerns learning. Ryle's most important contribution to the issue of whether sentences are used, apart from his recognition that there is an issue to be discussed, was his suggestion that we do not learn sentences. But his own argumentative strategy for establishing that rests upon the very narrow thesis that there are not, and could not be, any dictionaries of sentences. If one is to appropriate his insight, other arguments to show that sentences are not learned must be developed. Moreover, the bearing of a conclusion that there are not sentence dictionaries upon the problem of whether sentences are used must be made explicit. Since the topic of sentence dictionaries does have some relevance to the problem, let me briefly look into it before going on to more formidable considerations. Are there sentence dictionaries? The familiar objects we label “dictionaries” have entries only for words (with some phrases thrown in). White nonetheless contended that there are sentence dictionaries. "The...mistake...is to suggest that there is not in the case of sentences anything corresponding to a dictionary in the case of words. But dictionaries of quotations, phrase books for foreigners, books on the art of polite or genteel conversation, instructions in lifemanship, all teach the use of sentences."11

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Is it proper to characterize such books as the equivalent of dictionaries, as teaching the use of sentences? Surely not. My own Dictionary of Biographical Quotation never so much as suggests that it aims to teach the use of the sentences it contains. Rather, it is a report of interesting things said by famous people (ordered alphabetically in dictionary fashion). The other types of works on the list do seem to aim at teaching the reader to do something instead of merely reporting interesting remarks. But the natural characterization of what those books aim to bring people to do is that they, in their different ways, aim at teaching people what to say in given circumstances. For example, if in France, I wish to inquire as to the time, my French phrase book informs me that I should say “Quelle heure est-il?” Similar stories appear to be the clearly correct account of what the other sorts of manual on White's list aim at. Only someone who independently believes that people use sentences, who already thinks that saying something is accomplished by the use of a sentence, would hold that the point of such learner's manuals is to teach the use of sentences. We do not normally call them “dictionaries” and do not readily think of them as having the function of teaching the use of sentences. In short, it seems quite correct to say that there are no sentence dictionaries, nothing in the case of sentences equivalent to dictionaries for words. Unfortunately, this victory for the Rylean position is relatively minor, lightly borne by those who would defend the idea that we use sentences to say things. From the non-existence of dictionaries of sentences, it does not follow that we do not acquire and master sentences. For, of course, sentences could be added to one's linguistic repertoire as most words are, namely without benefit of dictionaries. On the other hand, the fact that no one compiles dictionaries of sentences does create a modest presumption in favor of the thesis that sentences, unlike words, are not something that we learn, not something which we add to our personal stockpile of employable linguistic instruments. That, however is only a presumption. The subject must be looked into. Do we receive any degree or form of instruction in sentences? We can certainly cite instructional activities whose aim is to teach the meaning of words. “Do you know what ‘genome’ means?”-“It's a word from genetics; a genome is....” With respect to sentences, however, there is no such clarity and certainly. There are instructional and explanatory activities undertaken in connection with sentences, but it is definitely contentious to suggest that these aim at adding a sentence to our vocabulary. For example, a child may point to a sentence in a book (not to an individual word-those may all be known to the child) and ask “What does that mean?” Suppose the sentence is “A stitch in time saves nine”. So far the situation mimics the activity

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connected with words. The question may be answered: “That's an old folk saying. It means that a repair job begun promptly saves considerable effort later”. We thus do explain what the sentence means. Yet do we want to say that the child has thereby learned a new sentence? Such an account of the point and outcome of the explanation is far from obvious. That account is based on the assumption that all explanations of meaning must be aimed at adding expressions to our vocabulary. Why must that be so? It is at least as plausible to think that what has been accomplished for the child is the solving of a puzzle, a puzzle as to what could be meant by that combination of familiar words. (“Why did talk of sewing come up in that context? Save nine what? What sort of needle could be used to stitch up time?”) It is highly doubtful that the explanation of that sentence has as its object something analogous to the point of explaining a word to someone. Let us try a different tack. Do we talk of learning sentences, of adding them to our verbal repertoire, of storing them in the bin (in Ryle's image)? Does our vocabulary grow through the addition of sentences? All those who urge improvements in our vocabularies and who design exercises to accomplish that have only words (and phrases), not sentences, in mind. We have not heard “It pays to increase your sentence power”, “To get ahead in the world learn only ten new sentences a day”. The projects and texts of school teachers and foreign language instructors promise only to teach us new words, not new sentences. Again, a different line. Do we forget some of our sentences as we do some of the words we have learned? Surely, if we do learn sentences, we must be able to forget them once in a while, not be able to recall what they mean, not be able to “find” them when we need them. Do we speak thusly? “The sentence is right on the tip of my tongue-it will come to me in a minute.” “I used to know what that sentence means. Right now I can't think of it. I'll have to go look it up.” (Unfortunately, there are no sentence dictionaries.) This argument that we do not learn sentences is no doubt further expandable, although the chief points have been covered. In general, there is no set of considerations from which it could reasonably be concluded that sentences are learned as words are. Thus, it seems clear that we do not acquire sentences as denizens of our vocabularies. Does it not follow from the fact that we do not learn sentences that we do not use them? The inference seems obvious since “learning a sentence” surely seems to be shorthand for “learning to use a sentence”. To learn a word, to learn its use, to add it to our vocabulary, is to endow ourselves with the potential for intelligent, proper, use of the word. If, as the above

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argument shows, we do not have sentences as elements of our vocabulary, that is, if we do not learn to use them, what sense can there be in holding that we do use them? There are several possible ways around that conclusion. It might be suggested that knowledge of how to use a sentence is innate and so using sentences is perfectly compatible with not having learned them. I doubt that anyone wants to take that way out. Or it might be held that sentences are used without having been learned in the same way that someone may use, e.g. a fork, without having learned to use it. That solution has very little in its favor and serious flaws as well. It requires either that our talk is much more mishandled than it in fact is (we are not so clumsy as the untutored diner dealing with chopsticks for the first time) or that we are very, very lucky and employ each new verbal tool (each new sentence) with astonishing proficiency for not having been trained in its use. It is time to note an assumption. I have argued that we do not (generally at least) learn sentences and that the only reasonable explanation of that fact is that we do not (generally, normally) use sentences. Drawing that conclusion assumes that if a sentence is to be used it must be possessed by the user, be part of one's vocabulary, prior to its employment. What of that assumption? Is it acceptable? "Every particular word we use is, perhaps, to be found in a dictionary, but certainly not every particular sentence we use. We have to learn almost every word, but we make up many sentences other than those we learn.”12 The suggestion is that to grasp how sentences can be used without a speaker having learned to use them involves recognizing that (many, most) sentences are constructed in the course of saying something. How, though, is talk of making up a sentence as we speak compatible with the idea that we use the sentence? Many of the pictures that strike us cannot fit the problem situation. We may think, for example, of constructing a house and using it as our domicile while building it. What, though, is the “it” which we are using? Not a house, at least not until some fairly advanced point in the process. Suppose I am making a cake. If, at some early stage of the project, I am forced to use that object to feed myself, the proper thing to say is “I had to eat the cake batter”. Only at a later stage can we talk of eating the unfinished cake, or of living in a half-completed house. Analogously, we would not have a sentence to use, even an unfinished one, until some later stage in the process of construction. Are we to think that we begin talking with partial sentences and finish constructing them as we talk? What a strange thing to say. The truth is that we construct our sentences, make them up, as we go along. That thought, however, is quite incompatible with the suggestion that

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we use sentences. Either a sentence is used to say something or it is made up in the course of saying something-we cannot have it both ways. And surely the correct position is that we fashion, create, compose, construct our sentences as we talk and so cannot be said to use them. What we have learned are words and (to speak much too simply) rules of grammar. What we use to say things and to construct proper sentences, are those words put together in light of those rules. It may still be felt that the idea that we say things by using words to that end and that sentences are thereby constructed is not, as I alleged, incompatible with holding that we use sentences to say things. A philosopher, comfortable with current practice, may come to agree that sentences are not pre-packaged entities residing in a speaker's vocabulary and yet remain captivated with the received idea that speech-acts can be performed only through the use of sentences. I find two ways in which one might attempt to combine those two positions, neither of which is acceptable. First, one might think that we construct sentences out of words so as to be able to use them to describe scenes, make promises, ask questions, etc. The analogy here is to the production out of ingredients of a pie that the cook then uses to feed her children or win a prize or whatever. The problem with that, however, is that in making the construction of a sentence and its utilization a matter of a temporal sequence, there is produced a false representation of how speech is conducted. Our discourse is not a two-step process of words being used to construct sentences that are then used to perform a speech-act, in the way a pie is made and then used. (Of course, we at times formulate what we are going to say and then say it, but that is not constructing and then uttering a sentence in order to say something; it is rehearsing what we are going to say.) To attempt to jointly hold the idea that we use words to make sentences and the idea that we use those sentences by representing the two pieces of usage as occurring in a temporal sequence is to be committed to a hopelessly inaccurate picture of how discourse is conducted. However, the only remaining resort in any attempt to hold that we both compose sentences and also use them in saying something would be to make the construction of a sentence and its utilization simultaneous. But how this would work I cannot see. The first problem is that in the absence of any guidance from those who might hold the view, I cannot clearly imagine how to develop in detail the idea that we both use words and use the sentences thereby created. The more difficult problem, however, is an inability to see what is to be philosophically gained by continuing to insist at this point that we use sentences.

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We learn words, add them to our verbal repertoire, precisely so that we can use them when appropriate. And we acquire the rules of grammar in light of which we coordinate the words properly. We do not learn (with at best a few minor exceptions) sentences, do not master them, do not make them vocabulary items. Speakers draw upon their vocabulary and their grammatical knowledge in order to say something, that is, to assert, to warn, etc. What is thereby said normally meets certain requirements and so can be analyzed in terms of being a sentence. Given all that, what is the point of insisting that the sentence so produced is used? What sense can be made of the notion that when one says, e.g., “The moon is lovely tonight”, the speaker is using six items; five words and also a sentence? My initial conclusion was that there is no reasonable case that can be made for the thesis that we learn, i.e. have as part of our vocabulary, sentences, at least the vast majority of sentences constructible in the language(s) we as individuals speak. The present conclusion is that the only reasonable explanation of the fact that we do not learn sentences, do not add them to our verbal repertoire, is that we do not use them in our linguistic activities. I have surveyed attempts at getting around that conclusion and cannot find one that is plausible. Sentences, then, do not mediate between the use of words and the occurrence of linguistic deeds. We say things, more specifically ask questions, make promises, gossip, etc., by the direct use of words. There is nothing in the notion of a speech-act that makes such a thing impossible or even implausible. Such a view as that developed here requires a considerable alteration in philosophical assumptions about the role of sentences in communication. From being the chief instrument in the production of linguistic deeds, it might now seem as if sentences are being demoted to mere by-products of discourse. Words are used, drawn from one's vocabulary, to say something and in saying something (normally in written discourse at least) a sentence is also thereby produced. However, while the demotion in the philosophical status of sentences is intended, that epiphenomenalist reading of their status is not exactly the correct interpretation of the view argued here. While it is a natural development to go on to consider what sort of thing sentences are such that they are not produced as instruments to say things but are produced in the saying of something, that investigation must be deferred until completion of the next project. In conclusion: it is wrong to say that it is sentences, not words, which are used to say things. It is precisely the other way round. Very roughly: we dip into our vocabulary and produce a string of words when saying things. As normally the configuration of those words will conform to the

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grammatical requirements of the speaker's language in order to actually be saying something, a sentence is also thereby constructed. In consequence, no reason can be found in considerations drawn from how talk is conducted and speech-acts performed to support the standard view that sentences are more basic constituents of reality than what is said. On the contrary, the most natural interpretation of the role sentences do play in human discourse strongly suggests that sentences rank somewhere below what is said in the great chain of being.

3. The Priority of Sentences as Physical Objects One defense of the thesis that sentences have a more basic mode of being than does what is said rests on the idea that a sentence is used to say things. What we have now found is that that line of argument does not work because sentences do not function as tools for the saying of things. Hence, if one is to continue to support the ontological priority of sentences to things said, another case must be produced. As I noted earlier, there is available such a second line, one which in fact would probably furnish the major contemporary support for the ontological priority of sentences. This additional defense rests on the claim that sentences are more basic because they are physical objects. It is to that idea which I now turn. Many philosophers, in recounting what sentences are and how they stand in relation to what is said, very swiftly break into talk about sounds and marks. In those accounts, human communication, since it is said to be carried out via the use of sentences (and words), is held to be at bottom the making of sounds (in oral discourse) or the making of marks (in written discourse). "To say something ... includes the utterance of certain noises."13 Austin then defines something which he labels “the phonetic act”, and which he asserts to be basic to all speech-acts, as "the act of uttering certain noises."14 Searle: "... when a speaker stands before a hearer and emits an acoustic blast... when I say 'Jones went home,' which after all is in one way just a string of noises."15 In this type of account, and it is standard, a written sentence just is a string of marks or scratches and a spoken sentence is a pattern of noises, sounds, vibrations in the air. It is but a short step from that picture of sentences to the idea that a sentence is perforce a basic constituent of the universe, more so at least than other items proposed as bearers of truth-value which are not physical objects. Although that characterization of the nature of sentences (and words) is frequently encountered, it is wildly wrong. Clearly sentences (and words) are not noises or marks, not even organized sequences of them. Just think

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of what it would be for one person to stand before another and emit an acoustic blast-or for someone to be making marks on paper. Try following for oneself the instructions “Make a bunch of sounds” and “Put some marks in your notebook.” To hold that someone is talking or writing is to exclude any notion that the person is (other than incidentally or additionally) making noises or marks. To call something a sentence (a word) is to deny that it is a group of sounds or marks. Characterizing something as a sentence is to locate it within the logical space of language and thus to distinguish it from marks and noises.16 Conversely, representing something as a mark or a sound, is to deny that it belongs to a language and so to deny that it is a sentence (or a word). At this point will come an objection. A more sophisticated latter day view is that a simple identification of sentences with sounds and marks ignores the important distinction between types and tokens of sentences, more properly, as I have argued, between sentences and their occurrences. It is only the occurrences of sentences that are sounds or marks, not sentences. "A sentence token is a physical object, a series of marks on paper or of sound waves, constituting an inscribed or spoken sentence.... It is important to observe, however, that though sentence tokens are physical objects, sentence types are abstract."17 "A written token is a collection of physical objects ... bits of paper marked with ink.... A spoken sentence [is] ... an event ... vibrations in some physical medium.... Sentence types are not physical objects."18 That, it might be said, being so, shows that it is only sentence-tokens which are marks or acoustic blasts. The objection does not touch the criticism above, in fact it is subject to it. Let us take into account the distinction between sentences and their occurrences (the correction for talk of the type-token distinction applied to sentences). Where does that get us in our present discussion? Nowhere. For even in the favored case of tokens, these are sentence-tokens here being referred to, in other words, occurrences of sentences, and thus subject to the necessities of what it is to be a sentence. And to characterize something as a sentence is to deny that it is a mark or noise. The mode of representation “is a sentence” logically precludes the representations “is a mark”, “is a noise”, '”is a sound”, no matter whether it is applied to types or to tokens, i.e. without regard to whether we are concerned with sentences (formerly sentence-types) or with occurrences of sentences (formerly sentencetokens). To recognize that a sentence cannot be identified with a sound or a mark is not to deny that a sentence can be the object of physical investigation. A spoken sentence has auditory properties that can be investigated. A written

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sentence can have its spatial characteristics described and, if it is in ink say, is subject to chemical analysis. The claim that a sentence(-token) is a sequence of sounds or marks does not err in noticing such possibilities of scientific or quasi-scientific investigation. Rather the mistake is in wearing its materialism on its sleeve, in its attempt to think of sentences as nothing but a kind of natural object. There is no doubt that what I have argued produces additional perplexities. Philosophers, in saying “Sentences are sounds or marks (or finger movements)”, have taken the easy way out. For the problems involved in making sense of the complexities of our talk, especially about sound phenomena, are simply papered over by that formula. When at last we recognize that the formula contains incompatible descriptions, all the difficulties it has comfortably masked begin to emerge. We suddenly don't seem to know our way around, especially around the language of sound-we acquire a mental cramp. It is important to notice that our newfound perplexities have chiefly to do with spoken language. Denying that when we write a sentence we are thereby making marks causes, at best, only modest discomfort. (The puzzles arising from taking sign language into account in this context and so denying that a signed sentence is finger movements seem intermediate in difficulty between the cases of spoken and written language.) The variable degrees of perplexity produced by arguing that sentences are not sounds or marks or finger movements tends to show that it is not that general thesis itself which is troublesome, but rather the strain that such a thesis produces in our sense of the language of sound. What is needed to rid ourselves of that perplexity and to thereby come to know our way around is, of course, a thorough exploration of the language of sound, an attempt at making sense of how it works. Sadly, this is not the place for that.19 The cramp, the uncomfortableness, will have to be lived with for now. The defender of the view that sentences reside at a deeper ontological level than what people say or claim or remark may well concede at this point that the argument in support of that view has over-reached itself. It might now be granted that it is mistaken to take a sentence to be a series of sounds or marks. Still, such a defender will point out that there is, running through those quotes above which express that view, and also through other similar accounts, a theme which my criticism did not touch. “Right, a written sentence is not ink splotches on paper, nor a spoken sentence grunts. But even if sentences are not natural objects, they are nonetheless physical objects, entities subject to various forms of physical investigation and description. As such they are more centrally placed in the scheme of things

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than that which we are talking about when we speak of what someone says. A good philosophical theory ought to take its theoretical entities from the lowest possible ontological level. Particular occurrences of sentences, (sentence-tokens as we used to say), written and spoken, although not as ontologically well-entrenched as, for example, molecules or even squeaks and marks, are more elementary, more concrete than what is said by someone. Hence a philosophical theory of truth really must hold that the objects which bear the characters of truth and falsity are occurrences of sentences simply because they are physical objects.” This version is more restrained than the original: it refrains from the mistaken thesis which identifies sentences with sounds or marks and asserts instead that sentences as occurring where-ever and whenever are physical objects. About that I plan to raise no fuss, will allow that written or spoken sentences are physical objects. That is, it makes sense to discuss their spatial and temporal features. And as spatial-temporal entities they are subject to all the vicissitudes of such objects. Let me be equally clear that what someone says is not a physical object. Someone in New Jersey may maintain that the cat is on the mat, but, while the cat and the mat might also be in New Jersey, what the person maintained is not also to be found there-or anywhere else either. There may have been a ten second pause between his saying the first two words and the remainder: but there are no pauses, in fact no time measures at all, internal to what he claimed. Though it is possible, for example, to burn and so to destroy the sentence he wrote, what he said is not combustible (nor fireproof). Those concessions leave available only one line of criticism of the argument at issue. That reasoning, in its most compact form, goes “The occurrence of a sentence is a physical object, while what someone says is not; hence a sentence is ontologically more basic, more concrete, than what is said.” The premisses having been granted, the question can only be “Does the conclusion follow?” I shall argue that it does not. Or, if you prefer, I shall deny the principle, the missing premiss of that argument. For it is there assumed that being a physical object guarantees ontological priority against all comers. I think not. My claim, of course, is not modest. For it is the denial of materialism, of physicalism.20 Nonetheless, in order to make progress on the matter of what bears truth or falsity that (or rather those) philosophical programs must be confronted-for this entire line of thought which we have been considering, namely that sentences are basic entities and what is said or stated is not because sentences are physical objects and what is said or stated is not, is an expression of physicalism. Examination of that source has now become necessary.

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Despite the implication in saying that of a direct confrontation, it should be obvious that I do not plan to attack along the complete front here. The present work does not have as its object a full-scale examination of physicalism and/or materialism. The present aim must be to do something more limited but something nonetheless relevant to the immediate situation. Hence, I shall first discuss some cases which reveal clearly enough the inadequacy of physicalism as a general ontological view. Then, having thereby obtained license to think about specific cases, I shall investigate on its own merits the issue of whether it is a sentence or what is said which has the more basic kind of being. One last point which it is necessary to make, sadly so but still necessary given how we philosophers are prone to construe projects of the present type. To deny Physicalism is not to commit oneself to Platonism or Spiritualism. To be a non-physicalist is compatible with having one's feet on the ground. Consider that monetary instrument known as a check (cheque). Someone might be tempted to claim that a check is nothing but some marks on processed cellulose, that it is nothing but a physical object. But that most definitely is not so. Anyone inclined to agree should try paying for a purchase by making some marks on a piece of paper. An individual check, of course, is a physical object, a spatio-temporal entity subject to physical inquiry and physical theory. But that fact does not explain what it is for an object to be a check rather than a marked piece of paper. To explain that requires reference to a complex of institutions and practices. That some physical object is a check is dependent on its having a certain place within those practices and institutions. Suppose now that we were asked which is ontologically more fundamental to something's being a check, more constitutive of, or more necessary to, its being what it is: the relevant social practices or the spatiotemporal object. It does seem fairly clear that if such a question can be asked and answered, the practices and institutions in light of which the object is a check have at least as much claim to being the right answer as the answer which cites only the physicality of the check. In fact, the more it is stressed that the thing whose ontological status is being examined is properly describable as a check, as contrasted with a marked piece of paper, the more intelligible is the idea that it is the relevant institutions which have ontological priority. It must be observed that I am not defending that answer, for it seems that the best thing to say is that the being of a check, if we can talk that way, resides in the social role given to a certain physical object. That is, what seems the best answer mentions both the physical object and the set of social institutions in which the physical object becomes the kind

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of thing that it is. In the absence of either physical objects or the proper social institutions, there would not be checks. Thus, both Physicalism and Idealism turn out to be incomplete answers to the philosophical question. Let me produce, very briefly, a second example to show that the one above is not idiosyncratic. A particular chess piece, say a knight, is typically made out of wood, metal, etc. But to specify what it is to be a chess knight requires reference to more than the physical characteristics of an object. For it is by its operation within the, or perhaps a, game of chess that something becomes a knight in chess. It is thus at least rationally arguable that it is the game of chess which makes a given physical object into the kind of thing it is, say a knight in chess. Yet the game of chess is not itself a physical object, subject to physical description. Once again, although it is not necessary to subscribe to this conclusion, for those with certain preferences (especially if they are willing to imagine that chess might be played entirely in the head, with no boards or pieces) it will seem that ontological priority should be ascribed to the non-physical in the determination of what constitutes the being of a piece in chess.21 It is important to be clear about what has been accomplished above. First, the two cases have been presented as expressions of the inadequacy of physicalism as a view about what is, in all cases with respect to all relevant questions, most ontologically fundamental. The result of thinking through the cases is not the discovery that some other view, one in philosophical competition with physicalism, is correct. Instead, the outcome is purely negative, that physicalism is not a comprehensively adequate answer to ontological questions. Secondly, it must be realized that the above cases are not strict analogues to the problem at hand, that is, to the question of the ontological relation of sentences and what is said, for the cases did not involve asking about two kinds of thing which, in the nature of things, is more firmly situated. Rather those cases concerned aspects of a single thing, a check or a chess piece, and the question about them was which aspect ought we think of as more fundamental to the being of the thing. In consequence of those two features of the preceding argument, nothing derived from it determines whether it is sentences or what is said which are more the basic items. It will thus be necessary to examine that problem on its own merits, not assuming the matter settled by prior subscription to a particular philosophical program.

III WHAT IS A SENTENCE?

1. Philosophers and Linguists In the previous chapter the final object of criticism was the widely shared idea that sentences have a more basic mode of being than what so-and-so said (or than propositions, statements, etc.) The major reason philosophers have been inclined to that ranking is because of subscription to a general philosophical view, materialism or physicalism. That view, taken in conjunction with the fact that (the occurrences of) sentences have physical properties while what is said by someone does not have physical properties, leads to the conclusion that sentences, at least as spoken or written, are the more ontologically favored entity of the two. However, in consequence of examining some selected cases, it was seen that materialism, physicalism, does not always provide the answer to the question 'What is more basic to some things being the kind of thing it is, its physical features or its nonphysical aspects, in particular its institutional role?' That means it remains an open question, a question requiring a specific investigation, as to which of the two items we are at present concerned with, namely sentences and what is said, is more of an ontological staple than the other. It is to that question we must now turn. The initial step in that investigation is in coming to grips with what a sentence is. Orthodox views about the relative ontological placement of sentences and what is said have been determined by the belief that it is perfectly obvious what sentences are while the nature of what is said is wholly mysterious. That assumption needs to be challenged. As we have seen, philosophers have persistently treated sentences as if they were nothing but natural objects (sounds, marks). Yet it is quite certain that sentences are as much artifacts as chess pieces or coins. It should be concluded from that record of philosophical misfires that it is not obvious, contrary to the usual assumption, what a sentence is. A discussion of the nature of sentencehood is the central component of the inquiry into which, something said or a sentence, is more ontologically bedrock. (The examination

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of the second part of the assumption, into what kind of being 'what is said' has, waits for a later chapter.) Someone might object that it is not true that we philosophers have a poor (theoretical) grasp of what a sentence is. It is quite simple: a sentence is a group of words that express a complete thought. In the Oxford English Dictionary's version: "A series of words in connected speech or writing, forming the grammatically complete expression of a single thought." Such a definition goes back to antiquity. But recent linguists do not accept it. While those who reject it offer various reasons, most of those rest on problems concerning the term “thought”.1 If one interprets the definition in a Lockean fashion, where the thought referred to is a psychological phenomenon, an occurrent mental event, then there is sufficient reason for setting the definition aside. If, however, one takes “thought” in Frege's fashion, in which it broadly corresponds to what I have been calling “what is said”, then the traditional definition is not so bad. For it then defines a sentence as the linguistic correlate of something said. However, in criticizing that traditional definition, rather than focusing upon the term “thought”, it is best to concentrate on the term “complete”. That age-old explanation of what a sentence is involves two references to completeness. On the one hand, the aim of the definition is to contrast the linguistic item “sentence” with the linguistic item “word” (and “phrase”): what is intended to mark the distinction is the idea that a sentence expresses a complete thought, though a word does not. On the other hand, the definition is intended to say that the linguistic item must also be complete in order that it be a sentence. The OED version above uses “grammatically complete” to modify “expression” and qualifies ”thought” by “single”, a bad choice as it runs into problems with whether the thought “I'll be here at 6 and she'll be along at 7” is a single thought, though it certainly is a complete thought. The best version of the traditional definition is “a sentence is the complete expression of a complete thought.” An example from Wittgenstein is illustrative. Suppose the question is the relationship between the expressions “Bring me a slab!” and “Slab!” It would be possible to hold that “Bring me a slab!” is the complete expression of a complete thought, while “Slab!” is not a complete expression, though it is an expression, of that same thought. However, if one accepts the traditional definition of “sentence” and if the notions of grammatical completeness and incompleteness are elucidated by such an example, then there is an unhappy consequence. “Slab!” turns out not to be a sentence. As the historically preferred definition allows as sentences only linguistic forms that are grammatically complete expressions of thoughts, then “Bring me a slab!” is a sentence but “Slab!” cannot be

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granted that status. I take it, on the contrary, that “Slab!” is clearly a sentence and so any definition which requires sentences to be “grammatically complete expressions” is unacceptable. While the “Slab!” type of case establishes the inadequacy of the most historically prominent definition of “sentence”, another type of case reveals something about the, or maybe only a, source of its shortcomings. Completeness of expression has meant, when applied to declarative sentences say, that a real (declarative) sentence must have a subject and verb. However, that demand no longer matches what is presently acceptable as stylistically legitimate. There recently was, and perhaps still is, a female columnist for a major British newspaper, usually writing on domestic matters, who did not, as a matter of style, use the first-person singular pronoun. So she would say, e.g. “We needed groceries yesterday. Went to the store. They had a sale on kale. Bought three large bunches.” “Went to the store.” and “Bought three large bunches.” are sentences, though lacking a subject term. They are incomplete expressions of a complete thought but (therefore) not non-sentences, just as “Slab!” is a sentence although not complete as an expression of a thought. Stylistic orthodoxy might decry such sentences and wish that no one wrote so. That failure to meet standards is not, however, the same as saying that they are not sentences.2 The traditional definition, under which only the grammatically impeccable qualify as sentences, fails because it involves a standard of excellence for sentences masquerading as a definition of what a sentence is. In an earlier chapter I offered the reminder that the distinction between a sentence and what is said has already been securely developed in philosophical literature. One way of making the distinction is by making reference to different languages. Even within a language, the distinction can be clearly drawn. One and the same thing may be said in different sentences, e.g. “My arm hurts”, “His arm hurts”, “Your arm hurts” where the pronouns refer to the same person and time; moreover, different occurrences of the same sentence may be involved in saying quite different things, e.g. “She's smart” when uttered about different people. It is important to make precisely the same distinction here by reference to a quite different range of linguistic phenomena. People who say “Bring me a slab!” and those who say “Slab!” will (typically) be saying the same thing, although the sentences are different. Hence sentences and what is said are different things. Moreover, what the columnist said when she wrote “Went to the store.” is that she went to the store although she could have, stylistic inclinations aside, said just the same by writing “I went to the store.” That what is said cannot be identified with a sentence is thus also shown by forms of words that are not complete

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expressions of thoughts, which are not grammatically complete representations of what is said. We do, then, require a more up to date account of what a sentence is than what has come down to us from traditional writing about language. To start, consult the entry under “Sentence” in Simon Blackburn's The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. "Most generally, the unit of communication: the smallest entity whose production constitutes a message, such as an assertion, a command, or a question. Grammatically a sentence is the unit whose structure is subserved by other recognized features of a language."3 Blackburn's entry expresses two quite different and, as will be seen below, incompatible contemporary accounts of the nature of a sentence. The first, introduced by the phrase "Most generally", is a version of what is found in current philosophical literature; the other, following the qualifier "Grammatically", is the favored view in linguistics. Although “What is a sentence?” has the shape of such eminent philosophical questions as “What is truth?”, “What is justice?”, etc., unlike those it has not been a featured subject in philosophical writing. That is so even in very recent philosophy where the notion of a sentence is a star performer, occurring as the hinge concept in current orthodox accounts of such philosophically central matters as meaning and truth. Despite the centrality of sentences to current philosophical discussions, there is no record in the philosophical literature of any debate about what they are. There are only isolated claims about what a sentence is. Blackburn has found some. When he gives his dictionary definition of a sentence as "the unit of communication: the smallest entity whose production constitutes a message, such as an assertion, a command, or a question", he is representing current (albeit unargued) thought in the philosophical community. One of his sources seems to be Dummett who, as mentioned earlier, in his important Frege: Philosophy of Language says: "A sentence is a linguistic unit: it is the smallest bit of language which one can use to say anything-to 'make a move in the language-game', in Wittgenstein's terminology."4 Earlier in the book Dummett had said: "for (in a logical rather than a typological sense) an expression with which we can make a move in the language-game (or 'perform a linguistic act') is precisely what a sentence is."5 Dummett's sort of account has made its way into such works as Devitt and Sterelny's Language and Reality: "To convey information, ask a question, issue a command, etc., one uses a sentence. The sentence is the basic unit of communication."6 That kind of account, though it is what is put about in very recent philosophy, won't do. It assumes that sentences are used, used to say things. I argued earlier that that assumption is false. Since sentences are not used to

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say things, they cannot be defined, explained, as the linguistic unit that is used to say things. So to answer the question of what a sentence is we must look elsewhere than to the philosophical literature. Blackburn provides a second account when he continues "Grammatically a sentence is the unit whose structure is subserved by other recognized features of a language." Blackburn there successfully captures a general agreement in current linguistics about what a sentence is. The entry under “Sentence” in David Crystal's A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics begins "The largest structural unit in terms of which the grammar of a language is organised. Innumerable definitions of sentence exist, ranging from the vague characterisations of traditional grammar (such as 'the expression of a complete thought') to the detailed structural descriptions of contemporary linguistic analysis. Most linguistic definitions of the sentence show the influence of the American linguist Leonard Bloomfield, who pointed to the structural autonomy, or independence, of the notion of sentence...."7 Unlike the case in philosophy, where “What is a sentence?” has not been much addressed and where the present normal view has more the status of an ipse dixit than the result of critical inquiry, the discussion in linguistics about the nature of sentences, even if currently at remarkably low tide, has been very long and complex.8 To break in upon it requires extreme selectivity. Thus, since my project concerning truth-bearers requires objecting to the standard view in linguistics about what a sentence is, the reader must expect much simplification in my representation of recent thought among linguists as to the nature of sentencehood. I shall take it here that Blackburn and Crystal are correct in holding that some version or the other of Bloomfield's definition of “sentence” is common currency among practicing linguists. To say, however, that someone has proposed a definition and that the relevant disciplinary community has come to accept it is not the end of the story. For it remains to be seen how problems with the general principle have come to be handled by that community. What I have found to be most helpful in understanding how Bloomfield's definition has been fitted into linguistics is John Lyons' Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics.9 I have no idea whether, historically, Lyons' book played the role of domesticating Bloomfield's definition by showing how anomalies can be handled. That is an issue in the history of linguistics that I am not competent to discuss. While there is some reason to believe that Lyons is a candidate for that role, I am interested only in the analytic issues involved in defending a Bloomfieldian account of what a sentence is. So, to simplify matters, I shall

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use Lyons as my main (though not sole) stalking horse in examining the consensus account in linguistics about the nature of sentences. In treating of sentences, Lyons first introduces Bloomfield's definition, supplying some glosses and examples. However, much the longer part of the discussion consists of attempts to resolve significant problems that the definition creates. It is those problems and their resolution by Lyons that shall occupy my critical attention. Lyons: "Bloomfield's definition of the sentence will serve as a startingpoint for our discussion. According to Bloomfield a sentence is 'an independent linguistic form, not included by virtue of any grammatical construction in any larger linguistic form'.... The point of Bloomfield's definition can be stated more concisely as follows: the sentence is the largest unit of grammatical description. A sentence is a grammatical unit between the constituent parts of which distributional limitations and dependencies can be established, but which can itself be put into no distributional class."10 That is, all grammatical relationships are internal to sentences. In the frame “__ song is sad” only certain words can, with grammatical correctness, be inserted into the blank: e.g. “His” is grammatically acceptable though “All” is not since the noun “song”, and its agreement with the singular verb “is”, will not grammatically go with “all”. But there are no such grammatical connections, constraints and requirements between sentences. Whatever relations there are between any two sentences are not matters of grammar, do not determine what grammatically is required or forbidden within either of the sentences. As defined by Bloomfield, by linguistics, the sentence is the largest linguistic unit within which grammatical, syntactical, relationships exist. There are problems standing in the way of accepting this definition. Lyons, however, does not find those difficulties defeating: rather he seeks accommodation. There is a will on his part to accept the definition-the technical issue is how to accommodate unruly phenomena. What are these problem children? They are "various kinds of utterances or parts of utterances which are traditionally regarded as sentences, although they are not distributionally independent in the sense in which we have been using the term ‘distribution'."11 That is, there are linguistic forms which are standardly recognized to be sentences but which do not satisfy the condition for being a sentence specified in the definition. Lyons, in his first pass at the issue, considers in detail three kinds of case. In the second round he examines a fourth type. (It must not be thought that these four problematic sorts of case are exhaustive. Another linguist says "There are, on the contrary, plenty more."12) In order for the Bloomfieldian definition to be

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legitimated, the theoretical linguist must do something about those sentences which do not satisfy that definition. The first class of cases consists of "utterances which contain pronouns of personal reference (he, she, it, they, in English)."13 What we ordinarily think to be sentences containing personal pronouns cause difficulties for those inclined to Bloomfield's definition because they stand in grammatical relations to some larger context. "An utterance like He'll be here in a moment presupposes the previous occurrence of some masculine noun or noun-phrase (e.g. John, the milkman, etc.) to which the pronoun he refers."14 Since a sentence is, according to the Bloomfieldian definition, the largest unit to which grammatical restrictions on its components apply and yet since which pronoun can be employed is restricted by some larger context-“she” cannot be used if the previous reference was to John, “it” is not grammatically proper if a person is referred to-then such a linguistic form as “He will be here in a moment.” cannot be a sentence. (Let me here indicate a convention I am following. Notice that Lyons, adopting a frequently employed convention, writes his sample sentence “He'll be here in a moment” (though employing italics instead of the quote marks I am using) and capitalizing the first letter of the first word but not including a full stop at the end. Despite the fact that there would be a fullstop, a period, if the sentence were normally occurring on the page and despite the fact that in discussing the punctuation appropriate to a sentence, linguists always mention the full stop in preference to initial capitalization, nonetheless the full stop is normally omitted when writing out specimen sentences. I take that omission to be the result of a use-mention confusion. The period employed in a sample is not being used, only mentioned, and thus can perfectly well occur inside a sentence exhibiting the sample without calling a halt to that sentence. I insert the full stop in specimen sentences because it is not there being used and because realizing its role is important to my later argument.) There is a second class of linguistic forms which are ordinarily taken to be sentences but which do not qualify as such under a Bloomfieldian definition. "As another example of distributional constraints running over a sequence of what would be normally regarded as separate sentences we may consider the 'indirect discourse' construction.... This phenomenon, which may be called extended indirect discourse... is... found in English (and many other languages). Take for instance a passage such as the following: The prime minister said that he deeply regretted the incident. He would do everything he could to ensure that it did not happen again. On the following day he would confer with his colleagues. He was confident that...."15 Each of those items "is traditionally regarded as a separate sentence (and

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punctuated as such)."16 However, each is "dependent on some previous 'verb of saying'."17 That is, for example, some of the grammatical features of “He would do everything he could to ensure that it did not happen again.” are as they are because of its relationship to the previous sentence “The prime minister said that he....” and through that to the context about which we must infer that the Prime Minister said “I will do everything I can....” That “will” by the Prime Minister in the original requires “would” in the specimen and the Prime Minister's “can” must turn into “could” in the indirect discourse. Because the sentence in indirect discourse is grammatically constrained by something outside it, it cannot, in light of the linguist's definition, really be a sentence. There is a third class of cases that Lyons must make fit under the definition. "Finally, we may consider the case of what are traditionally called 'incomplete' or 'elliptical' sentences.... There are many utterances of normal, everyday conversation which are dependent for their internal form on the preceding utterances of the same speaker or the person with whom he is conversing. An example might be John's, if he gets here in time, which could hardly occur except immediately after a question which 'supplied' the words required to make it into what would traditionally be regarded as a 'complete' sentence. For instance, it might occur after 'Whose car are you going in?', but not after 'When are you going there?' An utterance like John's, if he gets here in time is therefore grammatically 'incomplete', since it is not itself a sentence (it is not distributionally independent)...."18 Such elliptical forms are problem cases because they are normally spoken of as sentences, albeit elliptical ones, yet their "internal form" is "dependent" on some preceding utterance-and the definition being propounded would require that they not be sentences precisely because of that grammatical dependence. Those, then, are the initial classes of anomalies, linguistic forms that are sentences (ordinarily) but are not sentences (by the definition). Lyons takes it that in order to legitimate the Bloomfieldian definition of a sentence, namely “the largest unit of language which contains grammatical relations”, he must show how the anomalous cases can be brought into the fold. Lyons employs the same strategy in making all three kinds of problem cases fit the definition. Let me take the easiest case, that of pronouns, as the paradigm of his solutions. To enable linguistics to accept “She went fishing.” as a sentence, Lyons holds that there is (for English) something he calls a "secondary grammatical rule"19 which runs roughly “If a female is referred to, any pronominal reference to that person must be accomplished using ‘she’ and not ‘he’ or ‘it’.” In consequence of there being that rule of grammar, “She went fishing.” can be counted a sentence because it is

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derived via that secondary grammatical rule from a "genuine"20 sentence, namely “Jill went fishing.” Since “She went fishing.” does not satisfy the definition it is not, strictly, a sentence. However, because of its ancestry, arising as it does out of a genuine sentence via a secondary rule of grammar, it is permissible to call it a sentence though of the derived variety. Lyons uses the strategy of appealing to "secondary rules of grammar" to argue that each of the three difficult kinds of case can be called sentences even though they fail in themselves to meet the grammarian's definition of a sentence. The upshot is that, those problems solved, linguistics can incorporate into its body of theory (some version of) Bloomfield's definition of a sentence. In turning to criticism of Lyons' enterprise, it must be remembered that it is not particularly Lyons who is my target, but rather the enterprise, the attempt by linguistics to maintain a Bloomfieldian definition of “sentence”. Lyons is used here as an interesting and significant figure in contemporary linguistics' project of legitimizing a grammatical account of the nature of a sentence. The first shortcoming concerns the general outcome of Bloomfield's definition. It is not simply that the definition leaves a sizable residue of anomalous cases-even more important are the kinds of linguistic items it renders problematic. A proposed definition of “sentence” which has the consequence that such linguistic forms as “It was in plain sight.” and “John claimed that he loves me.” are either non-sentences or, at best, forms which need special explanation in order that they qualify as sentences should engender substantial skepticism. We would regard any definition of “horse” that has the consequence that the latest winner of the Kentucky Derby is not a horse as having gone astray. A similar attitude is justified in the case of Bloomfield's definition. Think next about how the recalcitrant cases are dealt with. Generally speaking, any attempt to fit anomalous phenomena into a theory requires that the principles by which the accommodation is to be accomplished must be in the spirit of the theory. Lyons' solution fails that test. The Bloomfieldian aim is to define sentences as the largest linguistic form whose parts stand in grammatical relations. The aim of the theory is to treat sentences as containers of all grammar, to make all syntactical connections internal to sentences. Yet Lyons, by calling the rules by which the difficult cases are domesticated and converted into sentences "secondary grammatical rules", completely violates the spirit of Bloomfield's enterprise. For given that manner of solving the problems, there are grammatical relations, even if subordinate ones, which hold between sentences rather than within them. That resolution, though it does relieve

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the intellectual pressure caused by the anomalies, does so by undermining the theory's hard-core. That conflict in his resolution of the problem cases became apparent to Lyons. Lyons' insight on this point is worth noticing for it marks one of the reasons why he is a superior representative of the field in discussing these matters. Other linguists are extremely cavalier about the conflict: for instance "[A sentence] is the largest unit to which we can assign a grammatical structure. Nevertheless, it would be an error to believe that outside the sentence there are no restraints, no features that link one sentence to another. There are, on the contrary, plenty."21 Having presented the definition and then the problems and the solution to them, in the very next section of the text Lyons points out that that the principle used to eliminate the anomalies produces a severe new difficulty. "The sentence is the maximum unit of grammatical analysis: that is, it is the largest unit that the linguist recognizes in order to account for the distributional relations of selection and exclusion that are found to hold in the language he is describing. It will be clear from the discussion of the examples given above (which could be multiplied) that distributional relations frequently hold across the boundaries of segments of utterances which would normally be regarded as separate sentences. This would appear to be a contradiction."22 Linguistics, treating Lyons as a model, ends up in a contradiction when it adopts a Bloomfieldian, a grammatical, definition of “sentence”. It tries to defend the thesis that all grammatical relations are necessarily internal to a sentence and yet it realizes that there are plenty of cases where grammatical relations exist between sentences. Lyons takes a shot at saving the day. He refuses to surrender any of the obvious theses that resulted in the contradiction. Rather he has resort to a philosophical chestnut: when in trouble invoke different senses of a word. "It [the contradiction] may be resolved, however, by distinguishing two senses of the term 'sentence'."23 I shall simply dismiss this deus ex machina move. It is not that there aren't two senses of the word “sentence”. There are, but the second sense is not anything available to Lyons in this particular affair. The two senses can be distinguished as follows: “He writes sloppy English sentences” and “He received a sentence of life imprisonment.” The reply to the chestnut: Don't invoke a second sense of a term as a tool of philosophical criticism unless there is a difference analogous to that between those two genuine senses of “sentence”.24 That evasive maneuver put away, Lyons and linguistics are left in a pickle. Sentences are defined so that grammar is internal to them, yet there are substantial cases, both in number and in importance, of grammatical

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relations holding between sentences. There are various ways out of the contradiction. One might deny that those are really grammatical relations which hold between sentences. That, however, is not plausible: the required agreement between “John” and a pronoun (“he”, not “she” or “it”) is of no different a provenance than the required agreement between “John” and the verb form of, say, “to drink” (“drinks” not “drink”). Or there is an even more drastic maneuver that might be undertaken. Let us grant that there is a rule of English which requires that, e.g., John be referred to as “he” and not as “she” or “it”-and that Lyons' correctly characterizes it as a rule of grammar. But what immediately follows is that, on Bloomfield's definition anyone who uttered “John went home. He had too much to drink.” would be uttering a single sentence. Since there exists a grammatical constraint in the context which requires that “he” be the pronoun employed and since grammar is internal to sentences, hence, despite appearances, there is but one sentence there. We should be happy that Lyons never contemplates that solution: he knows, as do we all, linguists too, that those two linguistic items, as written above, are two sentences and not parts of a single sentence. There is another extreme solution to be discussed in the next section. However, it should be obvious what the best way out of the contradiction is: to admit that the definition of a sentence in terms of grammar is mistaken. Grammatical relations exist both inside and outside sentences. A Bloomfieldian account of sentencehood, no matter how tempting to linguists, cannot be maintained. Before completely abandoning linguistics and its preferred account of what a sentence is, there is something further of large significance to be learned. I mentioned that Lyons introduces a fourth class of cases which turn out to be anomalous when seen in light of the idea that a sentence is the locus of all grammatical connections. "At this point we should perhaps mention a further category of utterances or parts of utterances which resemble 'incomplete' sentences in that they do not correspond directly to sentences generated by the grammar, but differ from them in that their description does not involve the application of the rules established to account for the vast mass of more 'normal' utterances. These are what de Saussure has called 'ready-made utterances' ('locutions toutes faites'): expressions which are learned as unanalysable wholes and employed on particular occasions by native speakers. An example from English is ‘How do you do?’, which, though it is conventionally punctuated as a question... [is], unlike genuine questions beginning How do you..., [not] constructed by means of the productive rules of English grammar.... From a strictly

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grammatical point of view such utterances are not profitably regarded as sentences, even though they are distributionally independent."25 The previous troublesome cases were linguistic forms which do not satisfy the proposed definition of a sentence but which are nonetheless sentences. Here the problem is that syntactically unanalysable entities (unanalyzable in grammatical theory) as “Good morning!” do satisfy the definition, that is, their internal arrangements are not shaped by features of the local conversational environment, but nonetheless Lyons, speaking for linguistics, does not think they should be regarded as sentences. Why the rejection even though they qualify under the projected account of what a sentence is? Because "their internal structure, unlike that of genuine sentences, is not accounted for by means of rules which specify the permissible combinations of words."26 This new kind of difficulty enables us to observe a further significant aspect of the Bloomfieldian definition. Under its auspices, not only must all grammatical connections be located within a sentence, but also a sentence must have internal connections which are shaped by grammatical rules. Hence any linguistic form which is a grammatically unanalyzable whole is necessarily not a sentence. That principle excludes from the domain of sentencehood not only the “ready-mades” but also (what we ordinarily call) one word sentences. On the grammatical account, understood as including this further proviso, such old favorites as “Slab!”, “Please!”, “Help!” will not be sentences. So, to use a modified example of Lyons', the reply “John.” to the question “Who rang?” fails to be a genuine sentence on two grounds: it is incomplete in that it must be understood in reference to some other sentence in the context, namely the question, but it also fails to be a sentence because it has no internal grammatical complexity. Lyons, in his usual accommodating manner, does produce some mechanism for allowing such cases to be sentences though they do not satisfy the aim of the definition and so are not sentences by strict right. "However, in a total description of the language, which brings together the phonological and the grammatical analysis, they might be classified as (grammatically unstructured) sentences, since they bear the same intonation contour as sentences generated by the grammar."27 Sentences they then are, though bastards. Earlier in this section I claimed that the two definitions of a sentence embodied in Blackburn's dictionary entry were incompatible. That can now be seen. The philosophers' account is put in terms of the smallest unit of communication, the linguists' in terms of the largest unit of grammar. Since “Hello!”, “Thanks.”, “John's.” (the last in context) are units of communication,

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they are, on the philosopher's view of things, unquestionably sentences-on the linguist's grammatical view they are not sentences except by special dispensation. There is no doubt that the philosophers' account is highly preferable. Still, as I asserted earlier, the account of what a sentence is which is commonly found in philosophical literature and worked into the dictionary entry by Blackburn is not itself right. For, given the consequences, while it is clearly better to understand the nature of a sentence in terms of units of communication rather than of units of grammar, the details of the contemporary philosophical answer make its preferred definition unacceptable. Sentence: the basic unit of communication, the smallest unit which can be used to say something. The objection to that is to the embedded notion of use. Sentences are not used to say things. I should point out that Blackburn's own account-"the unit of communication: the smallest entity whose production constitutes a message, such as an assertion, a command, or a question"-may or may not escape that objection. It is not clear what he means by "production"-is that use? Even if he can give some other explanation of producing a sentence than that of using it, I will later argue that Blackburn's more neutral version continues to misrepresent the relation of sentences to what is said.

2. Theoretical Linguistics and the Full Stop The going accounts of what a sentence is, in both current philosophy and current linguistics, will not do. Since an answer to “What is a sentence?” is crucial to settling whether sentences are truth-bearers, those failures to produce a correct account means that the inquiry requires a new orientation. Before so re-launching the investigation, a caveat must be entered. This and the two following sections shall treat of only written sentences and written communication (including, however, sentences written to be read aloud, declaimed, etc.) Arguments and issues about sentences in purely spoken communication will be dealt with in a later section of this chapter. That new start in the inquiry into sentencehood is best begun by paying attention to a feature of Lyons' predicament which has not yet been remarked upon. Despite maintaining that a sentence is, by definition, the largest unit of grammar, he still thinks that there are sentences which do not satisfy that definition. What is remarkable is that Lyons never exhibits the slightest doubt that certain linguistic forms are sentences, even though that certainty conflicts with his theoretical commitments. What is the basis of Lyons' complete confidence that those anomalous items are sentences?

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He takes it that a linguistic form such as “She arrived last night.” is a sentence. On what grounds? He says of such items, of all the theoretically anomalous cases, that they are "traditionally regarded as sentences",28 that they are "normally regarded as sentences".29 No one doubts that he is correct in that: what he picks out as sentences (apart from the theoretical difficulty such an identification causes a Bloomfieldian) would be thought of as sentences by all of us. What is odd, in the context of his work, is that Lyons never goes further in examining the "traditional" response, never asks what rationale the tradition supplies for regarding those linguistic forms as sentences. We can equally well ask: what justification does he himself have for regarding the problem cases as sentences? Imagine coming across the following passage in a novel. “John's. If she is to be believed. For she has said that she would do anything to prevent the marriage. Is it John's? No.” Each of the linguistic forms constituting that passage fails to be a sentence on the currently agreed upon definition of “sentence” in linguistics. Lyons, with not a doubt to the contrary (well, perhaps some doubt about the first and last as they have no internal grammatical complexity), considers them all to be sentences. What is the basis for that? The obvious answer is that he treats them as sentences because each item is marked with the punctuation appropriate to its being a sentence. The only plausible way to account for Lyons' unblinking resolution in holding that the theoretically anomalous linguistic forms are sentences is that he knew them to be sentences because they are so punctuated, with full stops (including periods, question marks and exclamation marks) and initial capitalization. (Since the objects of interest here are sentences, I shall simplify matters by using 'punctuation' to refer only to those marks which determine sentences.) Of course, when confronting the contradiction between his theory of sentencehood and his recognition that there are sentences which do not satisfy that theory, there were several options open to Lyons. The ones he selected are, I have already argued, unacceptable. To allow some grammatical relations between sentences, even if those relations are called “secondary”, is to violate the point of the definition; to realize that his solution to the anomalies has that consequence of being false to the theory and then to attempt to escape it by invoking different senses of “sentence' is an evasion. There are other options which he did not notice. The possibility of claiming that the external relations between sentences which are at issue are not really grammatical relations is implausible. The sensible option, I have urged, is to stop offering Bloomfieldian definitions of “sentence”. That solution adopted, as it shall henceforth be here, the issue of what a sentence is arises anew. To get solutions started on the right track in that

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project, I should like to consider two further options not contemplated by Lyons as to his difficulty as they shed light on the understanding of sentencehood. Faced with a case such as “John was working last night. He will have to again tonight.”, Lyons could have argued that since there are grammatical connections between “John” and “He”, and also between “working” and the verb of the second item, and since grammar is necessarily internal to sentences, there must really be, no matter how it appears, only one sentence there. However, the possibility of counting the number of sentences in such a case differently from what we normally do did not occur to Lyons. I can only assume that that logical possibility went unnoticed because he recognized that, despite the attractions of Bloomfieldian theory, the punctuation shows that there are two sentences there, not one. There is another radical move which is also logically possible. Lyons might have adopted a scorched earth policy in the spirit of Quine and declared that since such linguistic forms as “She is out running.” do not meet the definition preferred by the scientific linguist, it, in fact all the supposed anomalous cases, simply are not sentences. Bag the tradition and how we normally regard those items. There are no constraints on what the theorist is allowed. Once again, a logically possible move did not come to Lyons' attention. He seems to have assumed that his task, the linguist's task, is to give a theoretical account of the nature of those entities which we traditionally, normally, identify as sentences. And surely, how it is punctuated is normally the crucial feature in identifying a linguistic form as a sentence. Lyons, in brief, was caught between a theoretical commitment and an extra-theoretical understanding that a linguistic form punctuated in a certain way is a sentence. Throughout this last I have been speaking of Lyons, though not of his idiosyncracies. Linguistics has accepted his position on these matters. The conflict between what linguistic theory commits them to and what linguists, having imbibed the pre-theoretical tradition, recognize to be a sentence when confronted with particular cases, namely as a form bearing certain marks of punctuation, continues, though with less clarity than found in Lyons. Moreover, the tradition referred to by Lyons is not merely that of the linguists. What leads Lyons, linguists, you, me, to say that there are two sentences in “Susan is diligent. She won't put it off.”? Clearly, the marks of punctuation. Whoever wrote those words marked them as falling into two sentences. If asked to count the number of sentences on a page, any person counting, who is not gripped by Bloomfieldian theory (and I think even most of those who are when asked in a non-theoretical context), would reply

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that there are those two at least and would so count because they were entitled by the conventions of punctuation, by full stops and capitalization. And if the words were organized thusly, “Susan is diligent and won't put it off.”, we would all agree that there is but one sentence there and that for precisely the same reason. In theoretical moods, linguists have little, and little good, to say about connections between punctuation and sentencehood. David Crystal, in perhaps the most full account of these matters in recent linguistics, actually mentions the possibility of defining “sentence” in terms of punctuation. Although I will postpone examining his reasons for rejecting the possibility, his opening words need to be quoted now. "In some written languages, it is possible to arrive at a working definition of 'sentence' by referring to the punctuation one is taught in school."30 To put that into contemporary philosophical idiom, the idea that punctuation plays a role in determining what a sentence is is a piece of folk linguistics.31 Other than in Crystal's discussion, punctuation is mentioned in writings on sentencehood only as an afterthought.32 Given the grammatical account of a sentence favored by linguists, punctuation can only be a consequence of a expression's being a sentence. "...each segment in it that is traditionally regarded as a separate sentence (and punctuated as such)...."33 While linguists have little regard for punctuation in their theoretical work, I have been arguing that they have imbibed “folk linguistics”, that they have (unrecognized) extra-theoretical commitments, and so when it comes to their analytical practice they, as we shall see, again and again treat punctuation as a determinant of sentencehood. Up to now I have inferred that this is the basis for Lyons' acceptance of items as sentences in the face of his theoretical inclinations. Let me support that conclusion by examining a case where that unspoken reliance on punctuation is obvious. P.H. Matthews, working his way toward a version of Bloomfield, considers the example “They were drunk. Certainly I was.” About that, Matthews says "a grammarian34 will again establish two sentences.... On what grounds is this justified? Plainly we must seek some principle, by which drunk is connected to were, or certainly to I or I was, in a manner different from the connection between the sentences as wholes, or between drunk and certainly in particular."35 How does Matthews know that there must be a grammatical connection ("a principle of continuity") between “drunk” and “were” and not between “drunk” and “certainly”? If the first full stop and ensuing capitalization were omitted so that the sequence of words he provides read “They were drunk certainly I was” and we were assigned the task of organizing that sequence of words into two sentences, there would be two possible arrangements: the one which was initially given

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but also “They were drunk certainly. I was.” That pattern is less likely to occur than the other, is somewhat more grammatically awkward, yet it is grammatically acceptable. Contexts can be invented in which it quite natural. As a consequence of there being that alternative organization of the string of words into sentences, the only reason Matthews, linguists, have for speaking of one grammatical connection rather than another in that example, is that they are guided by punctuation. With the original punctuation, “Certainly” must sort syntactically with “I” and not with “drunk” only because the full stop and capitalization shows Matthews where one sentence ends and the other begins. Yet he slides right over the role of punctuation when he claims that it is for grammatical reasons that we organize that, and other word strings, into sentences. Matthews concludes, relegating punctuation to a consequence, "Hence the grammarian's division, and the written full stop corresponding to it."36 Every reader is by now aware that I intend to argue that, since punctuation plays a central role in determining what (linguistic forms) are sentences, punctuation must occupy a key position in any proper account of what sentences are. The theoretical linguist advocates the inferential formula “That linguistic form is a sentence and in consequence is so punctuated”. I shall be turning that upside down: the correct formula is “That linguistic form is punctuated as a sentence and in consequence normally is one”. The practice of linguists, though not their theories, gives reason for holding that sentences are those linguistic items which are appropriately punctuated. It is necessary to produce some other reasons for that view.

3. Writing and Sentences Imagine a tribe, a community of speakers, into which a written alphabet has just been introduced. The people in this community have lived a quite normal human life, having a normal human language and communicating in the broad range of ways in which normal human groups communicate. All that they have lacked, by way of language, is a writing system. Suppose that the manner of representing their language in writing to which they have just been introduced resembles our own in some respects. Imagine now, having acquired the fundamentals of a system of writing, that a member of the community writes, in recounting her adventures of the previous day, Iwentfishingyesterdaydownbythegrayrocksomeofmyfriendswereasleepintheir...

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Someone might point out to this writer, to this tribe, that readers would be able to read more efficiently, with less effort and work, if they adopted a simple convention: in writing they should put a space between the different words. The tribe thought that an excellent rule and adopted it. They would now write that same account of a day's activity as: i went fishing yesterday down by the gray rock some of my friends were asleep in their ... There are still problems for the reader. Was the writer saying that she went fishing yesterday and that, further, down by the gray rock some of her friends were asleep-or is what was said that the person went fishing down by the gray rock and, further, that some of her friends were asleep? To solve those problems of ambiguity would it not be wise, said some clever person, to indicate where one stops saying one thing and starts saying another? What is needed to accomplish that is some additional convention. Since the tribe had solved a similar problem by inserting spaces between words, might not the device be used again? Someone else remarked that, handwriting (or stone chiseling) being as variable as it is, it might be better to use a completely different marker to enable the reader to distinguish one statement from the next. How about capitalizing the beginning of each claim and putting a special mark at its end, say a “.”, a full stop? The tribe accepted that rule. So now the account of the fishing expedition is to be written: “I went fishing yesterday down by the gray rock. Some of my friends were asleep. In their....” The tribe further agreed to call those groups of written words which begin with a capital and which end with a period a sentence. I have just told one of those genetic stories which philosophers create to make a logical point, even if some times we forget that the story is about logic and not history. Before going on to the conceptual issues, in the circumstances it is worth saying something about some points of history. For the story as told above does bear some resemblance to the actual course of events, taking the history of the development of writing in Greek and Latin as the relevant domain. Written language was (is) introduced into human communities which already had (have) a spoken language. Arriving at an alphabetic system was not nearly the end of the process of coming to write: a large number of further conventions which we take completely for granted had to be agreed upon. The direction in which writing should go (right to left, up or down), what to do when the end of a line was reached (go back to the start, turn as an ox plowing a field and head the other way), whether and how to mark

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out one written word from another (leave it to the reader to figure it out, draw a line between words, leave a space): these are some of the issues to be settled, even if not immediately, upon institution of a writing system. Some such issues, including that of whether and how to distinguish one written word and how to distinguish one thing said from another, were resolved by what we call 'punctuation', a set of conventions employed to assist a reader in the comprehension of a text. Anyone interested in some of the historical details, using Greek and Latin as test cases, can consult some quite good books.37 Since none of these books asks the same questions as I do, they are often silent upon particular historical points relevant to the story above. That is why I recommend the books generally rather than trying to quote at length in partial substantiation of the historicity of my invented tale. What is definitely not in those histories of classical paleography is the last line of the genetic story: that the tribe came to refer to those blocks of written words marked out with the capitalization and full stop devices as sentences. Not that that idea is incompatible with the historical development of Greek and Latin writing in so far as we know it. Rather, those working in paleography have shown no interest in the theoretical question of what constitutes a sentence. In so far as they are trained in linguistics, they no doubt would accept linguistic orthodoxy if the question should come up. That final sentence of the story, on the other hand, expresses what I have called “the folk linguistic view of a sentence”, the idea that being a sentence is essentially tied to conventions of punctuation. That idea fits very nicely into the historical story, providing a quite natural way of concluding it. However, that the narrative flows smoothly even when “folk linguistics” is incorporated within it does not adequately substitute for a more explicit development and defense of the thesis which connects sentencehood essentially with punctuation conventions. In providing that more philosophical account, I shall not attempt to follow fully the canons of analytic philosophy since Socrates. There will be no definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions and no attempt to consider every possible counter-example and show how it is to be excluded. I am too much of a Wittgensteinian to engage in those maneuvers. Still, what I shall do has some likeness to longstanding assumptions about how to set out a philosophically adequate account of a concept. First, it must be remembered what the genetic story expresses, namely that punctuation has a point. Punctuation is introduced into a written language to assist readers in understanding texts.38 In particular, the aim of those conventions which bring sentences into being is that of enabling readers to determine where one thing said stops and another begins.39 As

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with fences, those boundary markers which create sentences show both what falls outside and help to organize what is inside. Secondly, whatever is appropriately punctuated is normally, and for that reason, a sentence. In English, since initial capitalization and a concluding full stop (period, question mark, exclamation point) are the conventional signs used for sentence punctuation, written linguistic forms in English which bear those signs will, because they are so punctuated, normally be sentences. Here, the use of the word 'normally' in what used to be in philosophical discourse the statement of a sufficient condition marks a difference between this account and pre-Wittgenstein philosophical practices. Still, treating the thesis as the statement of a norm does not preclude that activity beloved of analytic philosophers, the examination of putatively contrary cases. Suppose that someone writes down on a piece of paper a series of words, say “tuna, soccer, asphyxiated, belongs” and then writes again thusly: “Tuna. Soccer. Asphyxiated. Belongs.” Has she not, on my account of sentences, thereby converted a string of words into a string of sentences by doing nothing more than marking them with sentence punctuation signs? Nothing more? What is the difference between the English word “slab” and the call “Slab!”-or between the word “gavagai” and the tribesman's “Gavagai!”? Viewed narrowly, the difference is just a matter of whether the punctuation marks are used or not. More broadly, their use locates the resultant linguistic item in a new context. By so marking the item, it is indicated that in that occurrence the word is to be understood as functioning as a complete move in the communication game. Dressed in that manner, the word is to be understood as the saying of something, the making of a request to be brought a slab, the identification of some thing or, perhaps, of something. So too with the items on the objector's list. In their second incarnation, with the full trappings of sentencehood, we are invited to imagine them as, for instance, responses to a list of questions on a missing memo: e.g. “What kind of fish is an albacore? What sport does Leonel Messi play?....” Or, in the case as described, we might say “It looks as if the person were writing down a list of words and then shifted to writing them as sentences.” The objection is not radical enough to make the desired point. Suppose, instead of that short sequence, that we discover a longish text in which every single word is written with a capital letter and followed by a full stop. There are pages and pages of that. Are those sentences? Possibly, but possibly not. The text could be, for instance, the result of practice in correctly marking single word sentences. The interesting case, however, is this. Suppose it is realized that one can read through the text as a connected whole, with some

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of the capitals being genuine and some of the full stops being genuine but the vast majority being irrelevant to the sense of the whole. Whereas the original text looks so: “Four. Score. And. Seven. Years. Ago.” and so on, we realize that it can be read “Four score and seven years ago....” Now, were what appeared in the original text to be counted as sentences? I for one would be prepared to say “No”, that for some unknown reason, perhaps acting on a strange convention or punctuating it thusly as a joke, the author or the scribe marked the text as if it contained a large number of single word sentences. Here then is a counter-example: not all linguistic forms bearing the requisite punctuation are sentences. On the other hand, that very case helps establish that normally sentences are what are appropriately punctuated. For what would be initially presumed from the look of the text, is that it is composed of a large number of single word sentences. It is that presumption, that punctuation conventions establish the existence of a sentence, which was eventually defeated in the particular context by a different hypothesis. It is important to observe that what is relied upon in the reasoning about such cases is the background recognition that the aim of sentence punctuation is to mark out something being said. To think of “Four.” or “Tuna.” as sentences is not simply to think of them as bearing the proper marks of punctuation, but to imagine them as something that might be said. When we take “Tuna.” to be a sentence rather than a word, we do so because its punctuation indicates that we are to conceive of it being said (for instance) in reply to a question (e.g. “What kind of fish...?”) When we take “Four.” not to be a sentence we do so because, despite the punctuation it bears, it was surely not intended by its creator to be a complete communicative move, not the saying of something, but rather as a part of the longer statement “Four score and seven....” Consider a different type of case: “He went home on Wednesday she. Followed a day later.” Clearly enough, the author of that was attempting to make two intelligible claims: that he went home Wednesday and that she followed a day later. Somehow it came to pass that the actual punctuation produces a problematic text. A scribe, perhaps, made a mindless mistake in copying. After discerning what were (no doubt) the intended claims, we emend the text. The deviant item is, thus, not regarded as a sentence by textual editors in spite of its punctuation. Nonetheless the original gave us pause: that there is a problem about the text is the result of the occurrence of punctuation which indicates that here there be a sentence. The original text was corrected by realizing, first, that there is nothing intelligible to be said by “He went home Wednesday she.” and, secondly, that there is both an alternative punctuation which makes the whole and its parts intelligible

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and a possible explanation (a drunken scribe) of why the mistake in the text occurred. There is no sufficient condition for being a sentence. Being properly punctuated is the norm for a linguistic form's being a sentence. Yet cases are imaginable in which we would be entitled to a judgment that something is not a sentence even if it wears the correct I.D. tags. A significant feature of the reasoning which entitles us to that conclusion is a reference to the aim of sentence punctuation, the establishment of boundaries of things said. Similarly, being appropriately punctuated is not a necessary condition for being a sentence. Normally, however, only linguistic items which are so punctuated can be sentences. In both ancient Greek and Latin texts, the last sentence of a book does not conclude with a full stop.40 Why? The function of the full stop is to separate things said. If that function is taken literally, then since there are not two remarks to separate at the close of a book, the piece of punctuation is pointless. Yet surely that final sequence of words should be counted a sentence (as I did above) even though it is missing the mark that normally makes a sentence. Why should we so classify it? We can reason thusly: we know what the point of the convention is; at the end of the text there are not two remarks to distinguish; therefore, since the relevant confusion is not possible, there is no need to mark the text with the normal aid to understanding. Hence, despite the absence of the punctuation, the item can be counted a sentence. Suppose in a book, which otherwise follows the normal conventions of sentence creation, we find the following passage: “Keep out of direct sunlight. unlight causes the material to deteriorate swiftly Use in less than a year.” Is not that group of words in the middle a sentence even though it has no sentence punctuation? The plausible answer is: it is a sentence. A straight-forward explanation of the missing punctuation can be offered: the capitalized first letter has faded, been erased, etc. And the full stop following “swiftly” has also gone the way of all matter. The surrounding forms in the text all exhibit normal punctuation and there is a plausible explanation why the middle linguistic sequence has lost its punctuation. Hence, it should be reckoned a sentence also.41 Bearing the marks of punctuation is, then, not necessary to being a sentence. However, organizing units of written communication by such boundary signs is the norm for being a sentence. One role such a norm plays is that any linguistic form lacking appropriate punctuation can be called a sentence only if there is some special explanation for so classifying it given the presumption that nothing is a sentence without proper punctuation. Moreover, and most importantly, the cases of special explanation which

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entitle us to refer to a non-punctuated entity as a sentence are of the sort above. What must especially be guarded against is the idea that we can think of some unpunctuated linguistic forms as a sentence simply because they would be grammatically acceptable sentences when occurring elsewhere. Think of the following. “We are coming tonight, although it will be late, in order that the papers will be signed on time.” Someone infatuated with the linguist's grammatical definition of a sentence (though actual linguists, in practice, would not do so) could insist that there are four sentences there, namely “we are coming tonight”, “it will be late”, “the papers will be signed on time”-and the entire item. The internal forms are grammatically perfect and could, elsewhere, be a full communicative move. Nevertheless, here, in the linguistic context as given, three of the items are not sentences. There is a single sentence, albeit a complex one with several clauses (sentence-like forms)42, determined by the initial capitalization and the full stop. It is illegitimate to go about plucking a group of words out of the middle of something appropriately marked a sentence and declaring it also to be a sentence. Why stop at groups of words? Why not a large mass of single word sentences? It is equally misguided to declare that the ancient Greeks, and other linguistic communities, before they developed the idea of punctuation and thus of sentencehood, wrote sentences. Voltaire's M. Jourdain may have spoken prose all his life without knowing so, but sentences do not, except in exceptional cases as above, exist without punctuation.

4. Consequences and Benefits Sentences come into being when a community adopts for its written language a convention by which writers of that language can, for the convenience of readers, exhibit where one thing said leaves off and another begins. Of course, not every written language need establish those conventions and thus not every written language need have sentences. And in fact not all languages do have conventional marks corresponding to our full stop and initial capitalization. Greek and Latin were written long before such conveniences were seized upon. Asian languages generally, including Chinese, have a checkered history of adopting such conventions.43 A radically different type of writing system, Egyptian hieroglyphics, had no role for the full stop. Those facts are widely announced by linguists. All that is different here is that I have argued that in the absence of a system of punctuation, a person writing in that language is not producing sentences. What follows from that has a major impact on the contention that sentences are truth-bearers. For if sentences are what is true or false and

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written Chinese, say, does not have sentences, then one cannot make truthclaims in written Chinese. Since that is a most extraordinary thing to be committed to, we should make haste to deny that sentences are truthbearers. Even when a writing system has instituted sentence-creating conventions, those marks need not be universally resorted to by those employing the particular writing system. I remember seeing in the museum at Fort George in Scotland an eighteenth-century letter from a young woman to her brother who was garrisoned there. She wrote in an English version of scripto continua, with no separation between words and with no sentence punctuation, etc., even though for English such conventions had been in operation for a very long time. Yet, if you take the time to puzzle out her letter (those aids to reading are so useful), it is found that she is telling her brother quite a lot, passing on a great deal of information, expressing her love and care, in short saying many things. There is not, though, a sentence in the house. Along with such cases of individual deviance, no doubt produced through ignorance of the reigning convention, are cases of systematic exception from the requirements of punctuation within a language. For instance, consider the sign in a market “BREAD”. That is a piece of written communication. It says something, roughly “The bread is here”. If the sign is actually located above the tomatoes, we can complain about it in the idiom of falsity. (“There's no bread there, this is not the bread section-why can't they get things right around here?”) But that sign is not, such signs are not, typically at least, punctuated. Is there a sentence there? I see no good reason to say so. David Crystal, in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, prints some pictures of signs, one on a gate which reads “PLEASE SHUT THE GATE” and another which reads going down, in differently sized and differently colored type, “ FIRE PRECAUTIONS

THIS BUILDING IS PROTECTED THROUGHOUT BY SMOKE DETECTORS

PLEASE DO NOT SMOKE Crystal says of the pictured signs "These signs ... are presumably sentences, but they do not follow the expected rules of punctuation."44 I have argued that, on the contrary, they are presumably not sentences, since they do not follow the expected rules of punctuation. The situation seems to me this: the convention of marking our (English) writing so that sentences result has not been extended to all types of written discourse, not even all cases of saying things which are true or false (e.g. “THIS BUILDING IS

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PROTECTED THROUGHOUT BY FIRE DETECTORS”). When there is no need to use punctuation marks to separate different things said, as in the notices above where the items are either presented singly or occupy individual lines, then the devices may be, and usually are, omitted and the resulting form is not then a sentence, although it may be a perfectly effective piece of communication, even the saying of something either true or false (is or is not the building protected by fire detectors?) At least some languages, including English, have developed in such a way that in certain areas of discourse, in signs for instance, one can say things without benefit of sentences. That is a chief reason why Blackburn's account of a sentence as “the basic unit of communication” is misguided: it suggests that there must be a sentence present for communication to occur, for something to be said. That is not so. It is not true of written Chinese, of the girl who wrote a letter to her brother, of a variety of signs in a language which in other contexts demands sentences with full regalia. There are other highly sophisticated pieces of writing in which the (English language) norms of organizing an extended text in a large number of sentences are objects of rebellion. Consider the most important case, that of James Joyce. Those philosophers and linguists who are friends of sentences really need to contemplate Chapter 18 of Ulysses, the Penelope chapter, Molly Bloom's famous soliloquy. In the new Gabler text of Ulysses, Chapter 18 begins with "Yes because he never did a thing...” and continues for 1610 lines, roughly 35 pages, ending with a full stop “...and yes I said yes I will Yes." In line 747, the text is broken by a full stop (and line 748 begins with a capital). There is not another use of a full stop until that final one in line 1610. How many sentences are there in Chapter 18? If one goes by the normal marks of sentence punctuation, the correct answer is “Two”. However, Joyce himself gave a different count: "There are eight sentences in the episode."45 How does he obtain a count of eight? Some of the text's lines end before reaching the right-hand margin and the start of the next line is indented. That is, Joyce employs the normal punctuation marks for a paragraph and does so eight times. On only two of those occasions does he also use a full stop and initial capital, precisely at line 747/748 and at the end of the text. Yet, given his count of sentences, he must intend the paragraphing punctuation to function also as a sign of sentence ending and commencing. Realizing that, we also realize (and that is surely what Joyce wanted to get us to see) that normally the marks of paragraph ending and commencing occur exactly where the marks of sentence beginning and ending also occur. The full stop and initial capitalization are redundant when they coincide with the ends and beginnings of paragraphs. (Yet, even after

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Joyce has pointed this out we, in normal texts, plunge ahead doing the job twice, using redundant markings.) Thus, the chapter does consist of eight sentences, though most are not marked with the normal conventional sentence indicating devices. At least some critics of Ulysses think themselves entitled to say that the Penelope episode contains more, many more, than eight sentences.46 That is quite absurd, a consequence of thinking that sentences should be defined as the basic unit of grammar. Although we can accept Joyce's correction of our initial impression which is based upon the usual sentence markings, that there are only two sentences in the chapter, we do so because he has provided us with a comprehensible alternative device which determines the sentences. Both he (Joyce clearly holds the view argued here, that sentences are the result of certain forms of punctuation) and we can now agree on a count of eight sentences. To urge, however, that the author has a very badly mistaken view of how many sentences his carefully crafted chapter contains is unacceptable. It renders his literary ambitions pointless. Joyce took it that he could represent in writing “the stream of consciousness” and that one does not find in that stream much that can be called “sentences”. That aim may fail, but not because there occur in the chapter, unrecognized by him, many more sentences than he intended.47 In the course of those eight sentences Molly Bloom thinks many things, has many thoughts, most of which flow into each other. The lesson here to be learned goes beyond what I have been pointing out with the previous stories about Chinese, a girl from Scotland, and signs. There I was trying to show, in various ways, how things are said in the absence of sentences. In the Ulysses chapter, unlike Chinese, one finds sentences, but there too there is no one-to-one correspondence between a sentence and something said. Joyce constructs sentences yet the sentences are not, and are not intended to be, “basic units of communication”. I must point out that lack of numerical correspondence in order to prevent a misunderstanding: although the main function of the boundary markers which define sentences is to draw lines between things said, writing in English (and in other languages, Western at least) has come to be less and less rigorous in the pursuit of that aim, has moved further away from having sentences stand in a perfect correspondence with things said. Post-Joycean modernist literature has wondered “Why did Joyce have any sentences in his chapter?” In consequence of not finding sentences a necessity, modernist poems, for instance, are written without any punctuation, without sentences at all, almost (in that respect) as if they were being written in Chinese. Consider the opening of W.S. Merwin's recent narrative poem The Folding Cliffs.48

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Climbing in the dark she felt the small stones turn along the spine of the path whose color kept rising in her mind burned-in color moment of rust dried blood color other color gone color by day and she knew what color was there when she could not see it and when one of the stars was the darkness before any breath of daylight and the way was in her feet again the star of Kao'ea rushed between clouds when the dawn wind came toward her across the ridges of the mountain carrying the scent of water from the peak of Waialele At a high twist of the trail down to the left behind her over the naked roots of the slope and the widening hollow of Waiaka where the folds of the mountain were still touched by the moon ... And so it goes. At not one place in the entire long poem can one find what is definitely a sentence, that is, a linguistic form bearing the conventional marks which proclaim it to be a sentence. There are a few items about which one might argue, a capital occurring (as above in the line "At a high twist ...") though never a full stop. Of course, one did not have to wait for the twentieth century and modernist writers to start weakening the arrangement whereby sentences are conventional devices aimed at showing where one thing said stops and another starts. Whenever one could employ in writing the logical device of conjunction and thereby produce sentences of the form “Jack and Jill went up the hill.”, then there was no hope of retaining a perfect correspondence between things said and sentences. When the aim, the point, of marking a text into sentences starts to be weakened in that way, a sentence becomes even more only what is punctuated thusly. And so in recent literature we find it possible to write, in a conversational manner, “I'll be there tomorrow. If I come at all.” That consists of two sentences but only one thing is said: namely, on the condition that I come at all, I'll be arriving tomorrow. As with any standard “if-then” claim, neither of the clauses is itself asserted. I would like to note here that philosophers and logicians who would now agree that there is but one sentence in “If men are mortal and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal.” had best not claim that sentences are truthbearers. For “men are mortal” is not a sentence there and so would be neither true nor false and cannot then assist in truth-functionally determining the truth-value of the entire conditional. (Similarly, that same fact, slightly differently described, counts against the possibility of “what is said” having a truth-value, since no one there is saying “Men are mortal”. There will be more of that in a later chapter.)

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Having initiated my case for “the punctuation theory” with a criticism of the orthodox view in linguistics, it is only fair that I allow the linguists an opportunity to criticize my account. As I remarked earlier, the literature of linguistics is not rife with anti-punctuation arguments. However, David Crystal does at least sketch out the case against treating sentences as appropriately punctuated linguistic forms. Let me quote his argument in full, then turn to evaluation of it. First comes the idea that while many might hold the punctuation theory, they are but “folk linguist's”, misled by their education. "In some written languages, it is possible to arrive at a working definition of 'sentence' by referring to the punctuation one is taught to use in school. Thus, an English sentence for many people 'begins with a capital letter and ends with a full stop' (or some other mark of 'final' punctuation).” What can be said in criticism of the idea that sentences are what results from punctuation? "The problem is that many languages (e.g. in Asia) do not make use of such features; and even in those that do, punctuation is not always a clear guide. It may be omitted (in notices and legal documents, for example); and it proves difficult to prescribe rules governing its use other than 'good practice'. People therefore often disagree about the best way to punctuate a text. In some manuals of style, it is recommended that one should not end a sentence before a coordinating conjunction (and, or, but). But there are often cases where an author might feel it necessary - for reasons of emphasis, perhaps - to do the opposite."49 There are two reasons presented there for not taking punctuation as the defining feature of a sentence. Start with the second. Crystal claims that punctuation is not a clear, certain, guide to the existence of sentences. There are two types of failure: contexts (e.g. signs) in which the punctuation is omitted and secondly disagreement about where the marks should be employed in a text. Both types of failure come to the same thing. Notice that Crystal does not complete his claim when he says that punctuation is not "always a clear guide". A clear guide to what? Obviously he means not a clear guide to where the sentences are! That presupposes that the sentences are there, in the text, despite the absence of any punctuation or despite disagreement as to where to insert punctuation. What provides the support for that criticism is the linguist's notion that sentences are to be defined as grammatical entities. Find an atom of grammar and you have located a sentence. Because Crystal's criticism begs the question of what a sentence is, it cuts no ice against my account. Further, that there can be variability in marking texts into sentences does not ruin the idea of a sentence: why must

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“sentence” be the sort of notion which has necessary and sufficient conditions which must be adhered to by all comers? I have already argued that there are many oddities about sentences, that there are no necessary and sufficient conditions for being a sentence, that the relation between where punctuation is employed and what is said is subject to historical variation. It was not the folk who seized upon the notion of a sentence and made it so central to linguistic and philosophical theories. If this essentially practical notion does not satisfy theoretical requirements, don't lean so heavily upon it. Crystal's first objection to the punctuation theory is that not all languages employ sentence punctuation. I have already cited that piece of information as an objection to the idea that sentences are truth-bearers. Crystal obviously reasons differently: “Not all languages have punctuation. Punctuation cannot then be the defining feature of sentencehood, for all languages must have sentences.” Why must that be so? Why must Chinese and Egyptian hieroglyphics have sentences? Why must all stretches of written English, for that matter, be composed of sentences? The answer lies in the disciplinary matrix of linguistics. Linguistics, whether as a matter of normal practice derived from its historical roots in the study of grammatical patterns or, more recently and less widely shared, as an explicitly argued theoretical stance (Chomsky), attempts to do without the concept of saying something. In the absence of such a notion of communication, linguistics has nothing to occupy the central place in its theoretical structure other than the idea of linguistic patterns, that is to say sentences. And so, as with Crystal, there must be sentences for something to count as language: sentences are the ultimate item in the arsenal of linguistic analysis and understanding.50 Since the most general concept available to the linguist is that of a sentence (treated as a unit of grammar), it can then appear as if the entire point of uttering words, whether written or spoken, is the production of a sentence. Consider the following claim: "Speakers of a language do not have total freedom in combining words to make sentences."51 That way of putting things is frequently encountered in linguistics. (It is also of course common enough in contemporary philosophy, although the philosopher would normally be assuming that a sentence so made will then be used to say something, to communicate.) Compare that manner of expression with the preferable, i.e. correct, alternative: ‘Speakers of a language do not have total freedom in combining words to say things.' The normal aim of human language use is not to produce sentences, as the original version has it, but to say something. However, not having that concept in their theoretical repertoire and having nothing but the notion of a sentence (grammatically

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construed) to perform that theoretical role, linguists end up talking as if the point of uttering words is the production of grammatical patterns. Here we might think of Wittgenstein's imagining of a tribe who thought of (what we would call) mathematical equations as wallpaper designs. Those linguists who talk as if the point of talking were to produce sentences, which are, for them, grammatical designs, are very like the members of Wittgenstein's imagined tribe.52 If one relies on a theoretical background which assumes that the point of using language is the production of grammatical patterns called sentences, then one will inevitably think that there must be sentences constructible in every language and that, on any particular occasion of the intelligible use of language, a sentence must be produced. Hence Crystal on the necessity of sentences and also on his argument as to why the machinery of punctuation cannot define sentencehood. On the other hand, once the distinction between a sentence and what is said is recognized and once the idea of communication, of saying things, is seen to be the necessary feature of language, then one can cease claiming that every language and every intelligible use of language must consist of sentences.

5. Talking in Sentences Many pages have been sacrificed above in examining the relationship between written sentences and punctuation. Discussing the place of sentences in talk will not take nearly so much time. "Speech” here shall refer to talking, to what linguists sometimes call “spontaneous conversation”. Speech, so defined, may well include some decently formal venues, such as certain professorial lectures,53 but it does not include reading aloud from a text or reciting a memorized text, which are pieces of writing made audible. One might complain about the argument in the preceding section thusly: 'You claim that with the development of a written language, a people may come to adopt a system of conventions which brings sentences into being. But you also said that prior to a written language those same people spoke. Surely their spoken language already contained sentences. Hence sentences could not have come into being as add-ons of (certain) writing systems.' I take it that the complaint does not mean that prior to the origin of a system of writing, a given language community must have the concept of a sentence and that they then merely transfer that notion into their new writing system. In large measure, that is a historical hypothesis that all languages contain the concept of a sentence, a hypothesis which goes far beyond any available evidence. Rather, the immediately interesting feature of the objection is the claim that sentences do, must, appear in all spoken language

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even though speakers may not know that their talk is characterizable in terms of sentences. The situation is again similar to that of M. Jourdain: people always speak in sentences without knowing that they do so. The objection turns out to be the equivalent for speech of the claim we observed Crystal making about written language, that sentences are necessary features of language. However, contemporary linguists are unanimous (?) that the matter is not as straight-forward as the objection makes it. As a sample, see Crystal: "It is even more difficult to identify sentences in speech, where the units of rhythm and intonation often do not coincide with the places where full stops would occur in writing."54 Matthews: "One such unit is the sentence itself, though in normal speech the cues are often lacking."55 Palmer: "Even if we have learnt by some means or other at school to put our full stops and our capital letters in the right places and even if, therefore, it is possible to establish just how many sentences there are on the page, it would be a mistake to think that speech is equally made up of sentences."56 All such passages have a most revealing structure. In response to the suggestion that there are sentences in speech, writers in linguistics immediately raise the question of what would be the equivalent in speech of the full stop in writing. The first thought as to what functions in speech as the equivalent of (sentence) punctuation devices are the length of pauses between words-longer ones function as sentence boundaries-and intonation contours-a rise or fall of pitch indicates that a sentence has been completed. It is thus amusing that, when faced with the questions of whether there are sentences in speech and of locating them, linguists unselfconsciously respond as if the defining characteristic of a sentence is the bearing of certain marks of punctuation and so start looking for boundary markers that might correspond to the full stop. I have encountered no writer in linguistics who has ever responded to the issue by using the official theory: “Sentences in spoken language? By definition a sentence is the largest linguistic form with grammatical complexity. So let us look in speech for those maximal clumps of grammar.” That is just not done. Rather, when it comes to this particular issue, linguists (again) ignore their official theory and respond as if punctuation is definitive of sentencehood. It does seem plausible that length of pause and tone contours are the equivalents in speech of full stops. Those are likely what we resort to in marking out sentences when, e.g., reading out loud. Nevertheless, what seems plausible initially is not borne out by what is found in actual speech, as Crystal reports above. When speech is recorded on tape and the pauses measured with a stop-watch or when intonation and pauses are observed by oscilloscope, spectogram or other machines, it is discovered that there is no

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substantial correspondence between those purported marks of spoken sentencehood and where full stops would be employed were the spoken linguistic form to be written out. Pauses of various length occur in speech at many different points-tone units do not squarely correspond to what in writing would be the end of a sentence. Palmer: "...although sections of speech are often marked by intonation, it is not the case that every intonation tune will mark a stretch of speech that, if written, would begin with a capital letter and end with a full stop."57 The result of empirical investigation has been that there are no markers in speech which can be flat out identified with the full stop in writing. For someone who has argued as I have, that sentences are defined in terms of boundary markers and their background functions, the fairly obvious conclusion is that in speech, in informal spontaneous conversation, there are no sentences.58 Prior to considering that conclusion, it is important to notice what writers in linguistics do when faced with the empirical discovery that one cannot identify any features of spoken language with the marks of sentencehood found in written language. Crystal, in the passage quoted above where that discovery is announced, continues "In informal speech, in particular, constructions can lack the careful organization we associate with the written language.... It is not that conversation lacks grammar; it is simply that the grammar is of a rather different kind, with sentences being particularly difficult to demarcate."59 Palmer, after remarking on the impossibility of identifying intonation curves with full stops, continues "Moreover a great deal of spoken language does not consist of sentences in the sense in which the term is understood for writing at all. Much of it is made up of incomplete, interrupted, unfinished, or even quite chaotic sentences. Speech may be made up of utterances-separate bits-but utterances seldom correspond to sentences."60 While the initial response to whether there are sentences in speech was to search for punctuation equivalents, after the failure to find them, as a fallback position, Crystal (Palmer too) resorts to linguistic orthodoxy and begins thinking of sentences as grammatical units. Surprisingly, though, it also turns out that there are also problems with using grammar as a guide to the identification of spoken sentences. It is a staple of contemporary linguistics that spontaneous conversation is, from a grammatical point of view, at best messy ("constructions can lack the careful organization we associate with the written language"-"incomplete, interrupted, unfinished, or even quite chaotic", "separate bits"). Neither reliance upon boundary markers nor resort to grammar establishes beyond doubt that there are sentences in speech.

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Philosophers who have elevated sentences to a major theoretical role have not realized that in linguistics there is a significant current which is running against thinking that sentences occur in speech. Crystal, not in the wishy-washy passage quoted but in an important paper, presents the alternative, only hinted at above. Suppose it is assumed, as it standardly has been, that sentences are necessary in discourse, spoken as well as written. Then spoken language appears very sloppy: there are no significant boundary markers for the sentences and the grammatical structures are most unsatisfactory. It is, however, possible to regard the situation differently. Perhaps spoken language has a very different, non-sentential structure, a grammatical pattern not organized in the same way as written language. (Recall Crystal: "it is not that conversation lacks grammar; it is simply that the grammar is of a rather different kind.") What looks disorganized from one point of view appears so because it is not organized in categories at home in that perspective. Crystal: "It is arguable that all of the above problems arise solely because of the attempt to impose a descriptive model on the data which uses sentence as a primitive term. This variety of English ["informal domestic conversation"], however, does not seem to be readily analysable in terms of sentences. Rather, the clause is the unit in terms of which the material is most conveniently organized.... A model of Clause+connective+Clause... makes far fewer assumptions about the organization of the data, and avoids the arbitrariness involved in the discussion of [problems in spoken sentence identification.]."61 "The lack of clear sentential organization is thus one of the main factors accounting for the discrepancy between conversational data and standard descriptive statement...: almost all such statements insist on the theoretical priority of the sentence."62 "Looking at the data used to illustrate theoretical accounts of language, it has often been remarked that the examples cited are frequently somewhat contrived. This of course is inevitable if the aim of the exercise is to demonstrate the potential of language.... Lists of sentences of varying form, complexity and acceptability are the normal paradigms of illustration in linguistic writing. The value of this way of proceeding is undeniable, but it is a discovery procedure which, because of the way it is structured... is unlikely to encounter the data of spontaneous interaction. Because all such sentences-or at least most of them-are speakable, it is easy to imagine that there is no problem-that the grammar of informal domestic conversation is basically a reflection of that of the written language, with a few additional conventions such as ellipsis, intonation, and emphatic word order, and a few omissions, such as the structures characteristic of the more formal and literary modes of expression. The argument of the present paper, on the contrary, is that the

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linguistic organization of [conversational] English has been fundamentally misconceived, due partly to the absence of data, partly to the uncritical application of traditional paradigms of enquiry."63 I do wish to insist that there is a significant trend within contemporary linguistics that rejects the idea that conversational language ought to be analyzed in terms of sentences and the associated grammatical patterns characteristic of written language. The basic demand is that we must escape the domination of written language in approaching the analysis of speech and that newly devised grammars, with key theoretical terms other than that of sentence, need to be employed.64 I do not, however, wish to insist upon Crystal's own positive version - there are others65 and if this trend becomes established (success is far from certain) it may not crystalize around Crystal. I do not even have to hold that there are no sentences in speech because there are no markers or hold the weaker thesis that there are only sometimes spoken sentences, namely in those places where we can find tone and/or pauses used to establish boundaries. For suppose Crystal and others are mistaken and it turns out that traditional grammar is the best representation of speech. We (some language community) might adopt conventions which clearly display the existence of sentences in speech. We might, that is, reform and attempt to make our spoken language resemble our written language and so find a place for sentences. We might insist that we mark our speech in sentences by, say, wagging a finger whenever we wished to signal a full stop. All that I have to insist upon is that there is not, for English at least and no doubt other European languages, any evidence that in (much of) the spoken version of the language there are sentences; and that it may well be that the development of linguistic theory will reject the perspective which renders writing central to theory with the consequence that the structure of spoken language is not best represented in terms of sentences. The consequence is that philosophers who hold that sentences are truth-bearers (1) may thereby be committed to holding that there cannot be truth-claims made in conversational language and (2) if linguistic theory comes to say that the best account of spoken language does not rely upon the concept of a sentence, then those philosophers who take it that there must be sentences in speech may well look like Hegel on the subject of how many planets there must be.

IV PASSING SENTENCE ON SENTENCES

1. The Ontological Conclusion In all those pages constituting the previous chapter, I did not do the one thing that, structurally, was the point of the entire operation. Its aim was to examine the concept of a sentence, to inquire into what a sentence is, in order to discover which is the more basic item ontologically, what is said or a sentence. However, the conclusion as to which of the two is more basic was not there drawn. That must now be done. I shall approach that project via a discussion of a passage from Dummett that provides a particularly useful way of phrasing the outcome. Dummett says “we cannot say anything by means of a sequence of words that stops short of being a sentence-cannot make an assertion, express a wish, ask a question, give a command, etc., in short do what Wittgenstein called ‘make a move in the language-game’-except where the context supplies a supplementation of the words spoken that amounts to a sentence embodying them.... for (in a logical rather than a typographical sense) an expression with which we can make a move in the language-game (or ‘perform a linguistic act’) is precisely what a sentence is.”1 Dummett, as the final words show, is attempting to say what a sentence is. I have already criticized Dummett’s assumption in that project, that sentences are used to make moves in a language-game, that it is “by means of” sentences that moves are made, that sentences are the tools “with which” we say things. My present aim is to set out the reasoning by which Dummett above comes to conclude that there are two “senses” of the term “sentence”, namely the logical and the typological, only one of which, the logical, is philosophically important. What, according to Dummett, is a sentence? It is “an expression with which we can make a move in the language game”. That is, “we cannot say anything by means of a sequence of words that stops short of being a sentence.” So, the test for whether an expression is a sentence is whether anything gets said when the expression is “produced” (when it is used in Dummett’s terms).

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To understand how he proceeds from that point in the passage, it is necessary to recognize that he finds a difficulty with his own account of sentence-hood. The trouble concerns expressions similar to some of those presented in the preceding chapter, cases, for example, where someone utters “John’s.” or “Went to the store.” Dummett realizes that such productions are moves in the language game, that we do typically understand what is being said by someone who utters those words. In order to make further sense of the details of his maneuvering, we must also take it that he is initially inclined to say that those expressions are not sentences, that they “stop short of being a sentence”. Upon second thought, however, he realizes that if he were to hold that they are not sentences, his thesis about the nature of sentence-hood would thereby be undermined. For if “John’s.” etc. are not sentences, something would get said in such cases by means of sequences of words which stop short of being sentences. Dummett then provides a way out for himself, a means of saving the thesis about sentence-hood that he is defending. His solution comes in two parts. It begins with a (correct) account of what gets said, when such things as “John’s.” or “Went to the store.” are uttered. We all know that in the contexts specified in the previous chapter what was said by someone who said “John’s.” is “We shall go in John’s car.” and that the person who writes “Went to the store.” is saying “I went to the store.” Now that (correct) account of what gets said, of what an informed audience would and should understand in those cases, is described by Dummett as involving a “supplementation” of the words (actually) spoken. Moreover, and this is necessary for the salvation of Dummett’s thesis concerning sentences, the result of the supplementation will be, will have to be, a sentence. Thus, the thesis about what a sentence is can be saved: a sentence is that with which a linguistic move can be made-though there are cases in which something is said despite the fact that the “words spoken” “stop short of being a sentence”. In those cases, there will be lurking in the background a different sentence, a “sentence embodying them [the words actually spoken]”. Dummett is not yet finished. There is a second part to the final view, something that oddly enough derives from a reassessment of an initial assumption. In the end, Dummett recognizes the futility of denying that “John’s.” and “Went to the store.” and so on are sentences. Why he comes to that realization in the midst of his discussion is not made explicit, but just as Lyons came to call such things “sentences” albeit in a secondary sense, so too Dummett comes to accept their status as sentences. However, to keep his ducks lined up, he qualifies his acceptance of the sentence-hood of expressions such as “Went to the store.” by calling them sentences only in a “typological sense”. He no doubt realizes that they are sentences since

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they bear all the conventional signs of being such and, in consequence, thinks of them as typological beings. On the other hand, the sentence which (in those cases) “by means of which” the linguistic move is made, something is said, is what results from supplementing the spoken words, e.g. the supplement of “John’s.” is “We shall go in John’s car.” That quite nice sentence Dummett calls a sentence in the “logical sense”, the sentence we in philosophy are interested in, the one that is really important. Dummett rescues himself from his initial inclination that would have subverted the given account of what a sentence is, but the rescue operation leaves him in an impossible situation. First, as he thinks that sentences and nothing short of them are used to perform linguistic acts, are the means by which something is said, he cannot solve the problem, if there is a problem, caused by “John’s.” For the sentence he ends up supporting as the one by which the move is made and which substantiates his thesis as to what a sentence is, namely “We’re going in John’s car.”, does not even appear in the communicative situation as imagined. It may not even appear in thought: the person who says “John’s.” in response to the question “Whose car are we going in?” may not have, almost certainly will not have, “We’re going in John’s car.” cross her mind when she utters “John’s.”. Moreover, the person who asked the question will, in all likelihood, not have that thought cross his mind either when the answer is given, even though he perfectly understands thereby that they will be going in John’s car. Of course, someone who did not hear or understand the question which elicited the answer “John’s.” might ask what was thereby said or meant and then someone might explain by offering the supplemented version. But of course the move in question has already been made, and not by that longer sentence. Its later invocation is to perform a new linguistic act, that of explaining what the original move was. Secondly, the point of producing the supplemented version, namely to explain what was said by the cryptic words spoken, is not to produce a new kind of sentence, a sentence in a “logical sense”. It is to explain what was said by the cryptic words uttered, to specify fully what was said by the person who said “John’s.” Dummett has not discovered a new sense or senses of “sentence”-what he has done is to try to describe a communication situation in terms of sentences, rather than in terms of what is said. He is so determined to make sentences important to discourse-on his view they are what are employed to do linguistic things and moreover those with the right contours are bearers of truth-value-that he is forced to describe the complete spelling out of what is said in the situation as a sentence in a new sense. While Dummett is unusual in so much as noticing that there is a “typological sense”, the argument of the preceding chapter was that the only

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sense of “sentence” is the typological. There is no logical sense, no grammatical sense. Sentences are typological (orthographic) entities, entities that come into being when, and if, speakers of a given language adopt certain punctuation conventions for the written version of that language. Philosophers try, as Dummett does, to treat sentences as logical entities, or at least as logically useful entities-and theoretical linguists attempt to hijack the notion and turn it into the cauldron of grammar. Both groups are striving to make intellectual silk purses out of the sow’s ear of a sentence. Sentences are the result of the employment of punctuation devices in (some) written languages-it is possible that sentences occur in spoken language(s) too, if, that is, some similar punctuation devices can be located. The point of that punctuation is to make obvious to a reader (perhaps an auditor) the boundaries of different things said. It follows, and here is the conclusion missing from the preceding chapter, from that characterization, from sentences being the outcome of conventions for exhibiting things said, that the notion of a sentence is subordinate to the notion of what is said. Sentences must be explained in terms of what is said and not the other way round. Sentences presuppose that there are things said and not the other way round. To be old-fashioned, the being of sentences is dependent upon the being of things said. Ontologically, then, sentences are dispensable although useful appendages of the activity of saying (at least of writing) things.

2. The Case After the previous chapter’s long investigation into the nature of a sentence, with the ontological consequence drawn above, it is worth pausing to review where the overall argument stands. The issue was originally put: given that what is said and sentences are logically distinct kinds of thing, are truth-bearers linguistic entities, (declarative) sentences, or are they something non-linguistic, especially what is said? The primary use of the predicate “is true” occurs in the comment “That’s true”-and the referent of “That” is normally “What so and so said”-and is never “The sentence...”. Hence there is a strong initial presumption that it is not sentences that are truth-bearers, but rather what is said. Is there, however, a more traditionally philosophical argument which can support that conclusion? There is, the argument from indexicals. That is the argument that if sentences were truth-bearers, it would be possible (and common) for one and the same sentence to be both true and false, hence sentences cannot perform that function. That argument was polished up, its

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mechanisms clarified, in the course of showing that contemporary criticisms of it fail. It is not, however, a conclusive argument. There is, then, a strong case, based on two kinds of reason, why sentences cannot be, and what is said must therefore be, what has a truthvalue. One area of doubt remained: understanding why sentences have been the choice for truth-bearer of so many philosophers. Without understanding that, and dealing critically with it, the case against sentences cannot be complete. Upon turning to that matter in Chapter 2, it was noted that sentences have commended themselves to philosophers as what is true or false, not on the basis of particular arguments that they have that role, but because of a certain philosophical program, one which claims that we must give our philosophical approbation to whatever resides more deeply in an ontological hierarchy than any rival possibility. Once sentences have been declared to be ontologically more substantial citizens than what is said, it follows, given that program, that sentences should be awarded the position of truth-bearers. While the usual criticism of that move is to refuse to go along with the program which gives precedence in philosophizing to the ontologically more basic, I, instead, took up the project of disputing the idea that sentences hold the ontological high-ground, that they are ontologically prior to what is said. My strategy was to produce that ontological trans-valuation by asking why it has been thought that sentences are more secure and down to earth entities than what is said. There are two sets of consideration supporting that placement. One is the idea that sentences are what are used to say things-and since the tool for the production of sayings must be more basic than what is produced by its use, sentences are the basic entity of the two. I argued at some length, and of course I allege successfully, that sentences are not used to say things. Rather it is words, typically used in concert of course, which are our tools for the saying of things. The second line of argument found to support the idea that sentences are the more basic of the two items is that sentences are physical objects and as such are more fundamental pieces of ontological furniture than what is said, which of course is not a physical object. In connection with that I argued that the usual way of making the point that sentences are physical objects, namely to characterize them as sounds or marks, simply won’t do. To call something a sentence, that is to treat it as a meaningful piece of language, is precisely to contrast it with sounds and marks. Still, talking of sentences as sounds or marks is but a misguided way of making the more accurate point that sentences are, and what is said is not, a physical object. Thereby a handle is provided for the materialist thesis that what is physical is more ontologically fundamental than what is not. I argued, via some examples

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concerning monetary practices and board games, that that is not necessarily true. Ontological priority cannot be assigned in that sweeping manner and must be examined case by case. What, then, about the case of sentences and what is said? Which rates the nod in ontological priority? That is where the inquiry of the previous chapter comes in. There, arguments about the nature of sentences established that sentences are entities derived from the attempt to show an audience, perhaps only a reading audience, where one thing said ends and another begins. That is, talking of sentences has a point only against the background of trying to sort out the boundary between one thing said and another. And that means that the concept of a sentence is subordinate to the concept of saying something. Hence, what is said is, contrary to the usual philosophical story, the more ontologically basic of the two kinds of being. That conclusion is not intended to show that what is said is what has truth-value–that would be to accept the philosophical outlook that claims that we must give our philosophical approval to whatever resides more deeply in an ontological hierarchy than any rival possibility. Rather, the current argument is that those who support the program in the case of sentences and what is said have misjudged what is fundamental and thus the second of the two major arguments in favor of sentences as truth-bearers also collapses. It might be said that I have miscounted the major arguments in favor of sentences, that there are three not two. So, let me examine this third line of support for holding sentences to be a superior candidate for what has a truthvalue before explicitly drawing the overall conclusion about sentences.

3. Identity The lingering issue concerns identity. The defender of sentences as what have truth-value will say: “Despite all your contentions, sentences have a significant advantage over all your alternative candidates–they have very definite identity conditions. And that fact means that they must be first in line for the post of having truth-value.”2 The difficulty envisioned here is not that arising from sub-microscopic particles where it is problematic as to whether it makes sense to ask “Is it the same neutrino (or photon)?” and, if it should not be sensible there, what are we to say about the status of the thought that without identity there can be no such thing as the alleged something, that talk about “it” is merely hot air? In the present matter, it is correctly assumed that we can speak of the “the same sentence” and also that “Joe said the same thing as Suzie” is perfectly intelligible. The assumption behind the objection is the idea that if

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two relevant items have any range of uncertainty about whether they are the same or not, that kind of thing lacks identity and so are a spurious kind of thing and rationally unusable. So understood, the initial objection about the relative value of sentences versus what is said is the claim that for any sentence occurrence we can say it either is or is not the same sentence as one occurring elsewhere while that complete sorting cannot be done in the case of the alternative possibilities for truth bearing: we cannot always determine that what Joe said is the same or not the same as what Sam said. Therefore, sentences are and (for instance) statements, are not philosophically acceptable kinds of things. Hence, we must conclude that sentences are what have truth-value. I intend to make no fuss about the thesis that one can always determine whether two sentence occurrences are occurrences of the same sentence. I have seen no interesting investigation of the issue and it does seem that there might well be situations in which the question cannot be definitively settled: some sentence occurrences might be, say, so weathered or faded or faint that one must have uncertainty as to the issue of sameness. However, no matter how such a matter is ultimately answered the interesting question would remain. On the other hand, it is certain that the objector’s claim about the other possibilities for truth-bearing is correct: we are not always able to tell whether it is the same assertion or proposition that occurs here and there. If the sentence that is found in a remark is sufficiently faint that we cannot be sure what sentence it is, then that can only be because the remark is so faintly made that we cannot be sure what was said. Of course, there are even more important possibilities: even when we know fully what the words used by two people (or on two occasions) are, we may not know or be able to say whether they amounted to the same claim or not. We may well not know whether to say that “God exists” said by Spinoza and by a religious fundamentalist are the same statement or not; i.e. there is no meaning rule which definitively settles the matter. However, to point out the gap between the (likely) certainty of identity in the case of sentences and the uncertainty in some cases of what is said and so on, does not at all establish that the latter sorts of thing are philosophically and practically undesirable and so not what we should take to be bearers of truth-value. For the existence of uncertainty, of the inability to settle whether two things said are the same thing said in some cases, does not cripple the intelligibility of the notion of what is said. For we can and do most often know whether this was the same statement as that, the same proposition propounded, the same belief as held yesterday. The complexity of some cases or the inconclusiveness of rules for sameness in some cases

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does not remotely justify a rejection of the intelligibility of the concept of something said or asserted, etc. To think that it is the mark of a good concept that we must be able to say sheep or goat to every possible item proposed for falling under it is a philosophical fantasy with a long history. It is an expression of the desire to eliminate judgment and uncertainty in favor of mechanical rules and complete certainty. One would have thought that by this time philosophers had learned to overcome that particular human inclination. Even if sentences leave less room for disagreement about whether this occurrence is the same sentence as that, that does not make them in any respect superior as candidates for truth-bearing–it merely marks them off as different than the discourse related alternatives. For while we can normally and usually settle the question of whether two remarks are the same and thus say that for such kinds of thing there are perfectly good identity conditions, there do remain some cases in which no definitive answer can be found. That is no sign of failure in those notions. The consequence is that there is no remaining case for the idea that it is sentences that are bearers of truth-value. We must turn to the non-linguistic candidates to locate what sort of thing it is that are true or false

4. How to Characterize the Relation Between Sentences and What is Said Theoretical linguistics has tried to make do without the notion of what is said, so that, in setting out its conceptual structure, the concept of a sentence fills the central slot. Unfortunately, the result of that attempt to make sentences the crucial notion in understanding language has been a misrepresentation of what a sentence is. Philosophers have been somewhat better: we have tended to recognize that the notion of communication, of saying something, must be basic in accounts of language, though, as will be described before the end of this chapter, there are many significant circumstances in which that recognition gets lost. When we are on top of our game, however, we realize the centrality of what is said to a grasp of the nature of language. The chief problem for philosophers has been getting clear about the relationship between a sentence and what is said. The present section shall aim at producing a better, though far from complete, grasp of that relationship. The view that what is said is nothing but a sentence has had some support. That view flounders on the fact that their identity conditions are quite different. Others, recognizing that sentences and things said are two different matters, have, also mistakenly, held that the relationship between

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them consists in using one to produce the other. That is, it has been thought that the relationship is captured in the slogan “By using a sentence, we say things”. In light of arguments above, that formula must be corrected. The correct version requires both a reversal of ranking and a new preposition, so that we have “In saying something, we construct a sentence”. However, even that is not quite right. That new formula needs modification to reflect the fact, developed in the preceding chapter, that it is a major error to speak of the relationship between sentences and what is said. The most useful formulaic account relating the two notions is “In saying things, we, paradigmatically, construct a sentence”. While writers of classical Chinese and discourse analysts studying spoken language will not at all agree with the qualifier “paradigmatically”, no better formula can be devised. It provides a philosophically useful tool, approximates the truth and yet is a reminder that it is after all only a formula. In giving a characterization of how sentences are related to what is said, that formula, resting on the preposition “in”, invites understanding of that relationship in terms of the category of epiphenomena. That is, if sentences are (paradigmatically) constructed in the saying of things, then sentences look to be an epiphenomenon of the saying of things. It would do contemporary philosophers a world of good to view sentences ontologically as epiphenomena, but I doubt that it is really accurate to do so. Paradigm cases of epiphenomena, such as “In kissing her, he stepped on her toes”, display epiphenomena as unintended consequences of the main show. But in paradigmatic cases of the use of written language, the speaker usually does intend there to be a sentence, intend that one’s construction be marked out with appropriate punctuation and so differentiated both from nonsentences and from other adjacent sentences. Absent a thorough analysis of the notion of an epiphenomenon, the best that can be said here is that sentences stand to things said somewhat analogously to the relationship between an epiphenomenon and the primary phenomenon, that the one is brought about in the production of the other. The attempt to conceive the relationship epiphenomenally raises a deeper problem than that of intentions. “In an epiphenomenal relationship, there are two things: the phenomenon and its unintended consequence, the kissing and the stepping on toes. But look: in the case of sentences and things said there aren’t two things available for observation in the same way: there is not a sentence here, something said there, in the way that the kissing is up here, the toes down there. Look at the page-even if the sentence is not identical with what is said, in some manner there is but a single thing on the page.” With that objection we are verging on philosophical questions about the nature of what is said. That ontological examination remains for future

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chapters. Here I shall dodge the subtleties of the problem and attempt to continue giving some characterization of the relationship between sentences and what is said. To see sentences ontologically as epiphenomena does have the shortcoming that, in some as yet unexamined way, sentences and what is said are more closely bound together than are the items in standard epiphenomenal relationships. After all, no one has ever, even if mistakenly, supposed that kissing and stepping on of toes are identical. Because of the difficulty in, as it were, disentangling sentences and what is said, one must fall back on another way of characterizing, in traditional philosophical terms, the ontological status of sentences. The crucial concept is that of an interest. Sentences are part and parcel of taking a special kind, or rather kinds, of interest in what people say. I argued that sentences are the linguistic entity created by markers designed to show the boundaries of things said. That is, sentences arise via convention when a language community exercises one special type of interest in what a person says (writes): the interest of distinguishing between different things said. But once the possibility of sentences has been created and the marking devices characteristically employed, it is possible to exercise further interests in connection with them. Many of those reading this work will have had the experience of reading and evaluating student papers. There are, typically, two tasks we (nonsequentially) engage in when performing such evaluations. We focus some of the time upon what the student says: does he/she know the material, make insightful comments, draw relevant distinctions, argue effectively, etc.? But as evaluators we also typically spend some of our time and attention on linguistic matters: spelling, punctuation, etc. And that task of concerning ourselves with the linguistic aspects of essays includes the function of checking up on sentences. Are this student’s sentences too long? Too complex? Complete? Awkward? Misshapen? What, relevant to the topic here, should we make of these very simple facts of our pedagogical practice? When we look at student efforts from one point of view, that is when we take a linguistic interest in their writing, we abstract from concern about relevance, point, argument, insight (and, of course, it is now not out of place to add, truth3) to focus instead upon the work as a linguistic entity. It is in the course of pursuing that linguistic interest that the notion of a sentence becomes relevant: the essay is seen as a structure of sentences, the grammatical and literary excellence of which must be assessed. I should like to finish this section by discussing one further possible way of describing the ontological relationship between sentences and what is

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said. I don’t expect to win this skirmish, yet I think it worth mentioning. In a previous chapter, I said that those philosophers who took sentences to be truth-bearers did so because they adhere to a program that demands that we ought, in our philosophizing, to prefer the ontologically basic to the dependent, the concrete to the abstract. The inquiry since has been carried on in terms of ontological dependency-but there is also that alternative formulation in terms of the abstract and the concrete. Recent philosophy has it that sentences are concrete and what is said abstract and so, in consequence of the program, we ought to take the former to be what has truth-value. My argument that what is said is a sturdier piece of ontological furniture than a sentence creates a realignment in the usual pairing of descriptions: here something abstract is more basic than something concrete. On the other hand, it is possible to retain the original alignment if one is willing to recognize that “abstract” has not always meant in philosophy “that which is not in space and/or time”. If “abstract” is taken to mean, what it sometimes has meant, “that which is reached by a process of abstraction”, then one might say that sentences (the occurrences thereof) are abstract entities. Probably few noticed that I said, quite naturally, in the previous paragraph “we abstract from concerns about relevance, point, argument, insight, [truth]” when we are interested in sentences. I don’t wish to push this matter here: we philosophers have allowed the terminology of “abstract” and “concrete” to be captured by a particular philosophical view which identifies the concrete with what is in space and/or time. There does remain, however, a conceptual penumbra in which the abstract is what we get when we abstract from something else. As to abstract from is to take a certain limited interest in some phenomenon, then one might say that sentences are abstract (at least abstracted) entities corresponding to what is said.

5. Ending the Culture of Sentences What kind of being is a sentence? It is similar to an epiphenomenon where the primary phenomenon is something said; it is the result of taking an interest in the boundaries of something said and the entity thus created serves as the focus of further linguistic interests, interests in the language in which something is said rather than in what is said; it is an entity which results by abstraction from what is said. Those who think that we philosophers should make reference only to what is ontologically more basic in our philosophical accounts should now agree that we ought, in spelling out what sort of thing truth-bearers are, to give up talk about sentences and nominate what is said to play the role.

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Those who have not subscribed to that program in the first place and who have been willing to take as philosophically central whatever the argument turns up are now supported in their view that it is what is said that performs the task of bearing truth. Truth is part of the language of what is said-it is, in up to date terms, a feature of the discourse of what is said-and not of sentences, just as penalty kicks are part of the language of soccer and not of chess. When we abstract from what is said and make the language in which it is said the object of interest, one of the notions we put aside is that of truth. A coda if you will. Although I have located my discussion of the nature of sentences in a context where a particular argument concerning truthbearers is placed at the core, it should be clear that what I have said about sentences has a much wider bearing than that. A very great deal of contemporary philosophizing is dependent upon the notion of a sentence, makes sentences fundamental analytical tools. We philosophers have created a culture of sentences for ourselves to inhabit.4 However, my contentions here amount to saying that in practice sentences are reasonably unimportant and ought to be in our philosophizing too. We would do better if we abandoned talk of them in philosophy-except in the philosophy of law where the idea of a sentence is important. (Of course, where the problem is precisely the one on-going here of getting clear about how sentences and what is said are related, then sentences will necessarily be mentioned.) It may not be easy for philosophers addicted to referring to sentences to see how they can surrender the notion without ceasing to do philosophy. In the remainder of this chapter, I shall examine two selected issues in contemporary philosophy that seem to hinge upon sentences and show how we ought to start redoing our philosophical discussions.

6. Truth-conditional Semantics Truth-conditional semantics is the most substantial current philosophical view in the line of fire of the conclusion that truth and falsity are not attributable to sentences. Since sentences are not what are either true or false, sentences therefore do not have truth-conditions, conditions that must be satisfied for the sentence to be true. As sentences do not have truthconditions, their meaning cannot then be explicated in terms of their truthconditions. Since the contention of truth-conditional semantics is that sentence meaning is to be explicated in terms of the truth-conditions of sentences, it follows that truth-conditional semantics will not do. While that argument shows why defenders of this contemporary meaning theory will be strongly inclined to resist the thesis that sentences are not bearers of truth-value, I will here offer them a different way out. For

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truth-conditional semantics may be made compatible with the thesis that sentences are not truth-bearers. With certain changes, perhaps truthconditional semantics can be at home with a non-sentential account of what has truth-value. I think that some variation on truth-conditional semantics, some view that is obviously a version of that thesis, which yet abandons sentences as truth-bearers, can be produced. Without attempting to defend truth-conditional semantics, what I shall argue is that, if certain changes are made, changes that retain at least what I take to be the substance of the doctrine, then truth-conditional semantics can survive the failure of the idea that it is sentences that are truth-bearers. Whether it can survive other criticisms is a wholly different matter-and one that shall not be pursued here. At the heart of canonical, Davidsonian, truth-conditional semantics are Tarskian T-sentences. The central idea is that for each (declarative) sentence of a natural language it is possible to construct a sentence of the form “p” is true IFF p. Each sentence “p”5 will then will have its truth-conditions spelled out on the right-hand side of its formula and we can, in Davidson’s twist on Tarski’s theory of truth, interpret that as giving the meaning of the sentence mentioned on the left hand side. So the meaning of the (German) sentence “Schnee ist weiss.” is given by the T-sentence “’Schnee ist weiss.’ is true IFF snow is white.” Suppose it be accepted that sentences are not what are true or false. What in Tarski’s formula is incompatible with that? Clearly it is the interpretation that the “p” of the left-hand side is a placeholder for sentences. If, however, sentences are not truth-bearers, the left-hand formula will not be wellformed if understood, as it canonically is, as “(The sentence) ‘p’ is true”. Now suppose further that what does have a truth-value is what someone says-to simplify let me use the term claim (or statement) as what is true or false. If we wish to save truth-conditional semantics from the arguments of the preceding chapters, to make it compatible with their outcome, then it is obvious that a new interpretation of the left-hand side of the formula must be given. “p” must be interpreted as a placeholder for things said, for claims, and the truth-conditions for those are what are spelled out by the right-hand side. The formula will now read “(The claim) ‘p’ is true IFF p.” As an instance we will have “(The claim) ‘Schnee ist weiss’ is true IFF snow is white.” Now to add Davidson (at least the Davidson prior to “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs”) to the Tarskian framework: given the Fregean assumption that to state truth-conditions is to give the meaning, then the meaning of “p”, where “p” is construed as something said, as a claim or statement, is thereby specified by a (true) T-claim. And lo! A new version of truth-conditional semantics.

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How far can such a revision be acceptable? I shall track that question only through a few moves, only past a limited number of objections, leaving other details to be debated in consequence. The major difficulty standing in the way of acceptance is that the new version assumes that what is said has meaning. It also leaves the question about the nature of sentence meaning quite unsettled. To continue recommending that the alternative account replace the canonical Davidsonian version requires that those matters be looked into. The Logical Positivists’ verification principle was usually expressed “The meaning of a statement is its method of verification.” No one at the time objected that it is only pieces of language, sentences in this case, and not statements or things said, which have meaning. In the subsequent phase, Austin, and no doubt others too, split the roles, holding that meaning goes with sentences and truth (and thus verification) with statements. Still that division of labor was not used as a challenge to the verification principle (undoubtedly because that had already lost its philosophical grip for other reasons). In the current phase, meaning and truth are once again united, only now both are assigned to the linguistic side of the tracks. What I am proposing is that the Positivists got this much right (perhaps naively), that we can legitimately talk of the meaning of statements or claims or propositions, etc., as well as attributing truth or falsity to them. Since sentences belong to particular languages, as do their constituent words, and since, unquestionably, words have meaning (normal qualifications aside), it is usually assumed that sentences also must have meaning. That is not in question. What is more immediately relevant is a further assumption often made: since words and sentences are both items of a language and since both are meaningful, then, it is assumed, whatever characterization of the meaning of one must also be offered of the other. Since words are usually taken to be the basic phenomenon, philosophers are inclined to answer “What is the meaning of a sentence?” in exactly the same way they answer “What is the meaning of a word?” One result of that assumption is Frege’s idea that since the meaning of a word (a name), taken ordinarily, is to be analyzed into sense and reference, so too must the meaning of sentences. The consequence is his unlamented thesis that sentences must also have a Bedeutung as well as a Sinn. That same assumption helps produce the quite different idea that sentences are used. If one conceives of the meaning of words, post-Wittgenstein, in terms of their use, in terms of their being items of a language which have a role in linguistic activities, so too, it is often assumed, must the meaning of sentences be understood in terms of their use.

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My earlier arguments concerning the (non)-use of sentences as well as my conclusions concerning what kind of thing a sentence is entail that the assumed parallel between the meaning of words and sentences does not hold. Sentences, though they are like words in being entities belonging to a particular language, otherwise are not at all like words. They are not used and they have a radically different place in a language. In consequence, it is wrong to think that what one says philosophically about the nature of word meaning can be extrapolated to sentence meaning. Not all philosophers are likely to assume that word meaning and sentence meaning must be analogous. Those who hold truth-conditional semantics, for example, would not be committed to that: there is no associated claim that the meaning of a word is its truth-conditions. That asymmetry in accounts of meaning is one reason truth-conditional semantics can be reformulated so that sentences are not involved. That lack of analogy in the character of meaning fairly obviously holds when the contemplated shift from sentences to what is said is to be made. No one is likely to tell a story about the meaning of what is said, should that turn out to have meaning, which is analogous to accounts of what word meaning is. There is one further assumption requiring correction before the proposed investigation can get underway. In discussing the concept of meaning, philosophers typically take it that the fundamental occurrence of the notion of meaning is in a statement of the form “X means Y”. It is not the elevation of that formula to high importance to which I shall object here. (Making “X means Y” the focus of discussions of meaning was the point of Wittgenstein’s complaint “Of course, one can reduce the description of the use of the word ‘slab’ to the statement that this word signifies this object.... But assimilating the uses of words in this way cannot make the uses themselves any more like one another.”6) Rather my objection is to treating a statement of meaning specification as primary in the ecology of meaning. The statement “X means Y” is, at bottom, an answer to a question and it is the question which is the most fundamental piece of meaning talk. If we wish to understand meaning, we must start from the question “What does X mean?” not from the formulaic answer “X means Y”. Normally we ask “What does X mean?” when something is encountered in our linguistic environment which we do not understand. We are taught that, when we fail to understand some linguistic matter, asking about its meaning is what will bring understanding. There are many types of failure to understand and as a result the request about meaning will be answered in quite different ways. Philosophers notice that the general form of an answer is “X means Y”, but that formula is generated by the form of the question

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and so is uninteresting when it comes down to matters of how the X’s differ and what sort of thing, then, the Y will be which is cited in that answer. The issue now before us is: In the question “What does that mean?” can “that” refer to what is said? Setting words aside, must “that” refer to sentences only or can it refer to what is said? When cases of meaning inquiry are called to mind, it becomes apparent that sometimes what is not understand is what someone has said and so the question is about that. Imagine this case. Joe says “I met Biff and John for the first time in 17 years and they haven’t changed a bit-Biff grabbed me in a headlock and John gave me a wedgie.” I don’t understand the last thing Joe said, namely “John gave me a wedgie.” In this case, I know quite plainly why I don’t understand: there is a word there that I don’t know, the word “wedgie”. Because of my not knowing what “wedgie” means, I can’t understand what Joe said, don’t know what it means. So, I ask “What is a ‘wedgie’?” (or canonically “What does ‘wedgie’ mean?”) The reason I ask is not simply to add “wedgie” to my vocabulary but because, until I know what it means, I won’t know what the whole means, I won’t know what Joe meant when he said “John gave me a wedgie”. My aim is not only to understand the word but to understand what was said. Recall a case mentioned earlier: someone is told “A stitch in time saves nine”. That might be most puzzling. But the trouble is not with any individual word, as it was in the preceding case. Someone might well understand all of the words, yet be puzzled about what the saying means. There is something about the manner in which the individually understood words are put together which is the source of the failure to understand the meaning of the saying. So, the person can ask “What does that mean?” referring by the demonstrative to the entire saying. Part of the trouble might be alleviated by having the matter spelled out thusly: “A stitch taken early saves having to take nine stitches later on”. That would be an explanation of the meaning, an answer to the question about what the saying means.7 On the other hand, for someone else that might not be enough. “We were talking about changing the oil in the car. What does taking a stitch have to do with that? Who cares about sewing?” Now the explanation would have to be “Look it’s a folk saying: undertaking a task before matters get worse will save a lot more effort later on. It isn’t really about stitching, about sewing. That’s just used there to represent the more general claim that performing repairs, service, early in the game will save time and effort later-taking one stitch in the torn pocket will prevent having to sew the whole thing up later as the tear grows.”7 Questions about the meaning of something said arise also in cases of structural difficulty. “Dad was cooking last night.” About that someone may

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well know too many meanings and want the choices narrowed down. “What does that mean? Does it mean that Dad was discovered preparing a meal or does it mean that Dad was discovered in the dinner pot boiling away?” What should be noticed here is the phrase “mean that”. Someone hears, reads, “Dad was found cooking” and can think of two things it might mean and so inquires (no doubt stupidly) as to which, in the context, was meant. The alternatives are that it, the original, means that p or that it means that q. Those phrases “that p” and “that q” are the mechanisms for stating what is said as in “He said that p” (or “the claim that p”). When in the case of ambiguity we ask what is meant, we give as possibilities that the original means that p or it means that q. Here “means” goes quite obviously with the notion of what is said. Presumably one ought to think that those two alternatives are different ways of spelling out what was originally said. We are inquiring into the meaning of what was said and present two alternative things said as possible interpretations of what was originally said. We can of course also ask about the meaning of something said in another language. Wittgenstein says, for example, in Tractatus 3.3 “Nur der Satz hat Sinn; nur im Zussamenhangen des Satzes hat ein Name Bedeutung.” Suppose my German is non-existent-I need the entire thing explained and so ask “What does that mean?”, using the sentence markers to indicate the referent of “that”, the boundaries of which thing said it is that I want to understand. Or imagine encountering a sign in a store window in East Los Angeles: “Se habla ingles”. The question is natural: What does that mean? (Notice that in the sign there is not even a sentence to inquire about.) Questions about, and consequent talk of, the meaning of what is said are appropriate where nonsense is at stake. An introductory student might find in her philosophy book “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”. All the words are known and the structure is clear and so it is a perfectly fine specimen of English. The student, however, does not know what it means, suspecting that it is another folk saying. “Well, what does this one mean?” This time the answer is that it does not mean anything. No one who utters those words will be saying anything or, equivalently, the thesis that colorless green ideas sleep furiously is meaningless. The discerning eye will have observed that I have worked through that review of situations in which we ask for the meaning of something said, or ask for the meaning of some word so that we can grasp what something said means, so that I think there to be no interesting case against the view what is said has (or has not) meaning. Only if one prejudicially thinks that meaning must pertain only to pieces of a particular language would anyone think otherwise. If, on the other hand, one reminds oneself of what we actually do in raising questions about meaning, that can be seen to be

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prejudice. So I shall declare enough done to establish that what is said is, or is not, meaningful. What is then philosophically desired is the production of a general account of what such meaning consists in, what it is that is understood when something said is understood. One such account is that the meaning of a statement, of something said, is its verification procedures-to know what something said means is to know how to go about finding whether it is true. A second view is that the meaning of a statement is its truth conditions-to know the meaning of something said is to know what its truth-conditions are. There are still other possible views, including the thesis that the attempt to attain a general answer is doomed to failure. It is not my present aim to defend any of those positions. I want only to establish that that philosophical debate here can proceed without the notion of a sentence, that truth-conditional semantics can be reformulated without loss and so remain capable of competing. Of course, my claim that it can be refashioned without loss of virtue may fail to appreciate some other factor in the constellation of ideas that constitute the view, some loss which would, to its holders, preclude the transformation of the theory from one which concerns the meaning of sentences to one which is about the meaning of things people say. It strikes me that there are advantages to that transformation (advantages quite other than avoidance of the fact that sentences are not truthbearers). For instance, that truth does not have to be relativized to particular languages strikes me as a significant gain. It may be, however, that such a relativism is an important desiratum for those who stand for truth in semantics and therefore they would be unwilling to switch from a theory about the meaning of sentences to theory of the meaning of what is said. Hence, beyond this point I cannot go in urging that truth-conditional semantics can be revised to escape the fact that sentences are not truthbearers. There is an issue still hanging fire. What, then, of the meaning of sentences? If what people say has meaning (or not), then what about the meaning of a sentence? Are sentences meaningless? Or do they also have a meaning and, if so, what view of that are we to take? There is a short way to deal with that, too short however. I have argued that sentences in ordinary practice are relatively unimportant entities. We theoreticians, living in our current culture of sentences, simply refuse to recognize that relative lack of importance of a sentence. The above worry about what to say about sentence meaning at this place in the argument is a residue of that excessive concern with the notion. We could just say “Who cares?” and go on our way looking into significant questions about the nature of what is said.

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There is some plausibility in that manner, yet it is too abrupt. To provide some expansion let me remind you of some points previously made. One cannot say anything (normal qualifications aside) except by using words combined in appropriate ways. In saying something, we paradigmatically create a sentence, we typically block those words used with markers designed to show the start and stop of what is being said. It would be exceptionally odd to insist that something someone said is perfectly intelligible but that the sentence (sticking to the paradigm situation) constructed in saying it is meaningless. Sentences are close kin of things said and to separate them in respect of meaningfulness would be an illadvised policy. So let us agree that sentences are meaningful (or not as the particular case may be). However, having that status is derivative from whether or not what is said is meaningful. Hence there is no significant reason to worry about the meaning of sentences independently of discussions of the meaning of what is said.

7. Compositionality and Contextualism Were sentences to become philosophically unemployed, working philosophers might find it difficult to conceive how certain significant philosophical discussions could continue. I have attempted to show how issues under the heading “truth-conditional semantics” can survive the change of environment from life with sentences to life with what is said. In this final section the topic shall be a pair of doctrines frequently appealed to in current accounts of language and meaning. The doctrine of compositionality can be stated thus: the meaning of a sentence is a function of the meanings of the individual words of which it is composed plus the manner in which they are combined. The doctrine of contextualism is that only in the context of a sentence does a word have meaning. Those who hold to compositionality will say that words are the primary pieces of language, sentences secondary. Those who adhere to contextualism will think that sentences are the primary elements of language, words secondary. Those two doctrines cannot both be true. If a sentence has whatever meaning it has as the consequence of the meanings of the words of which it is composed (and the manner in which they are structured), then it must be the case that the constituent words have a meaning prior to and independently of their occurrence in the sentence. On the other hand, if the words composing the sentence have no meaning independently of their sentential context, then they cannot have meaning prior to and

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independently of that sentence (though they might also have some meaning in some other sentence). Hence the doctrines contradict each other. The problem is that some, perhaps many, present day philosophers have hankerings for both doctrines and thus inclinations to think that words both are and are not the primary items of language. The most interesting case is that of Dummett. Dummett finds both doctrines in Frege and, given his judgment that Frege is the fountainhead of analytic philosophy, of philosophy of language, of contemporary philosophical semantics, Dummett is disposed to think that the two principles must therefore be compatible. I will not be interested here in the question of the interpretation of Frege. Baker and Hacker have argued quite vigorously that Dummett reads Frege in light of current philosophy of language and that Frege did not hold many of the views which Dummett (and others) attribute to him.8 I shall here treat what Dummett says about these two doctrines as his own view, with the reminder that part of the reason he may aspire to them is that he finds them in Frege and that part of the reason he finds them (at least compositionality) in Frege may be that he thinks them intellectually powerful. Dummett’s chief discussion occurs in the opening chapter of Frege: Philosophy of Language. He begins by saying that to make mathematical proofs completely rigorous one must first give an analysis of the structure of “the statements which make up the proof”, for the validity of a proof “depends upon the meanings of the statements” which make it up. Then as to that meaning: “The meaning of a statement is determined by the meanings of the words or individual symbols of which it is composed.” To give “an analysis of the structure of the sentences of our language” (or, as he also says, of statements) requires explaining “how the meaning of each sentence was determined from its internal structure.”9 Dummett, then, in spelling out the tasks of the philosophy of language, gives the doctrine of compositionality pride of place. He thinks that there is a conclusive reason for asserting compositionality. “We thus derive our knowledge of the sense of any given sentence from our previous knowledge of the senses of the words that compose it, together with our observation of the way in which they are combined in that sentence. It is this which I intended to express by saying that... the sense of the word is primary, and that of the sentence secondary; any theory of meaning which is unable to incorporate this point will be impotent to account for the obvious and essential fact that we can understand new sentences.”10 That last is spelled out further: “the obvious and crucial fact that we understand new sentences which we have never heard or thought of before, so long as

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they are composed of words which we know, put together in ways with which we are familiar”.11 Compositionality thus has an unshakeable rational backing. On the other hand, the context doctrine is quite obviously in Frege. The views of the Foundations of Arithmetic are said by Frege to rest upon it. Frege explicitly refers to (versions of) the context principle four times in the Foundations.12 Dummett is so impressed by Frege’s reliance on contextualism that he declares the claim that only in the context of a sentence has a word a meaning to be ”the most important philosophical statement that Frege ever made”.13 Years later he softens that praise to “the celebrated context principle, which he [Frege] laid down in the Introduction as one of the fundamental methodological principles to be followed in the book”.14 Contextualism, for Dummett, has then a pedigree which cannot be denied. That acceptance of both contextualism and compositionality, however, causes trouble for, as we have seen, they are contradictory principles. Dummett’s problem will be how to maintain both. The remainder of the first chapter of Frege is determined by his effort to render them jointly acceptable. The thrust of his effort will be to discover an interpretation of the context principle that does not conflict with the compositionality principle. Dummett must first discourage any reading of the context principle that produces an incompatibility with compositionality. Suppose that we start with Quine’s interpretation of contextualism: “the unit of significance is not the word but the sentence”.15 While Quine’s reading does express what “Only in the context of a sentence does a word have meaning” taken straight-forwardly seems to mean, Dummett will treat Quine’s reading as showing not that the context principle is mistaken but that the Quinean or literal interpretation of the principle is mistaken. He has an argument to establish that. “In a word, the individual letters carry no meaning: the words ‘mean’ and ‘lean’, for example, carry no common meaning-component represented by the three letters ‘ean’. If the doctrine stated by Quine were taken as involving that the words in a sentence no more carry a meaning of their own than the letters in a word, the doctrine would be absurd, and fly in the face of the obvious and crucial fact that we understand new sentences...”.16 There are two connected lines of criticism there. One is that compositionality is a check to the straightforward interpretation of the context principle: compositionality, being rationally unassailable, renders that particular interpretation of the context principle false. Dummett has another strong objection, one that makes the principle as interpreted “absurd” (or “nonsensical” as he says a few lines earlier). If words do not

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have a meaning independently of their occurrence in a sentence, then they have the same status as “ean”. Words would be a semantic blank outside a sentential context, as “ean” is meaningless outside the words “mean” and “lean”. Of course, what Dummett is urging us to recognize is that words are not at all like that. “Mean” and “lean” are not analogous to “ean”, they are meaningful outside the context of a sentence. Words do, and, given the compositionality principle, must, have a meaning previous to and independently of sentences in which they occur. Nonetheless Dummett is unwilling to dump the context principle. There must, he thinks, be some other way of regarding it that does not run into absurdity. His interpretation is implicit in his account of whether words or sentences are the primary meaningful elements of language. “In the order of explanation the sense of a sentence is primary, but in the order of recognition the sense of a word is primary.... when we come to give any general explanation of what it is for sentences and words to have a sense, that, of what it is for us to grasp their sense, then the order of priority is reversed”.17 I shall allow Dummett’s solution to remain murky for now, instead turning to my reformulation of the entire line of argument. The point of engaging in this discussion was to set out a good-sized chunk of contemporary philosophizing conducted in terms of sentences and then to exhibit how the same (?) thought can be expressed in terms of what is said rather than in terms of sentences. Start with compositionality. The views developed in the previous chapters are relatives of the idea associated with the compositionality principle that words are the primary linguistic instruments, sentences secondary. I have argued that we use words, not sentences, to say things, thus making words fundamental in our communicative activities. However, compositionality is defensible only so far. The immediately relevant flaw is that, while it is true that sentences are composed of words, that does not mean “compositionality” is a good name for the descendant doctrine I am proposing. For, as sentences are being replaced by what is said as the object of philosophical interest and as something said is, because extra-linguistic, not composed of words, not composed of items belonging to a particular language, it follows that “compositionality” is not appropriate to its offspring. The unnamed successor doctrine to compositionality is this: we use words to say things and thus words are in that way more basic than what gets said. It is only because words are in that manner primary can we account for the fact, which Dummett rightly insists upon (although he has recourse to the notion of a sentence in formulating it), that we do understand things said which we have never previously encountered as long as the

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words in which it is said are (more or less) previously known and the patterns into which they are put are decently standard-and, as noted at the end of this section, other requirements that go beyond the full compositionality principle are satisfied as well. What, then, is to be done with contextualism and the associated idea that it is sentences not words that are the primary elements of language? There is no doubt that understood as it ordinarily would be understood, the context principle is quite wrong-headed. Though they are not the only reasons that can and should be brought against the principle (Baker and Hacker supply others18), Dummett’s arguments are devastating. The faults that those reasons locate in contextualism are not, however, due to its reliance upon the notion of a sentence. “Only in the context of a sentence does a word have a meaning” is not improved by changing it to “Only in the context of something said does a word have meaning”. That too is false, convicted by precisely the same reasons. So “the celebrated context principle” must be shown the door. Nonetheless, there is something right about the connected derivative thesis that sentences are more basic than words, though that correctness appears when and only when that thesis is appropriately revised to state that what is said is more fundamental than words. Dummett, though he claims that what he is doing is merely offering a different interpretation of contextualism, recognizes that there is a way in which a thesis that words are primary is deeply misleading if offered as the only thesis about the relationship of words to things said. Further, he is right in observing that the truth has to do with explanations. The best way to understand the matter is this. Words are pieces of language that exist to be used in the saying of things. Without a place in a language, without a part to play in the saying of things, they are not meaningful, they are not even words. Saying things, talking, linguistically communicating, is thus the background to something’s being a word. Further, understanding a particular word requires grasping the particular role it plays in a language, in saying things. Understood thusly, though only thusly, what is said is more primary than words. There is an excellent analogy for this point about words. Coins in a system of money have value. Contextualism goes wrong because it suggests that coins (by analogy) have their value only when actually being used in a particular monetary transaction. However, they have value even outside the context of such a transaction, as words have meaning outside the context of particular linguistic transactions. Nonetheless, to understand something’s being a coin and having monetary value is to understand it as having a role in a monetary system, to understand that it is to be used in financial

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transactions. And to know just what value a given (kind of) coin has requires knowing how it will function in transactions. So too, analogously, with words. Which is the more primary, words or things said with them? As in Dummett, the answer is ‘Either, depending upon what is at issue’. Words are the instruments by which we say things and understanding those words is what enables us both to say and to understand things never previously occurring in our experience. (To paraphrase Mill, words are the permanent possibility of sensible talk.) That is a version of Dummett’s “order of recognition”. On the other hand, words are what they are only because they have some particular role in some particular system of human communication and to make sense of a given word is to grasp that role (Dummett’s “order of explanation”). Not enough has been said here on the topics of compositionality and contextualism, especially compositionality and its successor. For the intelligibility of things said, there normally is more required than just an acquaintance with the words used and their grammatical organization. There are many such considerations necessary for understanding, one of which is metaphor (“He’s an old warhorse”).19 A complete discussion of these matters was not the aim, however. I have been attempting to illustrate, using those doctrines as examples as I did previously with truth-conditional semantics, how analysis and argumentation can proceed even when sentences are put aside as tools. Philosophical life will continue.

V BELIEFS AS TRUTH-BEARERS

1. Various Possibilities Chapters ago, I divided possible truth-bearers into two groups. One group contained what I have been calling the linguistic possibilities, the other the non-linguistic. The linguistic group comprises, with any plausibility, only sentences, the non-linguistic group such items as assertions, beliefs, propositions, and, the one I have relied upon throughout, what a person says. The terminology used to label the opposing camps, namely “linguistic” and “non-linguistic”, derived from the following consideration. Sentences (and words) necessarily belong to languages: some proposition of the type “That’s a (e.g.) Japanese sentence” must be true or false of any given sentence (ignoring, since they cause no theoretical problems, the mixed sentences discussed in Chapter 1). By contrast, candidates from the nonlinguistic group cannot sensibly be qualified as belonging to any language: “That’s a (e.g.) Japanese claim”, understood as assigning a claim to a language (and not, say, to the Japanese people, government, etc.) does not make sense, nor does any other where the name of a language modifies “claim” or any of its cohort. Pursuing that difference, sentences became linguistic candidates, items necessarily belonging to some language, while claims, propositions, etc., are non-linguistic, items necessarily not belonging to a language. Having initially marked out those two groups, the argument since has been that it is not sentences that are truth-bearers. With sentences now eliminated, the linguistic group contains no further plausible options. Truthbearers must, in the adopted terminology, be something non-linguistic. What remains to be done? A great deal. First, the possibilities for the kind of thing that is referred to by the word “That” in “That’s true” are presently plural-there are candidates, not a single candidate. Is that a satisfactory state of affairs? Is some one of the candidates what really has truth-value? There is a second set of problems. Suppose that some agreement is reached on the first issue: that truth-bearers are such-and-such. We must then ask, to put it in the metaphysical mode, “What kind of being

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does such-and-such have?” What sort of thing is the winning candidate whether it be propositions or claims or what someone says, etc.? Orderliness suggests that it is desirable to start with the problem of the potential reduction of the still plentiful stock of possibilities for bearing truth and only then proceeding to the metaphysical matters. However, that neat and clean line is impossible to maintain since the other issues will inevitably creep in, even if by implication only, before officially being called upon. It is thus necessary to make one point bearing on those final issues here at the start. Once upon a time I encountered a greeting card fastened to someone’s refrigerator door that read “Some of the most important things in life are not things”. Without worrying about the sentiment expressed in the card, I want to commend its metaphysical, that is to say conceptual, insight. For, in the sense intended, some things are not things. Philosophers have other words to use in place of that final “thing”, chiefly “object” and “entity”. The saying thus means “Some things are not objects, entities”. I shall adopt that insight. In the immediate sequel, propositions and statements and so on shall be referred to as “things”, but it is not thereby implied that they are objects or entities. It is to remain an open question during the discussion in this and ensuing chapters whether what is said, or whatever turns out to be the best choice for bearing truth and falsity, is a thing or a thing that is not a thing. I shall then be able to ask, in a subsequent chapter when the metaphysical question is allowed to officially arise, “What kind of thing is an assertion, etc.?” for which one answer (the wrong answer I shall hold) would be “They are objects, entities”. That out of the way and sentences previously dispatched, what are we referring to when we use truth words in the paradigmatic way, namely when we say “That’s (not) true”? We all know that in the history of the discussion about truth-bearers various items have been cited as non-linguistic possibilities. These include, importantly, beliefs, judgments, thoughts, Thoughts, propositions, statements, assertions, claims, judgeable-contents, Satze-an-sich, and, what I have been using as the representative throughout, what is said. Those possibilities share important similarities and yet exhibit equally important differences. Let me start with a similarity and then work back to differences and then forward again. Saying, as I did above, that the members of the non-linguistic group of potential truth-bearers are so classed together because they are not elements of some particular language or the other is true but misleading. To remove the mischief, it must be observed that those non-linguistic items are linked by more than the negative attribute of not belonging to a language. They also sort together because they share an affinity for “that” clauses. Each of

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the non-linguistic items, in its various forms, is typically (but not necessarily: see the following chapter) connected with a “that” clause: “The assertion that p”, “He asserted that p”, “What he asserted is that p” and so on. In that common feature, they once again stand in contrast with their linguistic opponent. It makes no sense to speak of “The sentence that p”. It is tempting to claim, because it clearly is a central piece of the correct story about truth-bearers, that it is “that” clauses which are the truth-bearers and that what we are arguing about is only what name to affix to them, whether they are (really) beliefs, propositions, etc. The difficulty with that move, at least at this point in the inquiry, is that something of importance would be omitted. Suppose that Sally says “It’s a long way to Nepal” and John says “That’s true”. Now John’s remark attributes truth to what Sally said, but what she said, in a perfectly straight-forward specification of what she said, did not have a “that” clause in it. It is of course possible to switch from direct to indirect discourse and have a “that” clause appear: “Sally said that it’s a long way to Nepal”. But it will not do to identify truth-bearing with “that” clauses. The most we are entitled to is the recognition that “that” clauses are intimately tied to truth-bearing, with a significant problem remaining to be solved. Now, let us start looking at some of the differences between items cited as non-linguistic possibilities for having a truth-value. My plan is to sift through the items in this collection, sometimes in a wholesale fashion, looking at relevant features in order to obtain some map from which a judgment, in the end, might be made as to which item is, or perhaps which items are, properly or best, regarded as, what is true or false. That collection, gathered from both philosophical suggestions and from more everyday candidates, is sortable into three sub-groups. One group comprises items that make some reference to communication, things such as statements and claims; a second contains mental candidates, beliefs for example; while the third group consists of things which appear to be neither definable with reference to communication nor to a mind, propositions being the paradigm item in this group. The labeling of the first group may occasion some surprise. For in saying that one sub-set of the non-linguistic candidates is marked by their connection to communication, the implication is that they are thus related to language. Yet with the elimination of sentences, linguistic matters were seemingly left behind. That conclusion, however, would be the result of a misunderstanding. I have all along been insisting upon the distinction between what is said and the words with which it is said or the sentence produced in the saying of it and have called the latter, both words and

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sentences, “linguistic” because they must belong to some language or the other. Things said, statements, claims, on the other hand, do not belong to a language and so are not linguistic. But, of course, a statement must be made in words (or, in a subordinate manner, by some other communication system, e.g. by flags) and so is necessarily connected with language. Statements, things said, assertions, etc. are thus necessarily related to language although they are not elements of a language. Calling them communication related, or discourse related, candidates for truth-bearing is thus perfectly appropriate, not inconsistent with my also labeling them “non-linguistic things”. The items I have placed in the mental group appear, on the basis of traditional understandings, to be denizens of the mind and thus logically independent of language and thus externally, contingently, related to communication. Propositions and other similar items (e.g. Fregean Thoughts), do seem to belong to neither of the other two groups. While statements are made and must be made in words, propositions (in the traditional way of regarding them) are not made and perforce are not made in words. Taken in that way, propositions also appear to be contingently related to language. As Frege said of Thoughts: "The thought, in itself imperceptible by the senses, becomes clothed in the perceptible garb of a sentence, and thereby we are enabled to grasp it”.1 Further, propositions are favored as truth-bearers by philosophers of a realist turn of mind in opposition to idealist philosophy precisely because they are not mental things, are not Humean ideas or whatever. Given that I said, back in the first chapter, that what is said will turn out to be the best choice for truth-bearer and given that it falls into the subgroup of communication connected candidates, then I must be intending to argue that truth-bearers are necessarily connected with communication and so with language. Indeed, my aim shall be to argue that, despite initial appearances, all of the possibilities, both the mental ones and the other supposedly non-communication possibilities, e.g. propositions, are themselves necessarily connected to language. The initial three-fold classification of the non-linguistic truth-bearers fades away upon inquiry, leaving only items intimately related to talk.

2. The Mental Candidates: Beliefs Some non-linguistic candidates for truth-bearing have been, in the history of philosophy, put into the category of the mental-beliefs and thoughts surely, judgments possibly-and have, for precisely that reason, either been

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promoted as, or denied to be, what has truth-value. It has been some time now since philosophers were likely to call something a truth-bearer simply because it is a mental something. Instead, it became much more the common practice as the twentieth century went on and continued into the twenty-first to deny that role on those grounds. However, though they have fallen upon hard times, the sort of items treated as head cases deserve some measure of analytic consideration, even though the present philosophical community will tend to deny that mental whatnots are truth-bearers precisely because they are mental. The major aim of this chapter is to argue that beliefs are to be included in the final list of truth-bearers but they are so because they have a type of discourse related being and are not a Cartesian (or neo-Cartesian) mental state. Appended to that argument is a (far too) brief indication that the same outcome is to be expected for non-Fregean garden variety thoughts. In recent writing, beliefs have not been favored as truth-bearers, though they have been in certain past periods of philosophy.2 A large part of the reason they have been put aside is that those many past philosophers who have treated beliefs as the fundamental truth-bearers have both thought of beliefs as a certain type of mental furniture and have also taken the mind to be at the root of everything (idealism). Philosophers who vigorously deny the latter, who may also deny that the mind is at the root of anything, have, however, conceded, or tended to, the former, that beliefs are mental objects. Consequently, beliefs have come to be rejected as having any legitimate claim to being truth-bearers. That is misguided. Beliefs, at least in the circumstances where one might say “She believes that p” or less formally “She thinks that p”, where the contrast is with “She believes in x”, certainly are truth-bearers. It is a basic fact of human life that we all have both true beliefs and false beliefs-hence it must make sense, be possible, that beliefs are truth-bearers. It is not an idealist fantasy that we can say such things as “What she believes about me is simply not true” or “She believes I’m lazy and she’s right”. Rather than dismissing beliefs as truth-bearers out of hand, it is important to see that they do belong in the pot. Another line of objection to treating beliefs as truth-bearers, one which also thinks of them as pieces of mental equipment, requires much more extensive investigation. Since the turn of the twentieth century, with both Moore and Frege (and also with the Austrian tradition derived from Brentano), it has been held that a distinction must be drawn between, on the one hand, the act of believing or the condition or state of belief, and, on the other hand, what is believed. The first, the activity and/or condition, Moore and Frege agreed, is mental,

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something engaged in or undergone by individual minds, but the second they held to be not a matter of the mind at all. For they (rightly) insisted that what is believed by two different people can be precisely the same, which would be impossible if what is believed were a mental phenomenon. Finally, they also held that it is what is believed that is true or false and not the private and individual mental conditions of different people. What is relevant to the topic of truth-bearing is not the Moorean/Fregean denial that what is believed is a mental something, but the thesis they shared with the idealists that “believing” and “belief” stand for something mental. If those are relegated to the mental, then so too presumably is “believe”. And so we acquire the notion, in its contemporary dress, that one must distinguish between the mental phenomenon, in Russell’s terms the propositional attitude, designated by terms such as “believing”, “belief” and “believe”, and the object of the attitude, the non-mental content of such mental activities or states, namely what is believed. The Moore/Frege line regards “believing”, “belief” and “believes” as referring to, picking out, naming, a mental act or mental condition, which is distinct from its content, i.e. distinct from what is believed. If truth or falsity attaches to what is believed and belief is treated as a state of mind, say an attitude toward a propositional content, then it follows that the ordinary locutions “true belief” and “falsely believes” are, at best, misleading. Those expressions would embody a failure (on the part of ordinary speakers, of ordinary language) to distinguish between the purely mental aspect and the non-mental truth-bearing content of a belief. And so we have fashioned an objection to including beliefs as a legitimate contender for the role of truthbearer. I intend to defend our practice of speaking of true and false beliefs, to show that the above criticism fails to grasp the nature of belief and so does not succeed in removing the notion of belief from the set of possible truthbearers. My response will enable us to begin seeing what sort of thing belief is and, later at least, to appreciate where belief fits in the directory of truthbearers. What first has to go in the standard view inherited and developed by Moore and Frege is the idea that there is some mental activity, some psychological act, named “believing”. The verb “to believe” (and hence the concept of belief) does not have constructions such as “I am believing that”, “He was believing”, “She will be believing tomorrow”, etc. It is, surely, possible to speak of “believing” but we do not thereby label an activity: “She went to her grave believing him to be innocent” is fine, but it means the same as “She believed until her death that he was innocent”. It cannot be rendered “She was believing for her last twenty years that he was

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innocent”. Human beings believe, but we cannot engage in believing. (Nor, of course, can God.) The Moore/Frege line, stripped of the idea of a mental act, then regards “belief” and “believes” as referring to, picking out, naming, a mental condition, something distinct from its content, distinct from what is believed. In response, start with the realization that, in linguists’ terminology, “belief” is a nominalization of “believe”-despite the philosophical compulsion to entify and a corresponding philosophical preference for nouns, the verb form is primary and the noun is a construction from it. Yet they are otherwise equivalent ways of saying the same thing. “I believe we will win” says nothing different from “My belief is that we will win”-and “John’s belief is that we will win” is but a variant on ‘“John believes that we will win”. What, however, does saying “I believe that p” (or equivalently as above “My belief is that p”), amount to? It is impossible to obtain a correct view of that matter, and in consequence impossible to produce a satisfactory philosophical account of what belief is, without consideration of the topic known to philosophers as Moore’s Paradox. Although the amount of consideration given to Moore’s Paradox has significantly increased recently3, that topic is not being connnected to work on the nature of belief: books are today written in answer to the question “What is belief?” without so much as a mention of the paradox.4 Wittgenstein, though, reckoned the matter important. “He once remarked that the only work of Moore’s that greatly impressed him was his discovery of the peculiar kind of nonsense involved in such a sentence as, e.g. ‘It is raining but I don’t believe it’.”5 Moreover, the reason he thought Moore’s discovery so important was precisely that it showed us that we had been laboring under a misapprehension about the nature of belief. In consequence, Wittgenstein devoted Section X of Part II of the Investigations to a discussion of the paradox. (The very existence of that discussion has escaped notice in quite recent writing on Moore’s Paradox.6) In order to understand truth-bearing one is led to the concept of belief. To understand belief, or so I, following Wittgenstein, claim, one must deal with Moore’s Paradox. Thus what follows is a (partial) discussion of that topic. What I shall have to say is derived, with large additions, from Wittgenstein’s discussion in the Philosophical Investigations.7 “Moore’s Paradox” is the name by which philosophers know the problem of the conflict between the two clauses of both “I believe that p, but not p” and “p, but I don’t believe it”. The problem has been labeled a

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“paradox” because it is thought that there cannot be a conflict between the two clauses yet there is. Moore’s own words are the best starting place. “Such a thing as ‘I went to the pictures last Tuesday, but I don’t believe that I did’ is a perfectly absurd thing to say, although what is asserted is something perfectly possible logically.”8 Moore there expresses his discovery that there is something absurd about that form of words. Over and above noticing the oddity, Moore makes two claims there, claims which have become widely accepted. One is that the absurdity cannot reside in the conjunctive statement itself, in what is said, because that expresses a logical possibility. Secondly, Moore claims that (therefore) the absurdity must arise only in the saying or asserting of those words, in the act of publicly issuing them. Moore produces an explanation of how the words come to be odd when spoken or written, an explanation which turns on the principle that saying implies believing. Moore’s claim that the absurdity cannot be logical, cannot reside in what is said, since that is logically consistent, and that hence the queerness must derive from something conversational, has, along with the invocation of (one or another version of) the saying implies believing thesis in accounting for the oddness of the words, become the going fare in discussions of Moore’s Paradox (other than Wittgenstein’s).9 Before acquiescing in that orthodoxy, however, one should first articulate why the absurdity of those words is thought to constitute a paradox. Suppose we begin by assuming with Moore and Frege that belief is a mental state, an attitude toward a propositional content. If “believe” does name a certain condition of mind, then for a person to say “I believe that p” would be for her to report that she is in that mental state with respect to the content specified by “that p”. However, and this is what Moore realized, if that were true, if “I believe that p” were a report of the speaker’s mental state with respect to the specified content, then the conjunction “I believe that Nepal is a poor country, but it isn’t” should not be problematic, should not even appear to be contradictory. For on the assumption that “I believe” picks out a mental state, then a statement such as the one above, a Moorean paradoxical statement, would consist firstly of a report by a speaker about themselves, specifically a report about their attitude toward Nepal, “I believe Nepal is poor”, and secondly an assertion about Nepal itself, “Nepal isn’t a poor country”. Assertions about two different subject matters, about two different logical subjects, here about the speaker on the one hand and about Nepal on the other, cannot be in conflict. Nevertheless, the statement is problematic, the clauses do conflict. Hence a paradox: that form of words should not, cannot, have a logically bad odor; however, it does.

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The Moorean tradition, including Grice, accepts that there is a paradox and then fashions a way out of it, a way out which saves all the initial assumptions. The Moorean position is composed of several elements. (1) The primordial assumption is that the function of “I believe” is to report a condition of the speaker, or, to say the same thing more metaphysically, that belief is a mental state. (2) Mooreans take it that the problematic forms of words cannot themselves cause logical troubles because what is thereby said is “perfectly possible logically”. (3) Hence it is held that the conflict must derive from some feature of the speech situation in which they are uttered. (4) Typically the “saying implies believing” principle, in some version, is employed in explanation of the conflict, a solution which preserves the previous assumptions, i.e. (1) and (2). Each of those four moves deserves criticism. But it is, of course, the first assumption that most requires critical examination. It is just there where Wittgenstein enters the arena. Wittgenstein’s initial response to the nonsense discovered by Moore was quite unlike the Moorean response. Recognizing after Moore the absurdity of the expressions “I believe p but not p” and “p but I don’t believe it”, he nonetheless did not take that to be a paradoxical state of affairs. Rather he took the oddness of those words as offering a correction of a major philosophical misunderstanding. His thought was “Ah ha! Our philosophical assumptions lead us to expect that such words as ‘I believe that the record won’t be broken today, but it will’ make sense-yet Moore’s great discovery was that they are not intelligible. Therefore, one or more of our assumptions, assumptions which preclude a conflict between the clauses, must be mistaken”. That is, Wittgenstein took the existence of the conflict to establish the falsity of a prior assumption. Some thinkers take the existence of evil to be a reason for denying that there is a God or that God’s nature is what we thought it to be. Others try to maintain the original set of assumptions and think how they might be compatible with evil. The Moorean tradition produces an epistemological theodicy. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, takes it that there is no paradox to be explained but rather that we began with a false assumption. Which assumption? There is an absurdity, a contradiction-like condition, built into assertions such as “I believe War and Peace is a great novel, but it isn’t great at all”. Since the second clause is clearly about the novel, in order that the conjunction be absurd the first clause must also be about the same subject matter, here the same novel. If they were not about the same subject matter, there could be no conflict. Wittgenstein concludes that we philosophers are mistaken in our assumption that a claim of the form

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“I believe that p” is about the speaker. Hence, to take another and longer step, belief is not (at least not simply) representable as a condition or state of a person. What alternative is there, however, to the standard assumption that the words “I believe” (and similarly “I don’t believe”) when followed by a “that” clause describe the state of a speaker (or report the absence of such a state)? If we do not thereby report the existence of a condition we are in (or deny that we are in that condition), what role do they have in communication? Wittgenstein’s own account is that “I believe” is used to make “a hesitant assertion”. That is, the words have the role of telling the audience that the speaker is throwing less than her or his full weight behind the connected claim that this is how the world is. Other versions are possible: to say “I believe” is to make a less than full commitment to the truth of the claim “p” or to indicate there are deficiencies in the evidential base which supports the speaker’s claim that p and so on. Wittgenstein’s full remark is “Don’t mistake a hesitant assertion for an assertion of hesitancy.” That is, the person who says “I believe that we will win today” is talking about the match, albeit toning down the certitude with which the claim is made, and is not offering a report about himself, is not talking about his hesitancy, lack of confidence, attitude or whatever. What the philosophical tradition has done, what the Moorean’s do, in the normal way of approaching the “paradox”, is to make just that mistake about the subject matter of statements beginning “I believe”. Analogously, “I don’t believe” is not said in order to report the absence of a certain inner state, the lack of a positive attitude toward a proposition. Rather, to say “I don’t believe that the dog will bite” is to say something about how the dog will behave, specifically to offer a less than wholehearted claim that the dog will not bite. So Wittgenstein’s view, the view being defended here, is that “I believe” does not report a propositional attitude and that what it does do is to soften a claim about how the world is. Wittgenstein’s argument, however, for the first of those theses is the insight that the nonsense discovered by Moore shows that “I believe” cannot be a description of how things are with the speaker. I have noted that Moore and those in his lineage have not noticed that possibility. Moreover, since Moore found a way of explaining the conflict without surrendering the central assumption that “I believe” tells us of a speaker’s attitude (that is, since Moore produced an epistemological theodicy), inquiry beyond Wittgenstein’s is necessary to defeat the Moorean project. In the Moorean tradition, what is required of a satisfactory account of the oddness of Moore’s sentences is that the explanation must locate the

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logical problem outside the conjunctive proposition itself. For that proposition, it is held, cannot suffer from any internal conflict as it is a conjunction of claims about two logically distinct subject matters. The general run of such solutions has been to invoke some feature of human conversation in explanation of why there is a conflict between the two clauses. Typically it is some version of the principle that saying implies believing which has been employed to account for the oddness. The principle works like this in the problem situation: when a person says “p” it is implied that she or he believes p; now suppose that a person says “p but I don’t believe it”; that in itself is not troublesome; however, since the spoken “p” implies “I believe p” and since she/he has explicitly said “I don’t believe p”, there has arisen in the conversational context the conjunctive claim “I believe p but I don’t believe p”. And in that there is a logical conflict. What must first be done is to understand more adequately what the saying implies believing principle means, what kind of principle it is. It has been the practice of those who have maintained that saying implies believing to paraphrase the “implies” in terms of conversational givings and takings (or, with Grice, conversational implicatures). Moore writes in explanation: “If we hear a man say..., we should all take it that...”.10 Others have talked about what someone implies by saying e.g. “It will rain” or what they give people to understand or what they entitle people to infer. The idea that there is an implication relation or implicature between saying and believing is the idea that there is a conversational (non-deductive) inference ticket from an assertion to a view about how things are with the assertor. That is surely right in some way. If you say “p” to me, very often I am thereby entitled to say of you “He believes that p”. Thus in criticism I shall be holding that the problem with the solution is not that it invokes a mistaken principle, but that the inference ticket is not relevant to the logical oddity involved in Moore’s Paradox. The troublesome expressions in our problem are “p but I don’t believe it” and “I believe p but not p”, in both of which “believe” occurs in a first person present indicative construction. Hence, to constitute a solution of the paradox, an explanation of the contradictory quality of a Moorean sentence, the saying implies believing principle must sanction an inference to the first person present indicative of “believe”. That is, Mooreans must hold that the saying of “p” entitles an inference to “I believe that p” and not to, for instance, “She believes” in order that the logically problematic conjunction “I believe that p but I don’t believe that p” conversationally results. In my claim above that saying implies believing is not a mistaken principle, I noted that when someone else says “p” we frequently can infer ‘“He/she believes p”. As a principle of inference, however, it is not

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something that a person can employ about themselves. We do not infer what we ourselves believe from what we say; we cannot argue “I said p, hence I have good reason to hold that I believe p”. That inference from assertion to an assertor’s belief is available only to another. The appropriate expression of what is inferred is, e.g. “She believes”, “He said p, so (caeteris paribus) he believes p.” The extremely general manner in which the inference ticket is normally stated has misled the Mooreans. Saying does not imply believing-your saying (all things being equal) implies that you believe and so on. There is, however, no first-person present version of the inference ticket, no license of the form “I say p, hence all things considered I am entitled to hold that I believe that p.” When using the saying implies believing principle as a solution to the logical problems with “I believe p but not p”, in order to obtain the requisite conflict with the “I believe p” it is necessary to think that my asserting of “not p” implies “I don’t believe p”. That is, what is implied must be stated in the first person present in order for the implication principle to constitute a solution that saves the traditional assumptions. And that, we have just seen, is not what can be inferred. To make the principle relevant to the problem cases, Mooreans must stretch it to include the impossible-as if we could take the same interest in our own words that another can. If it is thought that by suitable juggling one can still use the implied “He believes” in a solution-e.g. “He said ‘I believe’ and so I can say that he believes p and he also said ‘not p’ so I can infer that he believes not p and there is the conflict”-two responses are obvious. In such an attempt the economy and consequent plausibility of the original Moorean version is completely dissipated with the benefit accruing to Wittgenstein’s solution. More importantly, that maneuver, by throwing the problem into an observer’s perspective, fails to respond to what was initially paradoxical: that the words “I believe p but not p” are strange on our own lips. The saying implies believing doctrine cannot be made relevant in that way either. I have been representing the Moorean resort to the saying implies believing inference ticket as a theodicy-like move designed to save all the initial assumptions in the face of a discovered logical conflict. I have now shown that that particular move is misguided, that the principle typically invoked is irrelevant to the problem. However, here, as with the problem of evil, new proposals for solving the difficulty may well be lurking just around the corner, not yet available for criticism and refutation. In connection with Moore’s Paradox, however, a general argument against any future save the phenomena solution is possible. That possibility arises because the condition which Mooreans impose upon potential solutions,

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namely that the initial assumptions must be saved, necessitates the failure of the entire class. Return first to Moore’s announcement of the problem: “’I went to the pictures last Tuesday, but I don’t believe that I did’ is absurd to say, although what is asserted is something which is perfectly possible logically: it is perfectly possible that you did go to the picture and yet you do not believe that you did.” The absurdity is granted, although in speech only, for what would be said in those words is (claimed to be) logically untroubled. Notice that Moore does not merely assert that there are no logical troubles with what is said by those words; in addition he tacks on a consideration designed to establish just that, namely that “it is perfectly possible that you did go to the picture and yet you do not believe that you did”. Further in maintaining that what is said “is perfectly possible logically”, Moore implies that those words could be thought without any logical problems arising. It is those two items, the argument Moore and his fellows offer for the unproblematic status of what is asserted by the words “p but I don’t believe it” and the implication that (therefore) we can think, albeit not say, those words without any logical troubles occurring, which must be examined. How does Moore defend the logical possibility thesis? What he does, no doubt without noticing it, is shift into the second person, arguing that since you could have gone to the pictures without your believing that you did, the problematic words express a logical possibility. But such a shift of person fails to make his case. What must be noticed here, what is central to seeing the failure of the Moorean view and the success of Wittgenstein’s, is a major asymmetry within the concept of belief. The first person present “I believe p, but notp” is odd, absurd, (quasi-)self-contradictory. Yet, analogues of those words, containing other persons, tenses and constructions of “to believe”, are not in any measure problematic. “You believe p but it isn’t so” (second person) and “He believes p, but he’s wrong” (third person), “I believed p once upon a time, but it isn’t true” (even the first person in the past tense) have no logical taint to them whatsoever. Nor does the first person present if located within a case of imagination or hypothesis: “Suppose I believe p, though not p” is completely unproblematic. Moore, then, to convince us that what would be said by “I believe p but not p”, if it could be said, is something logically possible offers as proof the realization that “You believe p, but not p” is not absurd. But that consideration has no probative force: for the question is not about the untroubled second person construction. What is needed for Moore to succeed in his argument is a consideration that shows the first-person

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present tense to make sense. If, however, one attempts to defend Moore’s thesis by offering up as a first person present candidate “It is perfectly possible that I went to the movies but I don’t believe it”, then one has only introduced another instance of the asymmetry, namely a version of the perfectly intelligible supposition “Imagine I’m at the movies but that I don’t believe it”. I will assert as a general proposition that every time the Mooreans attempt to argue that what is said by the words “p but I don’t believe it” makes perfectly good sense, they invoke cases to illustrate the intelligibility which involve some construction other than the simple first person present of “to believe”. Admittedly, clearly, no other person, tense or construction causes problems. Hence, they do not present any successful defense of the thesis that the problematic words express something intelligible. As it is one of the key Moorean assumptions, a part of the hard-core of their research program (to borrow Lakatos’ words), something that the Mooreans seek to defend by discovery of a certain style of explanation of the absurdity of the words, then the failure to produce any satisfactory defense of that assumption renders the entire project pointless. The second topic to consider in this regard is that any standard Moorean solution, one which attempts to locate the troubles with the words in speech alone, implies that those words are intelligible in thought. ‘” I believe p but not p” must, for Mooreans, be thinkable. Let us take “thinkable” or “in thought” in the most straight-forward way. Is it possible to have the thought “I believe she’s coming up the drive, but she’s not” without any absurdity? Of course not. Trying to make sense of the words by refraining from having them pass through our lips and keeping them to ourselves as a thought cannot make them intelligible. That result is to be expected from a Wittgensteinian point of view. Precisely because Moore got it right in noticing that those words are absurd in speech, he must be wrong in claiming that they make sense in thought. To hold that an expression’s having meaning is a function of its having a particular public communicative role is to deny that you can play the Cartesian game and have a private intelligibility. The idea that remarks can be sensible in thought alone is quite mistaken. Here is the upshot. In producing what I have styled an epistemological theodicy, the Mooreans try to protect their initial set of assumptions by devising a certain type of solution. However, their argument that there is a defensible assumption to be protected fails and moreover the type of solution they seek is also indefensible because it attributes miraculous powers to thought. These are general objections to any attempt to carry on the Moorean project and so while it is impossible to anticipate all future

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solutions, the above considerations show that none will be capable of satisfying the conditions placed upon them. At this point I shall declare success for the alternative interpretation, namely that found in Wittgenstein, of the oddity involved in the forms of words “p but I don’t believe it” and “I believe p but not p”. What I am up to at this point does have something of the character of a declaration: there remain so many issues about which this alternative view will require us to change our minds, that one cannot in conscience sit back at this point and say “case completed”. However, the present project has to do with truthbearing and not with giving a full accounting of the nature of belief, so the ensuing discussion will have to be directed toward only those further matters relevant to the topic of beliefs being truth-bearers. “I believe you are a fraud” is then not about the speaker but about you, about whoever is being addressed. To say “I don’t believe the leg is broken” is to be talking about the leg not about the speaker (unless it is the speaker’s leg). The initial consequence is that first person present belief statements are not reports of the speaker’s attitude toward a truth-bearer, do not refer to a state of mind, or brain, or behavior. It is wholly misguided to divide first person present belief claims into two aspects, one of which (expressed by “I believe”) concerns how things are mentally (or neurologically or behaviorally) with the speaker and a second aspect (expressed by “(that) p”), a truth-bearing aspect, which is not concerned with things mental (or behavioral or neurological). “Believes” and “belief” (at least as they occur in the first person present) are not names of conditions, do not have a referential function, do not designate something called “a propositional attitude”. The second, positive, thesis arising from the earlier arguments is that statements of the forms “I believe that p” and “I don’t believe that p” are a form of assertion (or denial) that p in which the “I (don’t) believe” phrase has the function of attenuating the claim (or denial) that p. The consequence is that the terms “believes” and “belief”, at least as they occur in the first person present, are explicable only with reference to the concept of assertion, to the notion of saying something. The consequences of the argued position about belief are carefully restricted in the above summary to the first person present, to “I (don’t) believe that p”. Something, of course, needs to be said about other persons and tenses, about whether or not the standard views apply to them. Is not “He believes that p” a report about him? Does it not refer to a propositional attitude? While those two questions may appear to be the same, they are in fact, and importantly so, very different and require contrasting answers.

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The asymmetry between the first person present and other persons, tenses and constructions, which I so readily accepted above, will seem to the traditionalist to be destructive of the unity of the concept of belief. “Your view entails that ‘believe’ as it occurs in ‘I believe’ means something different from ‘believe’ as it occurs in ‘I believed’ and in ‘Suppose I believe’. Yet surely in all three the words have exactly the same meaning. Again, when I say ‘I believe that p’ and in consequence you say of me ‘He believes that p’, surely the meaning of the verb is the same!” Why would such an objector think that the view previously defended, a view which incorporates the above asymmetry between first person present and other constructions with “believe” entails that “believe” in the first person present must then mean something different from what it means in the past tense (or the supposition or the third person)? The thesis argued above is that since “I believe” is not a report about the speaker, the word “believe” in “I believe” cannot name a property of the speaker, cannot be referring to the speaker’s attitude toward a proposition. However, the objection assumes that, since “I [John] believed”, “He [John] believes”, etc. do offer a report about someone (John say), therefore the word “believe” in those constructions does pick out a propositional attitude, must name or refer to some condition of the agent. That is, the objection makes the assumption that the traditional view was right all along for other forms of the verb and that at most it has been shown to be mistaken for the verb as it occurs in the simple first person present. Armed with that assumption, it will now seem as if “believe” must mean something different in the two cases and in consequence that the view argued here must render the concept of belief incoherent by entailing a difference in meaning between “believe” in “I believe” and in “Suppose I believe”. The proper way of dealing with the objection is obvious. Since “believe” as it occurs in the first person present clearly does not differ in meaning from its occurrences in other tenses, constructions, etc., (the objection is correct in that respect), then the traditional view, the Cartesian view, is wrong about its function in those other forms as well. “Belief” is not the name of a property, attitude, state, condition, etc. in any construction. Belief is not a phenomenon that occurs in human life to which we have attached a label. What I have urged is this, that “I believe” is not a report of how things are with the speaker while, e.g., “I believed” is a report of how things used to be with the speaker. It does not follow from that that when one is reporting how things used to be with oneself, one is making reference to the existence of a specific state of oneself now vanished. To put it differently, there is no analogy at all in the following two statements both of which are

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past tense reports about the speaker: ‘I” believed then that she would be famous” and “I then had a bruise on my leg” (or a smile on my face or a stain on my shirt). The Cartesian idea, picked up by Moore and Frege and orthodoxy, is that there is an analogy between those two statements in that belief language picks out a state of the mind (or for Neo-Cartesians the brain) just as bruise language picks out a state of the body. Similarly, there is no analogy (except in person and tense) between “He believes that they will be happy” and “He has a rash on his arm”. A belief is not the inner analogue of, say, a rash.11 There is one feature of this that must be kept straight. The argument was not: the words “I believe” do not pick out a feature of the speaker, therefore “I believe that p” is not a report about the speaker. That formulation reverses premiss and conclusion. The argument was: “I believe that p” is not a report about a speaker, hence the verb “believe” cannot there be naming a propositional attitude or referring to a state of the speaker. It is the conflict generated in Moore’s funny statements which is the explanation of why “believe” in the first-person present cannot be referring to an attitude. The objector has been arguing that since I allow “He believes” to be about him, I must be allowing “believe” there to name a condition. That, however, is to think that the one’s being a report is explained by the person’s being in some kind of condition. That is not so: one must allow, say, “He believes that p” to be a report about him because it is not in conflict with the “not-p” in Moorean sentences. It is that structural or grammatical feature which entitles us to say that the third person cases (and so too the others) are reports about someone. What we should thereby conclude about whether “believe” in “He believes”, etc. does name or refer to an attitude is not even yet raised, much less settled. And how do we settle it? As it is obvious that “believe” in both “He believes” and “I believe” mean the same and since “believe” in “I believe” is not the name of a piece of mental furniture, then we must conclude that in “He believes” “believe” is not the name of mental furniture either, i.e. that it also does not there refer to a subjective something. So too in the other constructions. Hence, it is not a consequence of this view that the concept of belief is internally disjointed or incoherent. The words “believes” and “belief” when used in any construction are not designators. A person can then be talking about herself or himself and saying how things used to be with them by saying “I believed” (and similarly for the other cases) without thereby telling us that they formerly had the mental (or neural) analogue of a skin condition. But if belief is not that sort of thing, then what kind of thing is it? What kind of tale are we to tell, philosophically, about belief? Let me treat that

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problem in two stages: first by making some general remarks about the sort of thing that belief is and then by adding some specifics about belief itself. I have argued that beliefs are not phenomena to which we have attached the designator ‘belief’. What other mode of being, however, is there? Wittgenstein said in a similar situation “It is not a something, but not a nothing either.”12 What is it to be not a nothing which is not a something either? What would a philosophical representation of that be like? Let me trot out some variations on a theme, which taken together illustrate the kind of story which is appropriate to belief. Moore denied that “good” is the name of a natural property, i.e. “good” does not designate some observable feature or characteristic of good things. However, he was so captured by the idea that, since “good” was a predicate it must therefore be referring to something, he was led to claim that it names or refers to a non-natural property. Such a view has seemed totally implausible to many philosophers and so “good” has (in my circles at least) come to be regarded as not a property word, not a designator, at all, instead having some different function in discourse-the best account of the function being that it is an assessment word.13 Such a model is appropriate for belief. Belief is not a something any more than goodness is-“believes” does not designate something, whether a state of mind, brain or behavior. Nonetheless, belief is not a nothing, not a fiction, any more than goodness is-“believes” plays a significant role in talk and thought even though it does not play the role of picking out some condition of a person. Consider the following as a variation on that. What is it to be a citizen? Citizenship is not an outward or inward state of a person. It is to possess a more or less specifiable set of rights and responsibilities, items which cannot be discerned no matter how careful an inspection of the person, mind and body, is made. To call someone a “citizen” is not to refer to any condition of body or mind they happen to be in, but to locate them within a system of talk, thought and action. Believing is like being a citizen and not like feeling depressed. There is a more familiar model which has some relevance too. To say “I am playing soccer” is to locate my actions, my present speech and thoughts, within the rules of a game. Belief is analogous to a game. To say of oneself “I believe that” is to locate my actions, speech and thoughts within that ‘game’, within what Wittgenstein called a language-game, within something similar to a set of rules. In the same way, for you to say of me “He believes that” is to offer a claim about me that I should be located within the language-game of belief with respect to a given proposition, that I should be understood in that context and not in some other.

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What, however, is the belief ‘“game”, the particular system of talk, thought and action (to use my own formula) which constitutes belief? Although a satisfactory investigation of that is out of place here, some features of the belief game can be set out here. In fact, some central features have already been noted in the preceding pages. To say “I believe the market will crash” is to comment on the market not on me. It is not to remark on how I represent something, it is to represent something. Belief language is a sub-system of our talk about how things are. It is a means for representing chunks of the world. The concept of belief is an off-shoot of the concept of saying something (stating, asserting, claiming). Since there is no difference in meaning between “believes” as it occurs in the first person present and other persons, tenses and constructions, then to employ it in all its forms is to remain within the domain of talk and thought that the world is thus and so. To say “He believes that p” is not, of course, to assert how the world is but to remark on what he does or would (caeteris paribus) say the world to be like. What marks belief out from other sub-systems of talk about how some corner of the world stands, knowledge talk for instance, is that the belief “game” is “played” when a person finds they must say how things are with a diminished quantity of force and vivacity, when they find that the only claim about the subject they are entitled to make must involve less than an inquiry stopping commitment to the truth. It is possible to say “I believe it, but I may be wrong” and “I believe that is so, but let me check to make sure” whereas one cannot say “I know that, but I may be wrong” and “I know that is the way things are. but let me inquire further”. (Those differing “rules” of the “games” of belief and knowledge, show that knowledge is not a highclass belief.14) There are vastly more features of the belief game, most of which cannot be worked out here. For instance, it makes sense to say “He says he believes that, but he is lying”. A person who believes p may stop doing so; and the belief may cease because they are presented with satisfactory evidence of the falsity of p. A person who is said to believe something can be asked “Why do you believe that?” Beliefs can be silly or well-thought out. And so on. The language game of belief is hugely complicated. There will be many who have at hand a quick dismissal of the Wittgensteinian thesis that the concept of belief is a branch of the concept of saying. “Animals believe things although they don’t have language and so can’t say anything; surely ‘believes’ means the same in ‘Rin Tin Tin believes’ as in ‘John believes’; hence belief language cannot be a variation on, even related to, the concept of saying.”

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Nothing I said above commits me to holding that all those of whom it is true that they believe something must themselves have language and so have the capacity to assert or tell us how the world is. What I have offered is not another argument of the form “Belief is connected to language; animals don’t have language; hence animals don’t have beliefs.” On the contrary, it is quite consistent with what I have argued to hold that some non-human animals, members of some kinds of creatures, do believe things, believe the world to be this way rather than that. How is that possible, how is it possible to say (often truly) “She/he believes such and such” of creatures who do not themselves have the capacity to say “I believe that…” and mean the same by “believes” as we do when we say it of someone who can speak? One should start looking for an answer by noticing that the situation here is significantly analogous to those frequent cases when we say (often truly) “He/she believes that p” of a person who has not said that they believe p. The difference of course is that while the person has not said “I believe that p”, the animal, including here human infants, cannot (has not the capacity to) say it. What are we doing when we attribute belief that p to someone or some animal who has not said or has not the capacity to say “I believe p”? As argued above, we are not attributing to them some specific state of mind named “believes”. Nor are we saying that their brain is whirring in a certain fashion named “believes” (though it might be true that there is some determinate neural activity connected). Nor by “She believes p” are we referring to some particular piece of behavior, believing that p behavior, that she is engaged in. Nor are we saying that she presently has a disposition to engage in believing that p behavior–as Peter Geach pointed out there is no such kind of behavior.15 Rather we are saying that they are to be understood within a certain set of rules and practices with respect to the given proposition. Justifying a claim that the creature is to be so seen has significant difficulties, but what we are up to when we say, e.g., “Fido thinks it’s time for a walk”, is to hold that Fido is to be understood as falling within the belief “game”, within a specific structure of talk. At last it is time to draw this discussion of belief to a close. The idea was that beliefs could be stricken from the list of possible candidates for truthbearing since it really isn’t the belief which is true or false. I set out to defend the idea that we can rightly, and not misguidedly, talk of true and false beliefs. That defense is now complete. There are not two things going on in the statement ‘I believe that p’: a claim about my own attitude and a specification of what content that attitude has. The consequence of that division is that truth and falsity are to be allocated to the content aspect, to what is believed, and not to the attitude aspect, to the belief. However, to

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say “I believe” is not to be talking of oneself but of how the world is: the remark is not a combination of claims about two different subject matters. The entire claim is subject to assessment in terms of whether or not it truly or falsely specifies how the world is. Of course, it does not follow that beliefs are the best candidates for the truth bearing role: all that follows is that belief cannot be eliminated from that opportunity by the Moore/Frege line of argument. Behind this examination has been a second aim. The non-linguistic possibilities for bearing truth (which is all that remain after the demise of sentences) seem sortable into three groups: private mental states, nonmental non-linguistic entities (propositions especially) and things such as statements, claims, etc. which are connected to discourse, to communication. An aim occupying this and later chapters is to argue that all the genuine possibilities are at bottom items within the discourse bin. The outcome of this section, which has concerned the candidacy for truth-bearer-hood of beliefs, has been that belief is not a private state but is rather, essentially, a feature of our saying how the world is. Because of that fundamental relation to the concept of saying, beliefs, as truth-bearers, must be located within the communicative possibilities.

3. Other Mental Candidates To have shown beliefs to fall into the discourse group is not to have shown that all the important possibilities for truth-bearing that have been historically treated as located within the mind, really are to be classed with statements, assertions and claims. The one most likely to strike philosophers as not re-classifiable are thoughts, where ‘thoughts’ are what we have in the course of thinking: that is, a thought occurs when someone has, for example, “The world will end tomorrow” cross their mind without so much as a twitch of their lips or jiggle of their larynx. And yet that thought is true or false. It seems impossible to re-cast such items as part of the discourse set of truth-bearers. There is no doubt that it would be highly appropriate to have here a investigation of the idea that thoughts (excluding thoughts such as “Why is John so late?”) are private truth-bearers, even, as in the Cartesian tradition, the primary truth-bearers. At one time, I thought (!) that I would include in this work such an inquiry. But I, slowly and reluctantly, came to realize that it is simply not possible to perform that inquiry short of a full-scale work. For one thing, the issue involves one of those fundamental divisions within philosophy: between those who are Cartesians (or Lockeans) and think that private mental activity is the fundamental category from which

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philosophical understanding must begin (Locke holds we invented language to be able to express the thoughts hidden in our breasts); and those who deny that, who hold that language is basic, who hold that the notion of having thoughts is intelligible only if we start from discourse and the language that makes it possible. And that split, with all the proper qualifications and arguments, cannot be adequately addressed in anything other than a booklength piece of writing. This work clearly takes its stand with the latter view: as announced early it is undertaken in the spirit of (the later) Wittgenstein. But the proper defense of that perspective, and its application to the issue of truth-bearing, cannot be undertaken here, only mentioned. One may well treat that omission as a (serious) fault in the present argumentation–or as a recognition that you cannot climb all the trees at once as long as a major unclimbed tree is mentioned. So I will conclude this examination of the mental candidates for truthbearing by saying that is based on the philosophical outlook that thinking too, a sequence of thoughts passing through one’s head, would or will turn out to be communication related if and when the full investigation is conducted. So too for any other claimed mental truth-bearers (say judgments): they, along with belief, will not in the end escape being discourse related.

VI PROPOSITIONS

1. Propositions: Making a Fresh Start So we come to the troubled and complex subject of propositions. Let us recall how we have got here. At the beginning of the previous chapter, I divided the non-linguistic candidates for truth-bearing into three categories: discourse-related (statements, assertions, etc.), mental (beliefs, thoughts, etc.) and those falling into neither of the other two camps. My aim is to examine all three groups so as to come to some conclusion about how to answer the questions, first, ‘What are the truth-bearers?’ and then ‘What is their ontological status?’ Since I have argued from the start that the best initial choice of what is a truth-bearer is "what is said”, my preference clearly is with the discourserelated potential bearers. I have not, however, given final arguments about the matter and have not said anything about what kind of being “what is said” has: that remains for another chapter. I have now also worked through the central issues concerning the mental possibilities, and have argued that they turn out to be discourse-related. Continuation of the project now requires turning to examine the third category of potential truth-bearers, those that ostensibly are neither mental nor discourse-related. Here the chief notion is that of a proposition. Though propositions are central to the category, there are other candidates in this group: chiefly in the modern world (there were still others in the ancient world), Bolzano’s Satze-an-sich and Frege’s Gedanken. It is a curious accident of history that the German language did not create a derivative of the Latin propositio, as did English (proposition), French (proposition), and Italian (proposizione). So when Bolzano and Frege, writing in German in the nineteenth century, came to reject sentences, i.e. pieces of language, as truth-bearers and not wanting to skip off to the category of the mental, they had to invent terminology. Bolzano coined the terminology of Satz-an-sich to satisfy the need. However, to contemporary philosophical ears a Satz-an-sich is too reminiscent of “sentence-type” to be much resorted to as an equivalent for

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“proposition”. It is just as simple in translating German (as with, say, the Tractatus) to translate Satz in one occurrence as “sentence”, in another as “proposition”. Frege, on the other hand, was familiar with the notion of a proposition from Russell but rejected it for reasons involved in the Russellian/Moorean accounts. Russell said in a letter to Frege that “I believe that in spite of all its snowfields Mont Blanc itself is a component part of what is actually asserted in the proposition ‘Mont Blanc is more than 4,000 metres high’”.1 That being hard for Frege to swallow, as for most of us, he surrendered the word “proposition” to Russell, helped by the absence of a corresponding term in German. So he softened his anti-psychologism a bit and, in his later work, talked of Gedanken, thoughts, as the alternative to propositions. Of course, that way of talking was too much of a concession to the mentalist camp. In consequence, those who otherwise had the terminology of “proposition”, say English speakers, and those who wanted to avoid talk of both pieces of language and of minds in an account of what bears truth and falsity have talked instead of propositions, dismissing Russell’s contention as a misguided account of propositions. Frege’s Gedanken are today properly discussed under the heading of propositions. But how are these contemporary discussions of propositions conducted? There is a boring sameness to them. No sooner is the notion of a proposition introduced than the question is raised as to whether there are any of them. That is, it is assumed by philosophers discussing the topic that propositions are objects, entities, transcendent to be sure, with only contingent connections to human practice. Then, in consequence of that assumption, the question is immediately raised as to whether any such exist or not. And so the discussion moves on as a sort of analogue to the problem of whether there are any ivory-billed woodpeckers in the forests of Arkansas, though the objects in question in the philosophical inquiry are more abstruse and the kinds of consideration offered to support the opposed positions very different from the woodpecker case. Sometimes the matter is put more generally as a question of “the ontological status” of propositions. Well and good–but the only options normally considered for what ontological status they might have are existence or non-existence. The prior question as to whether we ought to construe propositions as transcendent non-discourse-related entities in the first place, the assumption which drives the explicit issue about existence, is not raised. In this work I shall take the discussion in a radically different direction. The major issue shall be what reasons we philosophers have for taking

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propositions to be a special sort of entity, objects that have truth-values but which are only contingently related to human talk and thought. I shall argue that there is no good reason to so construe them, that they have a nature and status very similar to that of, say, statements. The point of this way of going about the matter needs to be made clear at the start. If one asserts the existence of propositions, then one is committed to the existence of some strange beasts: supernatural entities that are unobservable, logically independent of thought and language yet somehow easily accessible by all and sundry in their talk and thought.2 On the other hand, denying the existence of propositions has its problems also. First, the notion of a proposition is by now only partially exotic. “Proposition” is a technical term, an artifact of logic and philosophy, but not, no longer, purely so: it does have ordinary uses. I do not have in mind here those ordinary uses that are outside our interests, e.g. speaking of propositioning someone, of making someone a proposition, of propositions appearing on a ballot. There are, in ordinary practice, circumstances in which the word “proposition” is used as philosophers do, something susceptible to truth-value assessment. When Lincoln said in the Gettysburg address that the United States has always been “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”, he was not taking up a philosophical position about transcendent entities, but was using “proposition” as an eloquent but ordinary speaker of English. However, compared to such characterizations as “what was said” and “claims” etc. ordinary talk of truth-bearers as propositions is relatively rare. That is probably because it has a limited role. “A proposition in law or in geometry is something portentous, usually a generalization, that we are invited to accept and that has to be recommended by argument: it cannot be a direct report on current observation – if you look and inform me that the cat is on the mat, that is not a proposition though it is a statement.”3 However, those occasions on which people speak of propositions may not be as unusual as they used to be: as more and more people take logic classes and become acquainted with philosophical thought, I would guess that the occurrence of “proposition” is not only more frequent in everyday practice but may be found even in connection with circumstances at least somewhat akin to saying “The cat is on the mat”. The consequence is that if we deny the existence of propositions and thereby refuse to count propositions among the truth-bearers, we shall be philosophically cutting ourselves off even further from a feature of ordinary practice. Moreover, even philosophers who stoutly deny that there are propositions are likely to find themselves using the term. Sometimes that is because the

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terminology has become deeply fixed in philosophical practice: those who deny that there are propositions have not (typically) recommended abandoning, say, talk of “propositional attitudes”. Even when there are not settled usages such as that, philosophers, including myself, who are not inclined to populate reality with propositions nonetheless may be found speaking of propositions a couple of pages later. That is especially true when thinking of logic: for there is an important place in logic for the terminology of propositions. Is that because they, we, are inconsistent? Isn’t the situation somewhat similar to that of the atheist who shortly after denying the existence of God finds herself swearing “God damn it!” and does not think herself contradictory? Perhaps the term is so useful, so deeply inscribed in philosophical thought, that its theoretical baggage is ignored. Can the baggage be dispensed with while retaining talk of propositions as truth-bearers? What account of propositions could be offered, in replacement of that historical baggage, which would sanction the continued reference to propositions as truthbearers? What I shall then be doing is trying to preserve a role, both in and out of philosophy, for propositions by rejecting the standard conception of them. I shall not deny (nor, of course, assert) their existence but shall rather argue that to have thought of them in the first place as objects, as entities, is what has generated the controversy over their existence. The general tactic to be followed is that of Frank Ramsay. He held that as a matter of philosophical method when we see a dispute that has gone on inconclusively for a long time, what we need to do is to look for something common between the two camps and deny it.4 In the present case, I shall be arguing that those who accept, as well as those who deny, the existence of propositions share the notion that propositions are entities, transcendent of course–and that it is that common feature of the opposed positions that must be rejected in order that the notion of a proposition can continue to have a legitimate role in philosophical and extra-philosophical discourse. Proceeding that way is difficult–it would be much easier to straight-out dump the notion of a proposition. Trying to retain the notion while unloading its baggage is a very messy procedure. That, however, is the project here. Before turning to that investigation, it should be noticed that there are further issues concerning propositions. The recent realization has been that perhaps philosophers have assigned too many different roles to propositions, given them too many functions for any one kind of object to bear. “The term ‘proposition’ has a broad use in contemporary philosophy. It is used to refer to some or all of the following: the primary bearers of truth-value, the objects of belief and other ‘propositional attitudes’ (i.e., what is believed,

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doubted, etc.), the referents of that-clauses, and the meanings of sentences. One might wonder whether a single class of entities can play all these roles. If David Lewis is right in saying that ‘the conception we associate with the word “proposition” may be something of a jumble of conflicting desiderata,’ then it will be impossible to capture our conception in a consistent definition.”5 Those worries about the variety of roles ascribed to propositions by philosophers today must be addressed. Looking into them will be part of the criticism of the common assumption that propositions are by nature transcendent entities having no essential connection to human talk and thought. One can, however, get carried away with the worry that propositions have been turned into hydra-headed monsters and forget that the roles given them beyond that of truth-bearing have been recent additions. If we are to make sense of the notion, it is with the function of being true or false that we must start.

2. The Realist Conception of Propositions is Contradictory If in daily life propositions as truth-bearers concern only portentous matters, then to say “The cat is on the mat” would not be to propound a proposition. However, a much stronger thesis can be established: given the standard conception of propositions, there can be no such proposition as The cat is on the mat. If so, contrary to standard propositional theory, many truthbearers are not propositions. All things being equal, when my wife tells me that the cat is on the mat, what she has said is true or false. However, there can be no such proposition as The cat is on the mat when propositions are conceived, as they standardly are in philosophical literature, as transcendent entities having truth-values independent of human discourse. For there to be such a proposition, in other words for there to be a something (1) that has a truth-value and (2) which concerns a particular cat and a particular mat and a particular time, requires that the something be appropriately indexed. That indexing can only be accomplished in an act of discourse, of saying something. Yet that is precisely what the orthodox, the realist, account of propositions as truthbearers aims to exclude, namely internal connections to human discourse situations. However, without such indexing there is no proposition, no bearer of truth-value. The traditional account of propositions founders in just the same way that the attempt to make sentences bearers of truth-value does: neither can capture garden-variety indexicals as truth-bearers. In the case of sentences I further argued that general sentences too must not be counted as truth-

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bearers. Here I won’t so argue but shall make a similar point: there is no reason to hold that there can only be propositions of a general nature. If we wish to hang on to the notion of a proposition conceived of as something with a truth-value, some other grounding than that dodge must be provided. Of course, the argument provides an obvious route for maintaining the notion of a proposition. Since providing those referential connections necessary to truth or falsity of indexicals, and thus for the very being of propositions as truth-bearers, occurs only in a discourse situation, we can continue to talk of propositions only if we recognize that they are made by people in the saying of things, that we create propositions by and in talk and thought. They thus are of a kind with what is said, with statements, assertions, claims and so on and not with Platonic Forms.

3. History and its Consequences Let me set those considerations aside for now and come at the issues from a different direction. Although the truth-bearing use of the word has come to have some ordinary standing, “proposition” has historically been a technical term, invented for purposes of logic and philosophy. The terminology was created by Cicero. Latin had no term for what Aristotle called the major premiss of a syllogism so Cicero, in translating and commenting, created from the Latin verb proponere, to propose, a noun form propositio.6 Thus, at introduction it was a word specifying a function in an argument. What is central to the future of the term is that in order to play the syllogistic role, a propositio had to be either true or false. It did not take long, however, for the notion of a proposition to be seriously modified. The Kneales in their monumental The Development of Logic say “…already before the end of the first century A.D. the word was used by Quintilian, the rhetorician, in the more general sense of ‘statement’ or ‘indicative sentence’ which it retained throughout the Middle Ages.”7 While the details of the move are not recounted in history of logic texts such as the Kneale’s, what happened was that Roman logicians created a new way of referring to what has truth-value by redeploying the term which Cicero had used to refer the major premiss of a syllogism. A proposition could now be said to appear in any role (major or minor premiss, conclusion) in a syllogism: in fact, in that usage propositions can be found outside syllogisms. This new use for the term was not filling a hole in Latin as Cicero’s invention had done. The new terminology of propositions was an addition to an existing practice of attributing truth or falsity to things said. That

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practice of characterizing things as true or false (obviously) did not come into being with Cicero (or with Aristotle). But, as typical in philosophy, no explicit connection was made between the new post-Ciceronian term marking what logicians and philosophers spoke of as true or false and how we ordinarily denominate what we characterize as being true or false. The connection between the two “systems” was left in limbo. Let us suppose that the historical facts are roughly as stated. It is worth noting them as a reminder that the notion of a proposition came into being in historical times. However, what is really at issue is how matters stand now. That is easy to answer: over and above the assigning of additional functions to propositions, in the relevant respects nothing has changed since that introduction of the notion by Roman logicians. What are those aforementioned respects and why are they relevant? Start by considering what the Kneale’s said in the above quote. They claim that “proposition” came to be “used in the more general sense of ‘statement’.” Is that so? Although the answer is No, we can see why the Kneale’s made that claim. There are two reasons. First, they are trying to emphasize that “proposition” was reoriented from Cicero’s use of the term to a use as a name for what is characterized as true or false. As “statement” (as well as other terms) performs that role as well, on those grounds it is tempting to claim, as the Kneale’s do, that “proposition” and “statement” came to have the same sense. There is a second support for the Kneale’s assimilation of propositions to statements: their grammars in Wittgenstein’s sense of the term, pertaining to what it does and does not make sense to say are, up to a point, the same. That is, we can speak of a proposition, of the proposition, of propositions. Exactly the same is true of statements: “statement” can be prefaced with either a definite or indefinite article and plurality is created in the same way for both terms. However-and this is what the Kneale’s overlook and what means that, despite the above similarities, “proposition” did not come to have the same sense as “statement”-the Roman logicians and philosophers stopped with the noun, a practice we have continued down the centuries. The notion of a statement, though, is significantly more complex than that. For statements, claims, etc. it makes sense to say “So-and-so made a statement” or “made the statement that p”; there is also the straight verb form “She stated that p”; it also makes sense to use a personal possessive with “statement”, e.g. “His statement was stupid”. No such possibilities were created for the term “proposition”, either by the Romans or by anyone after. Sense was not, has not been, given to “He made the proposition that p” or “She propositioned that p” or “Her proposition was preposterous”.

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The absence of those forms of words for the terminology of propositions, an absence which extends down to today, means, contrary to the Kneale’s, that “proposition” did not and does not mean the same as, have the sense of, “statement”. “Assertion” and “claim”, for instance, also have the same possibilities as “statement” with the consequence that “proposition” does not have the same meaning as they do either. Why are such matters relevant to the present discussion? Because those differences in what it is possible to say open up a crucial question about the nature of propositions. Why does proposition talk come only in the form “The proposition that”? Why is it lacking those other possibilities which statement talk, indeed our names for truth-bearers otherwise, have? There are, so far as I can see, three kinds of answer and those answers lead in radically different directions about the nature of propositions. As I said earlier, philosophers today take it that the main issue about propositions is whether there are any. But both parties, whether holding that propositions do or do not exist, take it that propositions are, or would be, a special kind of object, transcendent, supernatural. Why should that be assumed? An important initial step in taking propositions to be objects is they have (some of) the grammatical paraphernalia of objects. “A proposition” is of the same form as (say) “a cow”–“the proposition” resembles formally “the pencil”–the plural “propositions” is of no different shape than is, say, “buildings”. However, more important than those features, what seems to confirm that propositions are by nature entities independent of human practice is the lack in their grammar of the possibilities noticed in the case of statements. In the terminology as it has come down to us, we cannot make propositions; we cannot proposition that such-and-such; nor can they be said to belong to anyone, there is no proposition that is, say, Sally’s. Given those grammatical facts, what other choice is there than to take propositions as a kind of entity, a certain kind of object, transcendent because we do not encounter them in space and time? We are now in a position to raise the chief question: why does “proposition” have the grammar it does and not have the range of meaningful possibilities that “statement” has? One type of answer, the type suggested by the ubiquity of the treatment of propositions as entities in philosophical thought, is that that grammar is the inevitable outcome of what propositions are. But how did we come to know what propositions are? One possible answer is that the Roman logicians discovered a new group of (abstract) entities hitherto unrecognized, which they then named “propositions” and employed the name with

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standard entity grammar. A variation of that answer would be that the entities had been previously discovered (perhaps by Greek philosophers though possibly known from time immemorial); and that what was done by the post-Ciceronian thinkers was merely to create a new name for them. Surely, however, there are serious problems with that answer. Discovering a kind of abstract object is a very perplexing notion. Was the legitimating of irrational numbers a matter of discovery, a matter of happening upon a new type of number? Would discovering propositions be like unexpectedly encountering a Platonic Form? A completely different, perhaps decisive, criticism is that the sizeable group of philosophers who accept the entity grammar of “proposition” but who nonetheless argue that there are no such things will clearly not concede that that grammar was the result of someone’s having discovered propositions. For those philosophers, propositions are a philosophical fiction–hence there was no discovery that there are such things. Even more deeply, the idea that the grammar of proposition was formed in consequence of their really being objects, and being found to be objects, is subject to a powerful general line of criticism found in Wittgenstein. It goes under the general heading in Wittgensteinian exegesis of “the autonomy of grammar (language)”.8 Wittgenstein argues that grammar, what we can and cannot sensibly say, is not answerable to reality; but rather, one of his Kantian themes (his version of Kant’s Copernican Revolution), grammar shapes how we represent reality. See Philosophical Investigations, #373: “Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is.”9 Pursuing that entire topic here is impossible. Wittgenstein’s thesis is similar to the claim that the rules of chess are not answerable to reality: the knight in chess, say, does not have its allowable and forbidden moves dictated by reality. The rules of chess are autonomous. Quine realized something of this when he proposed that we could do without the proper name “Pegasus” and instead have a verb “pegasizes”.10 Now one does not have to think his reasons for the proposal are good reasons and one does not have to think that the change in grammar could be made as easily as he assumes. But behind the proposal is the Wittgensteinian recognition that reality does not demand that we have a proper name (Pegasus), that we can imagine having a verb form instead. The idea that it is the nature of propositions that determined the Roman logicians to produce only entity grammar for their new term “proposition” won’t work. How, then, can we understand why it makes sense to speak of the proposition that p but not of someone making the proposition that p? I will defend the following answer. The Roman logicians who created the terminology of propositions failed to develop the grammar of their term

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further. They simply did not give sense to expressions of the form “She made a proposition that p”, “He propositioned that p”, and others as well. Nothing precluded them from doing so, not the nature of propositions or existing rules of grammar or philosophical views that they held. They simply did not do so. We can at least partially understand why they did not extend the grammar. Cicero had introduced propositio to mean “major premiss” and so gave sense to the terminology of “the propositio’” and so on, i.e. to the entification of propositions. There was, and is, little inclination to speak of a human activity of “major premising that p” or “making a major premiss that p”, especially where syllogisms were (are) conceived of as abstract patterns divorced from the human activity of producing arguments. When the later Roman logicians re-routed Cicero’s term so that it became a general word for truth-bearers, they took over his grammar and did not think how what they were doing connected with the existing ways of talking of truth-bearers. That they thereby omitted important features of the concepts of what people say or state did not strike them. The issues that seem to have concerned them were not our worries about the existence of non-empirical objects but rather how propositions are related to pieces of language, to sentences. Future philosophers have accepted the inherited object grammar of “proposition” and have been willing to live with the problems it has created, namely that it suggests that reality contains such objects. It has not dawned on us that what we inherited is, from the point of view of the other terms we have for truth-bearers (though not from the perspective of reality), incomplete and that the source of our philosophical difficulties resides in failure to develop further the concept of proposition left by its creators. We must get clear about what the addition of the expressions presently without sense would have done and would do for the concept of a proposition. The thesis implicit in what I have said so far is that to have a verb form “So and so made the proposition that p” or “She propositioned that p” would amount to “proposition” not having the grammar of an object existing independently of human talk and practice. Of course, it is possible to have problems with the ontological status of claims, statements, etc. And it surely is possible to think that because we can say “a statement” we must be dealing with an object. However, that thought must be understood in light of Wittgenstein’s insight early in the Blue Book about a major source of philosophical ideas: “We are up against one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment: a substantive makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it.”11 Those issues will be addressed

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in the following chapter: the present problem concerns how we are to conceive of how “proposition” became nothing but a “substantive”. It is highly important to notice here the very different philosophical problems occasioned by the phrases “a proposition” and “a statement” (or “a claim”, “an assertion”): no one writes serious philosophical essays on whether there are assertions or not–and the (or at least one) plausible explanation of that great difference is that we can say such things as “John asserted that peace is possible” but cannot say “John propositioned that peace is possible”. Am I proposing that we today give sense to such expressions as “made a proposition that p”, “propositioned that p”? Given that the concept of a proposition was a more or less thoughtless creation by logicians and philosophers, given that that off-hand production has produced the idea that the universe contains a very large population of transcendent beings, given that there is nonetheless reason to retain the terminology of “proposition”, I would like to suggest that we consider making it meaningful to say, e.g. “John made the proposition that p” and so on. We philosophers, of course, have no power to alter meaning outside our own practice, but to the considerable extent that “proposition” is a technical term, we could rectify that initial failure by Roman logicians and philosophers to further develop the grammar of the new notion. Those expressions, of course, strike us as odd. But is that because they are ruled out or because they simply haven’t been given a role in our practice? What is it that would rule them out? It cannot be that we have learned, come to know, that propositions are language and mind independent entities and so cannot have that grammar. For as I argued above, the grammar cannot have been a consequence of the nature of propositions– rather the nature of propositions is given by the grammar. What else could rule out the intelligibility of the expressions? A conflict with something else that makes sense would do the job. However, there does not appear to be such a conflicting form of words or any contrary rule. The situation is not the same as with Quine’s proposal that we could come to speak of “pegasizing” since that does conflict with what we do in speaking of Pegasus. What would be overcome in the introduction of the proposition expressions is simply the oddity of using expressions that presently have no use in order to extend propositional talk. Giving sense to the presently unused ways of talking of propositions would have valuable consequences. It would make the connections between propositions and statements and so on clearer. Calling things said, or the statements made by people, true or false is a human practice. Propositions as presently conceived fall not into the discourse-related category of truth

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bearers nor into the mental category. They are the sore thumb of possible truth-bearers. Seeing that status to be partially the result of a historical accident that could be made right by giving sense to missing forms of words cures the soreness of their situation. Further, and more narrowly, the suggestion made here does remove a persistent source of philosophical dispute. As Berkeley observed about another matter, we philosophers have raised a cloud of dust and then complain that we cannot see. We are involved in a seemingly endless dispute about whether there are propositions. That dispute partially rests on the grammar of the notion, a grammar created without thought by Roman logicians. By altering the grammar in ways that the Romans could have done but did not, we would be laying to rest a significant philosophical dispute while retaining the possibility of counting propositions among the things that have truth-value.

4. Propositions and Logic Before collecting together the preceding lines of thought, there is another issue that must be looked into as it has a major bearing on what to conclude. Suppose the following simple problem in applied mathematics is set someone: a car leaves Chicago and averages 60 mph for the first two hours and averages 75 mph for the next two hours; how far has the car traveled in the four hours? Suppose, however, that the person who is to solve it asks such things as “Who was driving? What color is the car? What was the maximum speed attained the first two hours?” Those questions are irrelevant to the problem. Of course, if a car had actually left Chicago, it would have been of some color and (technological changes aside) someone would have been driving. But in the context of the problem, i.e. a problem in applied mathematics, those issues are excluded, ruled out, not discussable. Something similar happens in logic. Imagine the logic problem “What follows from ‘If the sun is shining, then the tulips are blooming; the sun is shining’?’” In that context, questions of the sort “Who argued that way? Who said the sun is shining? What language did he or she speak? When and where was it uttered?” are excluded–they are not to be raised in the activity at hand, namely that of solving a problem in applied logic. The argument, and its truth-bearing parts, are there conceived of as patterns, as abstract things, about which any questions about people and occasions of speech are excluded as not relevant to the enterprise being engaged in. The reply to the person who asks such questions in the setting of logic is “If anyone were to so argue, then it would follow that the tulips are blooming. In logic we do

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not care whether anyone has so argued or will so argue or has or will assert that the sun is shining. It is the pattern or form of what such a person would or could say that is of logical interest”. It is no coincidence that it was logicians and philosophers interested in logic who developed the notion of a proposition and its grammar. For they were not, as logicians, interested in who might have said, or might say, something. And so it was not relevant to their logical activity to give their newly constructed notion the grammar of statement, etc. so that it would make sense to talk of propositions being made by someone. However, rather than seeing that the irrelevance of asking questions about who said or argued what when is rooted in the practice of logic, logicians and philosophers then and since have projected upon reality what is a procedural feature of their line of work. It is held that in logic we don’t ask about who said what when because propositions, the truth-bearers, exist independently of ourselves and our talk. That piece of reification, of metaphysical illusion, is one exemplification of Wittgenstein’s “We predicate of the thing what lies in the method of representing it”.12 It is now time to connect the preceding three investigations in order to see what can be made of the notion of a proposition, especially as the results of the three appear to conflict. On the one hand, there could not be such a thing as a proposition, a something with a truth-value, if they were objects independent of discourse– for indexicals can be true or false only when rooted in a particular discourse situation and there is no reason to treat general propositions differently. If one wants to retain propositions as truth-bearers, as I have claimed should be done, then the idea of propositions as independent transcendent entities must be surrendered and propositions must be viewed as kin to things people say, to statements and assertions, i.e. as things created in talk. On the other hand, from the Roman logicians onward, no sense has been given to such forms of words as “He made the proposition that p”, that is, no sense has been given to just what we need to retain propositions among the group of truth-bearers. Of course, if we philosophers were to do what is partially in our power, namely to give sense to those hitherto unused ways of speaking, then the conflict could be solved. Lastly, there is a point to conceiving of propositions as independent of discourse and discourse situations, in logic and philosophy. That is not because, however, propositions are entities existing quite outside human talk and thought. Rather it is because in the practice of logic and philosophy generally it is irrelevant to talk of any particular person at some time and place etc. being the author of a proposition.

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Suppose that we wish to retain the practice of speaking of propositions, i.e. as something that has a truth-value. Suppose, further, that we don’t want to make vast numbers of items, especially indexical remarks, nonpropositions. We seem to be driven to say that, then, we must allow that speakers create propositions, must give sense to expressions such as “He made the proposition that….” That, however, apparently conflicts with the fact that in logic and perhaps other realms of discourse we want to talk of something as true or false without paying any attention to whether anyone has ever said or will say such a thing. To achieve the aim of saving propositions we philosophers must admit that propositions are created in talk–but we don’t have to go around trumpeting that. The major step is to stop talking as if they are transcendent entities independent of discourse. Perhaps every now and then we might slip in a “He propositioned that p” or “That is Sally’s proposition” as reminders of what could be said. Then we can also say that, in logic and philosophy, the rule is that to use the word “proposition” is to signal that in our logical and philosophical activities there is no interest in talking of who said that when. Propositions are rooted in discourse situations but there are circumstances where we, philosophers and logicians, are not interested in that fact, exclude it as irrelevant to what we are up to.

5. An Objection in Support of the Entity Conception of Propositions Having set out the positive case for de-entifying propositions, I must now turn to a significant objection to doing that, to a defense of the idea that propositions must be conceived of as objects that in themselves are completely independent of human practice. I said earlier that there seem to be three strategies for explaining how propositions received the grammar they presently have. One, the discovery model, claims that propositions were learned to be objects as a result of our encounters with them. That will not work: those who deny that there are propositions will not agree to that. My contrary account held that it was a historical accident that propositions became categorized as entities. The third strategy can now be deployed as an objection to that account. The general version of this third view makes the introduction of the notion of proposition come in two stages. First, propositions were, or are to be, put into the category of object, i.e. given that sort of grammar, freely, autonomously. Treating them as objects was not due, or is not due, to an acquaintance with them qua entities. Moreover, they were assigned the

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property of being true or false equally freely. Then, acting in a Quinean or Popperian spirit, the Roman logicians conjectured or hypothesized that there are such objects. However, it is still philosophically disputed whether that original hypothesis is correct. That view need not even make a reference to the history of the matter. We must infer, it might be said, that there are transcendent entities having the properties of truth or falsehood and of language and thought independence. We might as well call them “propositions” no matter how that terminology came to be. Perhaps the Roman logicians did as I claimed and thoughtlessly gave “proposition” the grammar of an object: we can now defend that outcome. It would be an enormous error to do as I have suggested and furnish “proposition” with such possibilities as the intelligibility of saying “She propositioned that…” on the model of “She said that….” On this view, the difficulties of the discovery account are successfully solved and it is allowed that propositions were assigned to the category of entity freely in the absence of acquaintance with them, without prior knowledge of their existence. However, there is a serious difficulty with so answering the question of why propositions and statements differ in their grammar. The above sort of account would be created by, and appeal to, those who think that philosophy and science are in the same line of work, only that philosophers are concerned with the more abstruse tasks. Both enterprises, on this view, are concerned to postulate the existence of unobserved or, as in the case of propositions, unobservable, entities in order to explain phenomena. As a historical description of what the Roman logicians were up to, the account does not appear to be accurate. There is no historical evidence so far as I know to support the idea. On the other hand, it is probably best to take the story as a rational reconstruction–rational reconstructions are known to ride roughshod over historical details. However, there must be an answer to the question “What phenomena are to be explained by the conjecture that there exist unobservable entities having the properties of truth or falsehood?” Genuine hypotheses that resort to unobservables have clear and stateable phenomena in view: for example, Brownian motion is explained by the postulation of molecules and atoms. The best expression of this entire position and an answer to the particular question of what phenomena are being explained is found in the work of Raymond Bradley and Norman Swartz.13 Start with these words: “The strongest argument for the existence of propositions as abstract entities is that… an appeal to them seems

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indispensable to any sophisticated attempt to understand the world of our experience. An appeal to something other than sentences and other than [statements, etc.]… is needed if we are to make ultimate sense of our ascriptions of truth and falsity. Propositions, conceived of as abstract entities in their own right, seem to do the trick.”14 This view is committed to the idea that propositions must be “conceived of as abstract entities in their own right”. It is that last thesis which runs contrary to what I argued in the previous section (and it, of course, does not notice the problem of indexicals). They are holding, that is, that the object grammar of proposition must be preserved, not as a historical curiosity but as a prerequisite of formulating the best explanation of some phenomenon. What do Bradley and Swartz hold the phenomenon that is to be explained by the conjecture that there exist abstract entities called “propositions”? Their answer is the following: “there are unexpressed and unbelieved truths and falsehoods which prompts us to look for a truth-value vehicle of prodigious numbers”.15 This consideration must be addressed. We will all agree that there are a large number of truths and falsehoods that have not been stated (are “unexpressed”) or believed (are “unbelieved”). Bradley and Swartz in fact argue that the number of truths and falsehoods is “non-denumberably infinite”, that there are a “prodigious number” of them.16 They then argue that human beings cannot conceivably express or believe all of those non-denumberably infinite truths and falsehoods. That being so, truth-bearers cannot be either sentences or statements, beliefs, and such. Hence truth-bearers must be something independent of human language and thought. They must be non-empirical non-mental entities that are called “propositions”. For those authors, the problem with my proposal, which amounts to making propositions into something internally related to discourse, is that we would thereby lose the opportunity to explain the widely agreed upon fact that there are more truths and falsehoods than humans have stated or believed–or even can state or believe. Only if we infer that there are abstract entities, propositions, having a truth-value can that phenomenon, that fact, be explained. Several comments. (1) Introducing a count of the number of propositions is irrelevant to the argument. All that is strictly required is that there be a single unexpressed and unbelieved truth, though asserting a prodigious number of them is itself a prodigy. (2) They accept that giving sense to, e.g., “She made the proposition that p” would count against propositions being put into the category of transcendent entity–the idea is that we must postulate objects independent of language and human life in order to explain

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the phenomenon of unexpressed truths. (3) The view might be adjusted to hold that I can have the word “proposition” but that the abstract entities required by the argument would then have to be called something else. However, it is simpler to go on calling them propositions and resist my attempt to make them discourse-related truth-bearers. (4) They also argue at length that sentences are not truth-bearers–thus one alternative explanation of the unexpressed or unbelieved truths is ruled out for them. That noted, I am interested here only in their argument that truth-bearers cannot be discourse related, i.e. cannot be in a category with statements, beliefs and such. The major problem with their scheme is that they have not cited a phenomenon to be explained that is distinct from their explanation of it. The phenomenon to be explained is stated by them as “There are truths not expressed or believed”. However, they have rejected not only statements and beliefs as bearers of truth-value but sentences also. Given those denials, and given that they do not anywhere claim that truths are a kind of truthbearer that are independent of true propositions, what can a truth be for them other than a true proposition? As, then, truths are nothing other than true propositions, the phenomenon they are seeking to explain is that there are true propositions not expressed or believed. Yet that is precisely what they hold the explanation to be: there must be such entities as true propositions that are unexpressed and unbelieved. Only if there are unexpressed and unbelieved true propositions can we make sense of there being truths, i.e. true propositions, unexpressed and unbelieved. Their position approaches Moliere’s joke that medieval philosophers explained opium’s sleep inducing propensity by its dormative powers. One can do much better by way of both description and explanation of there being unexpressed and unbelieved truths without invoking entities independent of human life. Remember the claim is that what is at issue in this discussion is a “sophisticated attempt to understand the world of our experience”. What feature of the world of our experience are they thinking of, what is the phenomenon we need to understand? I take it that they are reminding us of the following facts about the world and ourselves. We humans (should) realize that we have not learned everything there is to know and to understand about the world, natural and social; there remain things, no doubt very, very many of them, which no one has ever come to know, truths which have never been uttered or thought; in fact, it is extraordinarily improbable, perhaps impossible, that humans shall ever discover all there is to know, every truth. Given that fact, or set of facts, what would a good explanation be like? It would certainly mention the variety and complexity of the world, the fact

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of lost information about the past, the impossibility of large-scale prognostication, the possible conceptual schemes that we might employ to represent that world, etc. etc. There is, however, no reason to believe that the “etc. etc.” requires any reference to a set of transcendent entities. In short, the best explanation of “unexpressed and unbelieved truths” refers only to those matters mentioned above and not to entities existing independently of human practice. The general situation is this. The thesis is that we must regard propositions as transcendent objects because we want to explain some phenomenon–they are entities whose existence we hypothesize in order to function as an explanation. However, upon examination of the best attempt to offer an entity characterization of propositions, Bradley and Swartz’s, the phenomenon to be explained turns out to be precisely what that argument to the best explanation offers as the explanation. Given that there is a proper and plausible alternative explanation available, this attempt to defend the entity conception of propositions doesn’t stand. It will rightly be thought that in that response I have missed something of importance to the problem. The complaint will go something like this: “Your explanation fails to respond to an important feature of the situation. Don’t you see: there are, and will always be, unexpressed and unimagined truths. How can that be if truth-bearing is tied to human practice, to statements and claims and what people say?” What must be noticed here is that it isn’t only unexpressed truths that are subject to the objection. There are also unwritten novels, symphonies not composed, undreamed of hairdos, hopes and fears as yet not imagined by anyone and so on. Recognizing that, it is then possible to parody the question put to my position: “There are large numbers of unwhistled tunes– how can that be if melodies are tied to human beings, to vocal cords and violins?” Bradley and Swartz believe that the only way we can engage in a “sophisticated attempt to understand the world of our experience” is by holding that those unexpressed truths are unobservable entities. But that line of reasoning seems to require that we also postulate a third realm in which there are, e.g., innumerable novels waiting around to be written. Surely that is not the way to go. One could, of course, adopt Quine’s route in “On What There Is” and hold that, since we don’t want the bloated universe that results, we must disallow the possibility of saying “There are unexpressed truths and uncomposed poems”. Quine’s denial that it makes sense to so talk assumes just what propositional theorists such as Bradley and Swartz assume. However, finding the results aesthetically undesirable, Quine would deny

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their genuine insight, namely that there are unexpressed truths, etc. But, contrary to Quine, there are unactualized possibles, if you like that language–but both proposition assertors and proposition deniers mistakenly construe them as if they were a different type of actuality, a kind of entity, located in a super-sensible space. There is a last protest. The assimilation of unexpressed truths to, say, unwritten novels overlooks an important fact. There are possible novels. But the unexpressed truths are not possible truths: they are truths, truths right now. Hence, they must have a kind of being that the novels, etc. do not have–they must here and now be actual objects, albeit not in space and time. That, however, is a grammatical illusion. If it is discovered in 2050 CE that the first novel was written in 12,000 BCE, it did not become true in 2050 that the first novel was written in 12,000 BCE. There is no such thing as “becoming true”–or “was true” or “will be true”. Talk of some object having the property of truth “right now”, long before it is discovered that it is true, is a misguided way of saying that it makes no sense to speak of a truth-bearer coming to be true or ceasing to be true.

6. Language and Propositions Let us see where things stand. Since the notion of a proposition as a truthbearer is embedded in both ordinary and philosophical practice it would be desirable to retain the notion. What stands in the way is the nature of propositions as traditionally conceived: they are taken to be transcendent objects not at all dependent on human life and activities. That status, of course, produces an abundance of philosophical perplexities. I have argued that the way to avoid the difficulties of transcendence and yet to retain sensible talk of propositions as truth-bearers is to see that the entity grammar of proposition arose as a historical accident–there was, and has been, a failure to complete the grammar of propositions so as to exhibit their likeness to statements, claims, beliefs, etc. Giving sense to such expressions as “She made an interesting proposition today” does not require removing any part of the grammar of propositions, but adding some forms of words that presently are unemployed. I have then argued that if we wish to retain talk of propositions as truth-bearers, we must see that for there to be a truth-bearer in the case of indexicals there must be indexing and that can go on only in a discourse situation. So-and-so thus made the proposition that p. Let me take up some further matters concerning the traditional conception of propositions in the remainder of this section before heading off to propositional attitudes in the next.

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Beginning with Frege’s thesis that the Sinn of a sentence is a Gedanke, it has often been held that propositions are the meanings of sentences. That claim has also been repeatedly shot at. The criticism has been of two varieties. It has been offered as a reminder that the meaning of something is not discussed in terms of truth or falsity; the something may be true or false but its meaning is neither. That line of criticism is frequently fleshed out with further reminders that truth-value and meaning have other categorical differences that entail that they cannot be identical. For example, propositions can be implausible, well-supported, widely denied, while meanings cannot be any of those things.17 Now that style of argument runs afoul of a response offered to show that mental events can be brain events despite categorical differences. If it is held that thoughts, e.g., can be stupid but brain processes cannot be, the response is to offer Frege’s distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung. The category of mind is a different category from that of brain, that is, they have different grammars, but those differences have to do only with different modes of presentation of one and the same object. So too, it might be agreed, propositions are, and meanings are not, say implausible, but that has to do with different modes of presentation of one and the same object. Talk of meanings is but a different way of making reference to truth-bearing entities, namely propositions. We are now at the crux of the matter, what previous criticism of the identification of meanings with propositions has not responded to. For that defense of the identification lays bare the fundamental assumption: meanings and propositions are conceived to be entities, objects. That being so, why, in light of Ockham’s Razor, should we postulate two different entities? Hence it is more perspicuous to identify them and have only one to deal with. It is precisely the claim that propositions are objects that is under attack here. The present discussion is part of that criticism, so it would be impermissible to simply hold that the identification is nothing but an expression of a misguided account of what propositions are. However, nothing like that stands in the way of objecting to the second half of the assumption: that meanings are entities. It was one of the central philosophical realizations as the twentieth century wore on that the traditional claim that the meaning of something is the object meant, picked out, referred to, by the expression is wildly if tantalizingly mistaken. Even Russell came to share the recognition late in life, that, as he said, he used to think that while a word must mean something, he mistakenly inferred that it must therefore mean some thing.18

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The problems are more severe for sentences than for words. In the case of words, there is at least ostensive definition for some kinds of word and that makes it appear that the meaning is being pointed to. Quite apart from the uncertainty noted previously about what we philosophically ought to reply to the question “Do sentences have meaning?”, there is nothing remotely comparable to ostensive definition in the case of what is said by someone and thus possibly to sentences. Rather what we find in connection with questions about meaning of these latter units of discourse are a large number of explanatory activities, mentioning particular words, structure, speech acts. It is today outlandish to identify the meaning of a sentence with an object. Yet subscription to that view is the only sense there is to the thesis that propositions are the meaning of sentences. I have argued that we must supplement the historical grammar of proposition in order to end their anomalous status as truth-bearers and assimilate them to pieces of discourse (or else give up the notion) to what people say, state, assert, etc. If that is done, it also makes sense to ask of a proposition “What does that mean?” and to spell out its meaning. In short, propositions are not identical with meanings, they are themselves meaningful, have meanings. The supposed identity of meanings and propositions is finished with that realization. There are two further problems arising from the traditional view of propositions and their connection with language, problems which typically escape scrutiny. Both have to do with the relation between propositions and sentences. Those who treat sentences as the starting point for philosophical thought about truth-bearing and who yet deny that it is those sentences which are true or false, holding rather that it is propositions which fulfill that role, face a problem about what the relation is between sentences and propositions. The orthodox view is that sentences express propositions. That is not an argued position. I do not know of alternatives that have been suggested or defended. The idea that the relation is one item expressing another has become standard by default. I have already objected to the terminology of expression in this connection. We speak of faces and songs expressing something, say joy, and it is possible to have philosophical discussions of how that can be. However, it is not plausible to treat sentences as similarly expressive entities. (A breast-feeding mother can express her milk, but to hold that a sentence expresses a proposition doesn’t seem to employ that model of expression either.) Hence the idea that the relation between sentence and the

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relevant proposition is that of expressing appears to be a piece of obfuscation. There is a further serious difficulty in the thought that sentences express, or whatever alternative term might be used, propositions. For as I argued earlier not every (indicative) sentence “expresses” a proposition. The sentence “He has a bruise.” does not express any proposition at all. That difficulty is the result of making sentences the chief tool of analysis–as I said, the problem arises for those who make that assumption and yet want to speak of propositions as truth-bearers. The position of this work is that we can include propositions among the truth-bearers but must surrender the idea that sentences are philosophically important. Anyone who says “The cat is on the mat” or He has a bruise”, referring to X at time Y, will have made a proposition. We can even say “He has expressed a proposition”–which means “He has said something true or false”. That set of difficulties concerning the relation of language, specifically sentences, to propositions deals with the relation from the side of sentences. There are also serious problems that arise if we start from the other side, from propositions. The paradigm statement of the situation, one which both reveals what has to be said given the standard conception of propositions and exhibits the extreme oddness of the conception, is Frege’s: “The thought, in itself immaterial, clothes itself in the material garment of a sentence and thereby becomes comprehensible to us”.19 Frege is right about part of that: propositions are not in themselves in any particular language. We saw earlier in the case of what is said and assertions, etc. that they do not belong to any language–there are no Latin statements though there are Latin sentences. However, they are made in a language and the same claim, etc. can be made in a variety of languages. The same is true of propositions: they are made in some language or the other. Moreover, propositions are “immaterial”, i.e. they have no size, shape, location, etc. while sentences, the occurrences of them, do. That much being correct, the remainder of what Frege says above shows the oddity of the tradition in which he is working, the tradition in which propositions are taken to be transcendent entities. For in that, propositions are entities existing independently of human life–yet are necessarily expressible by people in linguistic form. It should be noticed that Frege strangely holds that the proposition “clothes itself” in a sentence–surely it should be we who do the clothing in the course of our discourse activities by means of the language employed. Is that not a strange picture of how discourse proceeds? That in making an assertion we are aiming at some object which is independent of us and trying to make it perceptible to the eye or ear by dressing it in our language? Couldn’t we sometimes make a

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mistake and end up clothing the wrong proposition? (If Bradley and Swartz are correct that there are non-denumerably infinite propositions, surely we must sometimes give a linguistic coating to the wrong one.) Or are we amazingly infallible and always nail the one we intend? Of course, that is all most strange, not at all the proper picture of what happens when we engage in talk that can be true or false. Aren’t we better off abandoning the historical account of propositions as stand-offish entities rather than acceding to some version of what Frege saw to be the consequences of that account for how propositions come to be embedded in human discourse? To agree that a proposition does not have a connection to any particular language does not require us to hold that they are entities floating nonlinguistically in an abstract analogy to space, entities that we are, somehow, able to reach out to and cover with language. For there is a much better alternative. Propositions are made in human discourse – and we can intelligibly say that the same claim or proposition has been made no matter what the language in which it has been made. To achieve objectivity in human discussions of the world does not require separately existing objects. It would be better to ask: what relation do propositions have to sentences? And the answer is that there are a variety of cases. If someone says “It is raining” then the proposition that it is raining was expressed and expressed in English by the sentence “It is raining.” but only because someone so propositioned: the sentence itself did nothing, the speaker did the expressing. If someone says “Rain” looking at the windshield, then they expressed the proposition that it is raining by means of the sentence “Rain.” If someone merely grunts and waves at the sky, then the proposition that it is raining was expressed, if it was, by the person making noise and the gesture with no sentence occurring at all.

7. Propositional Attitudes Today any discussion of propositions requires a review of the adjunct notion of propositional attitudes. However, current standard accounts of propositional attitudes reveal that the topic has become stale with no interesting questions being asked. Hence, I shall raise some problems about the notion, problems that are relevant to the topic of propositions as truthbearers. The last of these items will be a matter that helps propel this work forward. To start at the bottom rung of the relevance ladder, the thought that these matters concern attitudes is curious. The items discussed under this name, headed by the paradigmatic case of belief, are not attitudes at all. Attitudes

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have to do with delight and disgust. The genuine cases of propositional attitudes, then, though they are rarely mentioned, are such things as “I am delighted that you could come” and “He is disgusted that we have such poor health care”. Nor is the adjective “propositional” much better. For its use is based on the assumption that only propositions are truth-bearers: when a truth-bearer turns up in one of the favored cases, e.g. in a “believes that” or “fears that” or “hopes that” construction, it is labeled “a proposition” without further ado. Those criticisms are minor. There is a much more important point. Russell, in his seminal discussion of this topic in the “Philosophy of Logical Atomism”, rejected (for bad reasons) the term “attitude” and had qualms about the adjective “propositional” (since he had just denied, what earlier in his career he had insisted upon, that there are such “curious shadowy things” as propositions). However, as he couldn’t think of another word to replace “propositional” he continued using it for “convenience”. “What sort of name shall we give to verbs like ‘believe’ and ‘wish’ and so forth? I should be inclined to call them ‘propositional verbs’. This is merely a suggested name for convenience….”20 Despite the shortcomings of the terms, I shall follow Russell and continue to talk of propositional attitudes as well as employing his terminology of ‘propositional verbs’ simply because it is too difficult to agree on satisfactory alternatives. But recall: the terminology retains no philosophical commitments. Russell never pursued the idea of propositional verbs and the tradition following did not either. If he, and it, had pursued the thought that what is of interest are verbs that are used in conjunction with forms of words with which truth-claims are made rather than only the (smallish) sub-group comprising the attitudes, present day discussions would be quite different. For from that perspective, the “verbs of saying”21 would be included in the same philosophical inquiry as the attitudes: “She said/claimed/held/ denied/remarked… that we were too late” are propositional verbs. Going further afield so too are “He saw/noticed/realized that we were alone” as well as “He inferred that p” and “That entails that p”. Betting would be relevant for it too may have a connected truth claim: “I’m betting that Sea Biscuit will win.” Even the modals would have to be included: “It is probable that the small horse will win”. And there is, of course, the concession “It is true that he has great skill”. In other words, if we followed up on Russell’s clue and realized that “propositions”, truth-claims, occur in connection with very many and very diverse verbs, the amount of philosophical

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attention paid to a single small sub-set of them, the so-called “propositional attitudes”, would be recognized to be excessive. Why has that happened, why the narrow focus? It is not arguments that have produced that concentration on the attitudes. Rather it is lingering Cartesianism in association with the traditional conception of propositions that are the culprits. The fascination of “propositional attitudes” has been that belief, hope, fear, doubt, disgust, etc. are taken to be private inner states that enable a mind to connect with, to grasp, another non-spatial entity, a proposition. For Moore and Russell, in their Platonic Atomist days, people in thinking make direct contact with independent entities, namely propositions.22 In Plato, the Forms can be encountered only after death and then only by suitable psyches: on the entity view of propositions, we do not have to wait so long: anyone who merely thinks (fears, hopes, doubts…) makes contact with them. And it is the attitudes that do the connecting, the relating.23 It is as if the attitudes are a mental hand reaching out for and seizing some object: Frege compares a mind grasping a Thought to a hand grasping a pencil.24 The deeply ingrained Cartesian picture of the mind and its logically selfcontained states will be beyond much comment here.25 But notice: believing something is not even remotely one entity in a certain state reaching out to grasp a different entity as a hand does a pencil. Rather, it is a person having a limited commitment that some part of the world is arranged thus and so. Moreover, the second of the background ideas, that propositions are transcendent entities out “there” apprehended by minds equipped with the requisite states, has run its course. In short, there is no reason why we philosophers should go on spending significant time on propositional attitudes, especially without locating any such discussion within an examination of the larger class of propositional verbs. One other feature of the old pictures behind propositional attitudes needs to be examined. The background conception, with propositions as transcendent entities on the one hand and Cartesian minds busy dealing with them on the other, omits language. At some point, however, language must be brought into the account. Since a proposition does not thoughtfully present itself in the language a given person happens to speak, the person must, over and above the seemingly wordless mystical contact with it, “clothe” the proposition in language. Since it is an entity we are held to be mentally making contact with, the standard view is that we when we come to use propositional language, the words so used are used referentially. Given the entity conception of propositions, writers on propositional attitudes normally treat the words in which propositions are expressed as referring expressions. So, in “I believe that the price of gasoline will rise”

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“believe” is treated as the name of the speaker’s mental state and “that the price of gasoline will rise” is construed as a singular designating expression that refers to the entity (represented in English) as that the price of gasoline will rise. “That p” thus is treated as having a logical role similar to that of a definite description although referring to a different kind of entity, a proposition. That won’t do. To speak of propositions is to be talking of something with a truth-value. Now if someone remarks to us “The price of gasoline will rise” or “That car is stolen”, we bring the machinery of truth-value assessment into play: a philosopher will say that propositions have been put forward. But if someone makes the remark “That the price of gasoline will rise” or “That that car is stolen”, our immediate concern is not with truth but with meaning: we need to find some hypothesis that makes sense of the occurrence of those strange remarks. What the person said, namely “That the price of gasoline will rise” or “That that car is stolen” are neither true nor false, that is to say, they are not propositions at all. It is certainly possible that someone should say (e.g.) “That it is too salty”–that can be a response to someone’s asking “What did he say?”. But the response is a report in indirect discourse of what someone said and so it is not the making of a proposition, i.e. of a truth-claim, about the saltiness by the speaker. In short, propositions are formulated by “p” and not by “that p”. That means that propositional expressions are not analogous to definite descriptions: they are not headed by a word whose role is to indicate that a referring expression is being uttered. That is recognized in logic. In the propositional calculus a proposition is represented by “p” (and so on). There is no symbol whose role is like that of the iota operator (in Principia Mathematica). In epistemic logic “A believes that p” is symbolized as “Bap”: the “that” vanishes or is absorbed into the belief term. It is only in discussions of propositions and propositional attitudes that we find propositions represented by “that p”. If the idea is rejected that a proposition is something existing independently of language and of human practice, then it is clear that there is no reason to treat “that p” as if it were used to pick out or mention an object in a fashion analogous to “the girl with the dragon tattoo”. There is a view, however, that amounts to holding that I have matters backward. The objection is that it is not a consequence of the notion that propositions are entities existing in their own right that the “that p” clause is to be treated as a referring expression–on the contrary, the starting place is the realization that “that p” clauses must be referential; hence the conclusion is that there must be a domain of entities (i.e. propositions) for “that p” clauses to refer to. Ian McFetridge develops that view in a paper in

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which he is objecting to Davidson’s account of indirect discourse (of which more later).26 The relevant lines in McFetridge are as follows: “(1) Galileo said that the earth moves. (2) Hence Galileo said something, i.e., there is something which Galileo said. (C) “We produce and seemingly understand sentences such as (2) and infer them from sentences like (1).”27 Since McFetridge is objecting to Davidson, the argument is couched in terms of what someone says. But he does not mean that it depends upon some idiosyncratic feature of that verb. One “must allow that there are things said, stated, asserted and so on”.28 In short, all the verbs of saying are to be subject to this argument. However, I see no reason that the thesis should not be extended to all (?) the propositional verbs: e.g. “He noticed/ believed/considered etc. that I was embarrassed; hence he noticed/believed/ considered etc. something”. Given those extensions, the view proceeds by holding that the inference from (1) to (2) is valid; hence the clause “that the earth moves”, etc. must be “a singular term whose referent is something said–a proposition”. Hence there is “a domain of objects–things said”, i.e. propositions; things said, propositions, are “entities”.29 And we are off to the ontological races. While there is much in that view that should be critically examined, my attention shall be on the move that generates all the rest, the inference from (1) to (2). (I shall ignore McFetridge’s standard paraphrase within (2) “i.e. there is something which Galileo said”.) The crucial inference then is ‘Galileo said that the earth moves; hence Galileo said something’. In the quote above McFetridge defends the validity of that inference: “We produce and seemingly understand sentences such as (2) and infer them from sentences like (1).” Though the “seemingly” is odd, there is no question that we can intelligibly say ‘She said something’–and so on through the list of propositional verbs: “knows/remembers/saw...something”. What is questionable is the idea that “we infer” such matters from “said/knows/remembers/saw that p”. Normally, “He said something” is an expression concerned with some type of ignorance. We might add “He said something but I couldn’t hear him”. It might be your ignorance not mine: “He said something that you will be interested in”. “Galileo said something” is not inferred from “Galileo said that the earth moves”, since the speaker who says that doesn’t know what he said and so doesn’t infer anything from whatever it was he did say. “Galileo said something” is inferred, but from various circumstances-he

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could be seen moving his lips and gesturing to an audience but was too far away to hear. In typical cases in which we talk of someone saying something, the person who says “Galileo said something” is not there deductively inferring but rather reasoning to the best explanation, namely that Galileo was not gibbering but saying something though the speaker knows not what. However, the second type of case, in which we say “So and so said something of interest to you”, is different. For there the speaker did hear Galileo say “the earth moves” and yet mentions that fact to you in the words “He said something of interest to you”. But is that an inference of (2) from (1), of “something’” from “that p’” via Existential Generalization? It is certainly not a paradigmatic inference, not like “The keys are either here or there–they’re not here–hence…” or “I had $5 and spent $3.99 on a hamburger; so I have $1.01 remaining”. Are we concluding that so-and-so said something? Surely not. What is going on is we are suppressing (for now) our knowledge of what he did say in the interests of catching your attention: and the appropriate way of putting off the report of what he said is to say that he said something. It is highly unlikely that we ever infer “He said something” from “He said that p” (nor from any of the other propositional verbs). However, I must leave this issue in limbo– or to pursue it requires a more complete investigation a) into what it means to say “said something” (or “realizes, etc. something”), b) into what place Existential Generalization has in our ordinary practice, and c) into what constitutes an inference. I shall have to rest my case here on the grounds that the argument produced by McFetridge does not include a defense of the claim that we (routinely) make inferences from cases like (1) (for all or most propositional verbs) to claims like (2). In the absence of that defense, we still have no reason, in light of seeing that “He said something” in the above case is not issued as an inference, to regard “that p” is a singular referring or designating term similar to a definite description. McFetridge, and I assume many others, take it as obvious that Existential Generalization is a tool in our linguistic practice, usable and used just as it is in formal logic. But formal logic is not, as Russell had it, the skeleton of rationality and language but rather an attempt to capture and represent the rationality in our talk and thought–and it is eminently discussable when and where it succeeds. When McFetridge says that “we” infer “something” from “that p” he is thinking of what philosophers and logicians do in their professional work, not of what we humans do in our practice. However, we are now left with the question of what logical role the clause “that p” does have in connection with propositional verbs if it is not

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a denoting phrase. There is, of course, a striking interpretation, relevant to at least some cases, by Davidson. His well-known thesis is that in case of “says that p” (and presumably all the verbs of saying) the “that” is a singular demonstrative, referring to something said.30 So “Galileo said that the earth moves” is to be understood as “Galileo said that. The earth moves.” That view has one virtue: the “that” is separated from “p” leaving the proposition correctly represented by “p” alone. But that separation raises a further problem. Davidson, and all other philosophers writing on these matters, assume that the word “that” is logically essential whether it is taken to be part of a truth-bearer, say a proposition, or whether, as with Davidson, it is treated as a separate demonstrative. In English, it seems that the normal form for all the propositional verbs includes the word “that” as a complementizer (the linguistic term for its role). However, we all know, and linguistics recognizes this also, we aren’t required to insert a “that” following a propositional verb. “She believes she is unwell”, “She said he was a jerk”, “He noticed I was offended”, etc. etc. are perfectly acceptable. Assuming that the inclusion of the complementizer is the paradigm, it is possible that the future development of English (and perhaps other languages) should be such that what is now paradigmatic becomes less and less employed, that people in speaking as a matter of standard practice, perhaps even universally, omit the “that”. Apparently both Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese (and possibly other languages) do not employ a complementizer, do not put “that” in front of “p”31-in those languages the normal form is what we employ as an acceptable variant. That, if true, of course does not mean that those are logically or philosophically deficient languages. It is not clear how speakers of those languages would make sense of Davidson’s position. Davidson’s interpretation was not offered in light of its intrinsic plausibility but in order to satisfy the requirements of an extensionalist agenda. His view is not widely accepted, perhaps because the agenda is less well regarded today than earlier, but certainly because philosophical investigation has revealed major difficulties with it.32 There is at least one other problem arising from what I have said above. Davidson’s account of the function of “that’ in “that p” is tailored to the verbs of saying. It seems incapable of helping us understand the broader issue of what should be said about the much wider class of propositional verbs. In, for example, “I forgot that you were worn out” it is very implausible to think the “that” is a demonstrative pointing to an utterance “You were worn out”-and so too for many other of the relevant verbs. It is preferable to find some way of regarding the role of “(that) p” that helps in understanding what is going on in the entire set of propositional verbs.

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To take the big step in seeing what is going on when a “(that) p’” clause is used, we must examine a consequence of the standard conception of propositional attitudes. Consider the following argument, constructed with the paradigmatic “believes” and formulating the second premiss with a reminder that the usual version is prefaced by “That”. P1 John believes (that) the next World Cup will be in Russia P2 (That) the next World Cup will be in Russia is a proposition C Hence, John believes a proposition Clearly the argument does not hinge on “believes”–any of the standard propositional attitudes will do. In fact, any propositional verb will do. Despite the attractiveness of the argument it is fallacious. It is parallel to “John will become 32 next week; 32 is a number; hence John will become a number next week”. Let me adapt some of Carnap’s terminology to a description of such arguments. Their first premiss is in the material mode–the second is in the formal mode. That is, the first premiss is a remark within normal discourse, the second premiss is a remark about some fragment of normal discourse, a remark about the fragment’s logical status within normal discourse. (Clearly it is a remark made by philosophers using their special term “proposition”: “that Russia will host the next World Cup” might as easily be labeled a suspicion, a fear, a conclusion.) The conclusion, “John believes a proposition”, is thus an illegitimate mongrel, a mixture of two different modes of discourse. That is why the conclusions of comparable arguments employing different propositional verbs are odd (perhaps each with slightly different oddities). We can hear the oddity of “John fears a proposition”, “John saw a proposition”, “John hopes a proposition”, “John bet a proposition”, “It is possible a proposition”. Those are easily perceived logical confusions and they result from combining statements from different modes of discourse in the relevant version of the above argument. Russell noticed such oddity in The Philosophy of Logical Atomismhowever his way of dealing with it is misguided. “It seems natural to say one believes a proposition and unnatural to say one desires a proposition, but as a matter of fact that is only a prejudice. What you believe and what you desire are of exactly the same nature.”33 It does seem natural to talk of believing a proposition, while it is decidedly unnatural to talk of fearing or seeing or suspecting a proposition. I think that oddity is found in all the propositional verbs other than “believes”. However, and contrary to Russell, despite the (seeming) naturalness in the case of “believes”, it is the

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inclination to regard “believes a proposition” acceptable that is the “prejudice”. For the argument that concludes we believe propositions is as fallacious as it is for the other propositional verbs. What is needed is an explanation of that feeling of naturalness in the case of belief. At this time, I have nothing to offer by way of explanation–to work out a proper explanation is a desiratum of further thought on the topic of truth-bearing. Consider the question “What do we believe when we believe that p, e.g. that there is life after death…?”34 The fallaciousness of the argument above shows that there is no such question: what we believe when we believe (e.g.) that there is life after death is that there is life after death. What we fear when we fear (e.g.) that the ice will break is that the ice will break. What is true when (e.g.) it is true that the sun sets in the west is that the sun sets in the west. And so on through the list of propositional verbs. Russell, then, is wrong that “what we believe and what we desire are of exactly the same nature.” There is no nature, no essence, of what we believe (and so through the propositional verbs, e.g. of what we forget, of what we infer…). What we forget/infer/know when we forget/infer/know is what we forget/infer/know. There is no further philosophically interesting characterization. The way to see the conclusion of the fallacious argument is that it offers a misguided account of what one believes, fears, says, infers…. The first premiss is the only legitimate specification of what one believes, says, sees, etc. The second premiss gives that specification a philosophical massage and thereby gives rise to a different specification that is illegitimate. That is, “He hopes (that) there is life after death” specifies what he hopes and it is the function of the clause “(that) there is life after death” (with or without complementizer) to make that specification. The clause is not a referring expression–it answers a different kind of question, performs a different logical function. Each propositional verb requires what linguists call a direct object in order to make sense.35 One cannot fear or assert or recognize or wager, etc. simpliciter as one can snore or belch. One must believe or claim or notice etc. something (and, again, as Russell noted, “something” does not amount to “some thing”). The role of the words following the verb in each case is to set out what one doubts, says, infers, etc. (or what is possible, entailed, etc.) The end is at hand. For it should now be clear that what one wishes, notices, claims, etc. are truth-bearers occurring when someone wishes/ notices/claims, etc. (that) p. In short, then, the kinds of things that are true or false, are hugely more various than we find mentioned in philosophical literature. Moreover, we have to include among the what clauses and so

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among the truth-bearers what is not possible, what someone does not believe, what someone didn’t realize and so on. All attempts to trim that great variety into a single kind of item (sentences, propositions) or a very limited group of items (statements and assertions say) are mistaken. Even my original claim that the paradigm truth-bearer is what so-and-so says must now be carefully examined.

VII TRUTH-BEARERS AND THEIR NATURE

1. The Variety of Truth-bearers The previous chapter ended with an answer to the central question of this work: ‘What kinds of things are true or false?’ What they are not is clear: sentences are not true or false. As the arguments of the first half of this book show, sentences are not even of philosophical importance, much less being that which plays the role of truth-bearer, despite the current fashion of making them so. Truth-bearers, those things that are true or false, are intimately connected to human talk, to discourse. They are not pieces of the language that we use to talk about things–they are not denizens of the mind that exist antecedently to our language and our discourse practices–they are not mysterious objects transcending our world which we reach out to and make contact with in our talk. Rather, to make sense of them, and ultimately to make sense of our entire practice of talking of truth and falsity, we do not have to go beyond our ordinary talk of someone saying that this is how things are, of claiming the world is this way or that, of wishing that pigs could fly, of what someone concludes and so on. However, to have rejected sentences and to have argued that the apparently non-discourse possibilities are related to such things as statements, claims and assertions, is not have satisfied the philosophical soul. For nothing has yet been said about what kind of being those various sorts of things that are truth-bearers have. That is a major task of this chapter. There is, though, some work to be done before that issue can be discussed. For nothing has yet been said about how the various kinds of truth-bearers are connected other than as discourse-related. We still have a multitude of candidates–what people say, assertions, beliefs/what people believe, assumptions, theses, propositions (construed as I have argued they should be), what is inferred and so on and on, all of which, given the

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arguments of the preceding chapter, are things that have a truth-value. Is that abundance a satisfactory state of affairs? It is very difficult to imagine an argument that there must be one and only one kind of thing that can be true or false–or even an argument that there can only be 4 or 7 or whatever number you like. However, one can think of considerations that incline philosophers to think that there should be only one kind of thing that can have a truth-value, that our practice of treating many kinds of thing as being true or false is undesirable and should be rejected. That recommendation is an outcome of the perspective associated with and derived from Quine, related to his (perhaps metaphorical) preference for desert landscapes. Or, more straightforwardly, it is an expression of Quine’s idea that regimentation is needed to achieve simplicity and simplicity is the aim of all our intellectual endeavors. The Quinean thesis would be that allowing, in the ordinary way, many kinds of truth-bearers–and the preceding argument has concluded that many more kinds of thing are true or false than philosophers have previously contemplated, a very large leap into steamy tropical forests–is a sign of the lack of respect for simplicity in ordinary conceptual practice. Out of intellectual decency, on the Quinean view, we must regiment our ordinary practice and reduce the number of kinds of truth-bearers to something simple, allowing only one if possible. Part of the attraction of talking of sentences or of propositions as what really have truth-value is that such views are an expression of the drive to simplicity. Some people come to a point at which they wish to simplify their lives, when the objects and activities of modern daily life wear them down. There is no reason to believe that those philosophers who do or wish to simplify any possible list of kinds of thing having truth-value do so because they are weary of the intellectual burden placed on them by having so many sorts of thing being called true or false. The urge to simplify here is caused by something quite different. It is produced by the ideas that simplicity is the major virtue of intellectual productions and the connected notion that philosophy is a kind of high-level science. While it has been clear from the start that this work is in the descriptive tradition in philosophy, it is tempting here to spend some time looking critically at revisionist themes in general. That, if done properly, would be a major digression and so the temptation must be resisted. There is, however, one matter that must be investigated as it leads into an important realization about the multiplicity of kinds of truth-bearers. Quinean projects aimed at smoothing out ordinary practice in the interest of theoretical rigor are rather like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ desire to make rivers run straight in nice concrete channels. We have come to

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understand, however, that there is point to the natural meanderings of rivers.1 There is also point to the ordinary practice of having many kinds of truth-bearer. For there is reason to believe that each of the many items which constitute a kind of thing which we characterize as true or false has a purpose, a role, in the ecology of talk. In other words, if one created a list of propositional verbs and asked about each “What special contribution to our talk and thought does the intelligibility of ‘V’d that p’ (e.g. guessed that p, denied that p, bet that p and so on) make?”, it is plausible to think that each does make some special contribution. It is informative to know that some person hoped or guessed or forgot or mentioned or implied or heard that such-and-such–that someone regards it as wonderful or as unfortunate that such-and-such-that some particular matter entails or makes probable that such-and-such. Even for those verbs that philosophers treat indiscriminately (as I have done here), talking of what is said, of statements, assertions, and claims, there are differences. In practice they don’t amount to the same thing. “What is said” is very general and lacks any nuance while “statement” is more high-falutin’ (“So and So issued a statement today”); “assertion” goes with assertiveness and “claim” with an indication of a little doubt that some person got it right or with a recognition of contentiousness. “Proposition” too has its place, in fact two of them. In ordinary practice, the term works as Austin said, namely to specify that a certain claimed truth is of large import (recall Lincoln’s “the proposition that all men are created equal”). In philosophy, once deprived of its metaphysical interpretation and brought down to earth as of a kind with what is said, assertions and so on, “proposition” is used to specify a truth-bearer while setting aside any interest in who said or might say such a thing or the context of its being said. We philosophers are interested in the substance itself, not (except when doing history) in the provenance of the substantial issue. If, in the end, duplicates should turn up on the list, so be it. But the revisionist project would do away with all those differences that have a place in our discourse and in our understanding of the world and replace them with a tidy linguistic channel. But is there no one word that can be applied to all the kinds of thing that are true or false, a role that “sentences” and “propositions” and “statements” fill admirably? There is not as far as ordinary practice is concerned: the phrase “things that are either true or false” is the closest that can be turned up and of course that does not satisfy the desire for a single substantial word to mark the function. Philosophers, however, have invented a useful word, namely “truth-bearer”. But that is not full of philosophical possibilities as what the questioner wants.

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That lack of a philosophically potent single word designating truthbearers is philosophically painful in some contexts. Recall that some nounphrases (“what so-and-so V’d”) that specify a kind of truth-bearer have an associated noun: what he stated-statement, what she realized–realization, what he believed–belief, what it implied–implication, what was assumed– assumption…. But not all do: what he told me, what he saw… do not. The one especially important here is “what she said”, a phrase that from the beginning I have marked out as of special importance in the examination of what truth-bearers are. In the case of “what she/he said” there is no noun parallel to “statement”, “claim”, “proposition”, etc. The word “saying” has a different role: La Rochefoucauld, Francis Bacon, Benjamin Franklin, among others, are the authors of sayings–a person who says “The cat is asleep” is not producing a saying. Now that absence of a noun troubles philosophers. We would like to be able to use a noun in our pronouncements on matters conceptual and logical. Our philosophical practice includes talking of assumptions as well as of what is assumed, of truths as well as of what is true, of entailments as well as of what is entailed. Consequently, the absence of a noun corresponding to “what is said” seems to us a deficiency and seems to exclude “what is said” as a serious candidate for the office of primary truth-bearer. But that is to assume that what makes for smooth philosophical practice is how things really are-an assumption that is a variant on what Wittgenstein criticizes as generalizing from one’s own case, in this instance from one’s own professional practice.2 The question, however, is not “Generalizing from standard philosophical practice, what should we say the primary truthbearer is?” Rather we must ask “In ordinary practice, what is the term or terms for a truth-bearer?” And the absence of a noun “saying” to mark out a kind of truth-bearer is not a problem in the conduct of our ordinary talk, much less a crippling one.

2. What is Said as the Major Truth-bearer Very early on I declared that “That’s true” referring to something someone said is the paradigm occurrence of “is true” and thus that the best initial answer to the philosophical question “What is fundamentally true or false?” is “What someone says”. I also said that that answer would remain best following a thorough investigation. It is now time to explain and justify that latter thesis.3 The argument above has been that there are a very large number of kinds of things that have a truth-value and that those items are quite diverse, though all fall within the category of discourse-related. In those circumstances

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the question must be “Why should one pick out ‘what is said’ from that variety of truth-bearers as having fundamental importance?” There are some of the truth-bearers that no one would even consider as a candidate for being basic: what is implied, what she suspected, what he noticed and so on have no plausibility as what we should think of as the primary (kind of) truth-bearer. Philosophers, realists aside, have had some inkling that truth is essentially connected with discourse and so have focused attention on statements, assertions and, with sentences, even the language in which discourse is (seemingly paradigmatically) conducted. What is said, in the absence of the noun “saying”, has not been so widely featured in philosophical thought. One consideration in favor of the centrality of “what is said” is simply quantitative. Talk about saying something (and “saying” here of course includes talking, writing, signing, semaphore, smoke-signals…). is overwhelmingly present in our lives, so much so that we philosophers don’t notice the frequency: talking of saying is too pedestrian to capture our attention.4 Of course, not all use of “to say” has to do with truth-bearing: “He said ’Shut the door’”, etc. does not. But that only shows that we do not have a specialized word for doing the job of talking of being true or false: her saying “The dog is hungry” or “She said the dog is hungry” is simply the normal format for introducing truth-bearers into a stretch of our discourse. However, the case shouldn’t rest primarily on quantitative considerations. Start here: there are many items in the set of truth-bearers about which it makes perfect sense to say “She V’d (that) p but she didn’t say (that) she had V’d it”. E.g. “She discovered (that) he was a crook but she didn’t tell anyone”. However, for the obvious discourse related truth-bearers that does not make sense: e.g. “She claimed that he is a crook but she said nothing about it”. If we encountered someone saying such a thing, we might try to make sense of it by thinking that they were using “said” in a special way, e.g. taking it in a narrow sense to mean “speak” and think that the claim was made in writing or smoke-signals. Of course, we would try to understand it in that sort of way because we realize that, literally, one cannot claim (assert, state, tell, report…) that p without saying that p and we try to render intelligible what the other could have meant. The upshot is that the verb “to say” is fundamental to that range of truthbearers that are unproblematically characterized as discourse related. But, as I remarked, many truth-bearers, of various kinds, do not fall into that class. Why should we say in view of that that what is said is the paradigmatic truth-bearer?

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It is here that we bump into one of those places in philosophical discussion where deep opposing philosophical outlooks rise to the surface and come into closer than usual direct conflict. For I am going to hold the thesis that those hugely varied kinds of things that are true or false, no matter how they may seem on first sight, will ultimately turn out to be connected to human talk, to our discourse and language. However, there are other philosophical perspectives that will not concede that that will happen, even at the end of philosophical inquiry.5 The contention above was that truth-bearers divide into one group that are on their face discourse connected and another group that are not. The two groups are separated by the impossibility of saying about members of the first group, e.g., “He asserted that p but he didn’t say that p”–where the paradigm conflicting remark is “He said that p but he didn’t say that p”–and the intelligibility in the case of members of the other class of saying, e.g., “He was surprised that p but he didn’t say that p” (or, e.g., “It is a fact that p but no one previously has said that p”). But that sorting device does not rule out that to make sense of what the members of the second class comprise requires, in the end at least, seeing that they have connections with discourse. Those connections, of course, remain to be established. However, establishing them can only be done on a case-by-case basis, by looking into each relevant concept. That project is certainly not something that could conceivably be undertaken here–or in any plausible single investigation. I can only point back to chapter 5 in which that type of inquiry has taken place for the concept of belief and has resulted in seeing that belief is not a Cartesian inner state, or a neo-Cartesian brain state, or a pattern of behavior, but is in fact intelligible only as a way of commenting upon the world.6 I do not mean that each such investigation will be structurally parallel to the belief case–the concepts are far too heterogeneous for investigations to have that kind of similarity. My only contention is that all the investigations will end up by recognizing that the concepts are what they are in light of their place in human talk. I take it, unfortunately without further argument, that the relation of other kinds of things that are true or false to what someone says is analogous to what Aristotle had in mind about the concepts of being and health: while there are different kinds of thing that have being or are healthy, all of those are so because they are related to one primary kind of thing that has being or is healthy.7 Similarly truth-bearers are of many different kinds but all are related, in highly various ways, to the central notion of someone saying something about the world.

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What, then, should philosophers say when asked “What are the truthbearers, what (kind of) thing is it that is true or false?” Something like: “The central and basic thing that is true or false is what someone says. But there are a large number of related truth-bearers, related in very different ways, to the notion of what someone says”.

3. Problems and Puzzles The preceding paragraph is the conclusion. But of course conclusions do not end discussion. So in this section, I shall consider two further objections to that answer to the question of “What things have a truth-value?” (1) The first difficulty concerns an issue analogous to the responses by Geach and by Searle to Hare’s idea that commending is built into the meaning of “good” and to Strawson’s claim that endorsing is built into the meaning of “true”. The response made by Geach and by Searle is (for the case of “good”) that when “good” occurs in an antecedent such as “If the pie is good…” no one is commending the pie; “good” surely means the same thing there as in “The pie is good”; hence commending cannot be involved in what “good’’ means.8 Consider an analogous objection: ”if-then” statements, e.g. “If Messi is injured, (then) he won’t be playing today”, have a truth-value. Moreover, philosophers say of hypotheticals things like “Suppose the antecedent is true and the consequent is false; then…”. Now if someone says “If Messi is injured, then he won’t be playing today”, they have not said either “Messi is injured” or “He won’t be playing today”. Yet we think of that antecedent and that consequent as being true or false. Doesn’t that show that truth and falsity don’t “attach” to what someone says but to something else?9 It shows no such thing. All that has been argued is that what is said is the paradigmatic bearer of truth-value–I have repeatedly called attention to the fact that things other than what is said have truth-value. What the objection does is to remind us, by way of a new type of case, that that is so. Since “Messi is injured”, occurring in the antecedent of the hypothetical, is true or false and since it is not in that occurrence something anyone said, what name should we give it, how should we refer to it qua truth-bearer? It should be noted that “Messi is injured” is what could be said by someone sometime. What we should learn from the case is that “what someone could say” must also be treated as a truth-bearer, as a legitimate variant on “what someone did/will/would say”. (Imagine the following discussion: “What will he say?”–“I don’t know, but what he could say is… and if he does, he will be right”.)

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However, even if we realize that “Messi is injured” is something that someone could say, truly or falsely, and it is that possibility that accounts for its being true or false when it is not in fact said but only hypothesized, that does not constitute a complete answer to the question about what kind of thing “Messi is injured” is when it occurs as antecedent in a hypothetical. The original statement of the problem provides an additional part of the answer: “Suppose the antecedent is true and the consequent false”. That is, the truth-bearers there are the antecedent and the consequent. “Messi is injured” is true (or false) because it is the antecedent of an “if-then” statement. Here we have a noun (antecedent) specifying the truth-bearer–in this case we (once more) do not have an equivalent “what” phrase. So to the list of truth-bearers we need to add “antecedent” and “consequent”. Again, while that is true, anyone who thinks that there is a major difficulty here will not be satisfied with that answer. “But what is it that is functioning as an antecedent–‘Messi is injured’ isn’t just an antecedent! There is something that is there cast in that role (being an antecedent) and could elsewhere be performing another; e.g. in ‘Either Messi is injured or the sun is shining’ that same something is a disjunct. What we need to know is what kind of thing that something really is, what it is in itself.” The first thing to notice is that that the same something occurs as both antecedent and disjunct only if we assume, as we normally do in our philosophical/logical practice, that the same person is being referred to by the name “Messi” and that the injury referred to is the same injury to that person. As I have often enough noted, those connections are made only in particular discourse situations. Hence, we are already in the realm of talking. The demand that there should be some kind of truth-bearing thing that is not said both when “Messi is injured” occurs as, say, an antecedent and as a disjunct, is the demand that there must be one real bearer of truth-value, that there must be one privileged word that marks out truth-bearers. I have already denied that there is such a beast, denied that there is a special word that denominates all and only truth-bearers. As I said earlier, there is such a way of talking of truth-bearers but it has no philosophical oomph. “Messi is injured” occurring as antecedent, as disjunct, as bald statement, as what is suspected, etc. etc. is a truth-bearer, is something with a truth-value, is something that is true or false. Those are ways of saying what it really is. There are no others. Philosophers nonetheless hanker to use the word “proposition” as the general term for “what is true or false”. There is nothing wrong with that as long as it is realized that it means nothing more than “what is true or false” packed into a single noun. “Messi is injured” as an antecedent and as a disjunct is a proposition, i.e. it has a truth-value, and will be the same

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proposition, have the same truth-value, in each case as long as the referential connections are assumed to be the same. However, nothing of a nearer approach to reality is thereby gained by employing the terminology of “proposition”. There is only some gain in simplicity and order in philosophical practice, by insisting that we use the word “proposition” rather than “truthbearer” or “what is true or false”. (2) Someone might well say at this point, in philosophical exasperation, “But there are truths that haven’t been uttered, much less conceived of by we humans”. Put in that general fashion I have already criticized that objection in the previous chapter when discussing Bradley and Swartz’ argument that there must be propositions, abstract entities independent of human talk and thought. But the point of the objection here is not an attempt to prove what the truth-bearers are, but a protest against putting truth into a fundamental alliance with human beings, with our discourse practices.10 And that protest can be put much more specifically. The critic might say “Look–supposing human beings, all language users, disappear, but the world otherwise goes on. Even without people, without talkers and writers and thinkers, it would remain true that falling snow is white (as long as it does remain white)”. Let me disentangle this. The crucial words are (of course) “it would remain true”. To say that anything would remain such-and-such is to say that it is now such-and-such and will continue to be such-and-such at time t. So, to insist that it would remain true that falling snow is white in a world without anyone who can say that it is that color is to be committed to “it is now true that… and it will continue to be true at time t (when there are no people)”. I have objected before that “true” is not a temporal notion, that “is true” is timeless. The above objection rests on not seeing or accepting that. So, let me spell the point out in more detail. First, if people, language users, were to disappear, that (all things being equal) would have no effect on the color of falling snow and much else. That is, in a world without people, snow as it drifts down would be white. The proper way of talking about that situation is not “It will be true at time t that snow is white”–rather what can be said is “Snow will not change color, will still be white, even if people vanish”. The future tense verb goes with the subject “Snow” and not with “true”. Of course, someone can say in response to “Snow will continue to be white when people are gone” “That is true”. What changes with the disappearance of people is not a time reference from “is true” to “will be true” but the tense of the verb in the proposition commented upon, in this case from “is white” to “will still be white”.

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What tempts the objector to mis-locate the future tense, to say “It will still be true that snow is white” rather than “It is true that snow will still be white”? What produces the illusion? I have no general answer. (See note 37 to Chapter 1 for a reply in a specific case.) Nor have I seen the hint of one elsewhere, though it is a worthwhile project for philosophy. In sum, this objection to taking truth-talk to be conceptually connected to human discourse expresses a confusion arising from as yet unexplained sources.11 Imagine a list such as the following: We use a lot of dead metaphors; The Taj Majal is in India; Infrared lamps can be dangerous; The moon was discovered in 1534; Baseball players are more athletic than rugby players; etc. It is an obviously a list of some things that are true or false, of things with a truth-value. But it is more: it might be, under various circumstances, a list of what some particular person has said over the course of a week, a list of claims made by people in Los Angeles in 1954, a list of what a typical six year old knows, a list of possible consequents of if-then statements, and so on. As that list reminds us, matters true or false are, in the first instance and in appropriate philosophical notation, of the form p. But that innocuous seeming fact can be misleading. It encourages us to think that the basic use of “true” should be in grammatically predicating “is true” of p, that “p is true” is the fundamental form of truth language. That encouragement is seconded by recalling that in working with the propositional calculus we frequently say “Suppose p is true (false)”. But of course p is a variable or, better, is a place, a gap, showing where something with a truth-value can be inserted. Thus, p is not something that can be true (or false). Our saying “Suppose p is true” is not intended to literally claim that p is true but rather means “Suppose what(ever) you insert there is true”. That is, what we have in the supposition is a variation on “what” phrases, namely ‘’what can be inserted in the space marked by p” and we are supposing that to be true. Suppose that what is to be inserted there is “Cats prey on rats”. The “p is true” formula is now misguided in a second way since “Cats prey on rats is true” is a non-player in the truth-game (just as “The moon is a prime number” is not an entrant in either the mathematics game or the material object game). Generalizing, it is then clear that the primary use of “is true” is not that of being predicable of the various items that can fill the gap marked by p though of course “is true” is a predicate when “That’s true” is said of whatever we have inserted into the place marked by p. Nor does it do much better for our understanding of truth-bearers to abandon that first thought about “is true” and conclude that the paradigm is

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“It is true that p”. While this, unlike the previous suggestion, is an intelligible way of talking, it too is not the fundamental role for “true”: for it is typically a concession. That the phrase “It is true that” has a special role in discourse means that it is not the primitive form of truth-talk, not the basic form of words for declaring that something is true. Talk of something’s being true comes into being only when we enter the realm of talk about talk. That meta-talk takes two closely related forms: when someone says of something said by someone else “That’s true” (or, for example, ”You got that right”) or when the something said is referred to as, e.g, “What she claimed” or “She claimed that…” and one or another truth-predicate is employed (“She falsely claimed that…’). As I have noted, “said” is paradigmatic but far from exhaustive of what can be declared to have a truth-value. Given that I have argued above that all the relevant verbs are intimately, though variously, connected to discourse, then the language of truth comes into operation only when a connection is made to talk and thought.12

4. C.J.F. Williams, Logic and ‘What So-and-So Said’ There remain questions about what kind of thing it is that is being talked of when we use the “what” phrase, when we characterize a truth-bearer as, e.g., “what she argued”, “what he forgot”, “what is presupposed”, etc. And as typically there is a noun associated with the “what” phrase, as “claim” is with “what was claimed”, we also need to ask what the ontological status is of claims, theses, beliefs and so on. The best place to conduct those inquiries is against the background of C.J.F. Williams’ extremely sophisticated investigation in What is Truth? That book functions as the launch pad for the present inquiry because he, and I think he alone, is wrestling with several of the same issues that are being examined here, even if he is going about it in a quite different manner and ends up with different conclusions. Williams takes it that the paradigm form of truth-talk is “What so-andso said is true”. Now that is a variant on my version, namely that the paradigm is “That is true” said in response to what someone said. Williams’ variant does not allow him to investigate (though he sometimes mentions) alternative answers, investigations that have occupied most of this work. But that is a minor deviation from my account. The major realization should be that Williams takes it from the start that what is primarily true or false is what someone says. There is an important qualification to that. Williams: “There is perhaps an idiomatic tendency in English to associate ‘say’ with ‘true’: ‘What he said in his letter is true’ may sound more natural than ‘What he writes in his

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letter is true’. But there is no necessity in this. What people assume, maintain, suppose, etc., can be just as true as what people say. It is the ‘What’ that counts.”13 The argument in section 2 above concerning the paradigmatic status of “says” holds that it is more than a mere “idiomatic tendency” that “to say” plays a central role in the cast of truth-bearers and that, hence “What is said” is a genuine paradigm. However, Williams is reminding us that, even if they are not paradigmatic, we must also properly countenance what people assume, what is maintained, what someone supposed as truth-bearers. However, the argument here has been that Williams’ “etc.” covers many kinds of things with truth-values, a much larger group than he realized. Despite these initial points of agreement, our projects now diverge. For Williams’ entire aim is to produce a representation of his paradigm form, namely “What so and so said is true’” in terms of formal logic (with minimal emphasis on symbolization). He is in the Russellian tradition of philosophy: that to make philosophical sense of something, it must be cast in terms of logic. By contrast, the present work has been written from an entirely different philosophical perspective where making philosophical sense of something requires grasping its place in ordinary life and discourse. Williams’ major background assumption is that “What so-and-so said is true” itself has a truth-value (even though he will hold that its grammatical form is not its logical form). He then takes it that all matters of truth and falsity can be represented in logic. So, his question is “How is that particular truth-claim to be logically pictured?” On its face, it is a straight-forward subject-predicate claim and so it seems that the question of representation is simply settled: “What so-and-so said is true” has the form Pa. Williams, however, will not accept that. He has problems both with treating “is true” as a term for a property (he prefers to say “not a predicate” intending the word “logical” to preface “predicate”) and also with treating “What so-andso said” as (in his favored terminology) an object-designating phrase. Consequently, his book is taken over mainly by showing what status the two components of the paradigm really have. Williams’ troubles with the predicate “is true” have to do with his acceptance of some form of the redundancy thesis (he prefers to say that “is true” evaporates rather than is redundant14). As a consequence, in a proper logical representation of “What so-and-so said is true”, the grammatical predicate “is true” must vanish: there is no property of truth for it to represent. Williams thinks of that view as answering the question “What is truth?”15 I said at the outset that I would not be considering the question of what truth is here–I don’t think that merely saying that “is true” is redundant, even if correct, would provide anywhere near a full account of

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what truth is. So that part of Williams’ project I shall not be responding to, shall in fact be ignoring. The other half is what concerns me, his account of the nature and status of what someone says. He thinks that the natural response to questions about the function of the “what” phrase is that it is an “apparently objectdesignating expression”.16 What someone says is, on this reading, an object designated by the “what” expression. However, for Williams that can only be an appearance for, if the expression is object-designating, there is an unsolvable “problem” of “what objects do expressions like ‘What Percy says’ designate’?”17 Williams thinks that the standard answer to that-that it is a proposition conceived of as a (mysterious) transcendent entity, is completely misguided-“the notion of a ‘designation of a Proposition’ is one in which it is the whole purpose of this chapter to call into question”.18 (Note the capitalization: Williams has said “Following Geach I shall ‘dignify “Propositions” with an initial capital’ when it purports to refer to a non-linguistic entity”.19) However, calling the apparently object-designating role of “what so and so said” into question does not amount to arguing against it. He does not–he simply takes it that the realist doctrine of propositions is wrong. Hence, the idea that the “what” phrase is object-designating is assumed to be obviously mistaken, that it is an idea leading us into steamy metaphysical realms. What he does is offer an alternative construal of the role of the expression and of the nature and status of what someone says. Williams clears the deck for his alternative interpretation by rejecting a defense of the idea that the function of “What Percy said” is what he thinks it appears to be, namely object-designating. In effect, he notices that “what” locutions go far beyond the ones being considered in discussions of truthbearers, e.g. “what he said”, “what it entails”, “what he believes”: we can also talk of “what she wore”, “what makes her happy”, “what remains of the wine” and so on. However, Williams gets trapped by looking only at one such expression and thinking that it is representative of all “what” locutions. The case that he wrestles with over some pages20 is “What the postman brought is on the mantel”. Surely, he imagines an objector saying, “What the postman brought” is an object-designating phrase, denoting an object on the mantel. Why should “What Percy said” be any different? Williams gets out of that problem by a lengthy argument designed to show that both “What the postman brought” and “What Percy said” are Russellian incomplete symbols and thus require a logical representation different from what is given to a term for an individual, for an object. However, Williams’ problem with “What the postman brought” can be solved much more easily if one notices other cases of “what” phrases:

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“What they charge for a glass of wine is outrageous”, “What the Mayor did today is against the rules”, “What he earns is more than he deserves”, “What she did was offer a defense of the thesis”. It seems wholly implausible to take any of those subject-terms as designations of objects. Equally, it is not the role of “What the postman brought” to be object-designating: for what he brought may have been best wishes from the post-office staff. The illusion that it is functioning as object-designating is produced, not because of the “What”, but because only objects, spatial things, can be on the mantel. That problem out of the way, Williams can turn to his preferred construal of “What Percy says is true”. His chief thesis is that that claim “means no more than ‘For some p, both Percy says that p and p’”.21 (Given that he takes “says” to be merely idiomatic in importance, Williams must also be willing to hold that “For some p, both S assumes/maintains/supposes/etc. that p and p” are covered by his account.) In that account “is true” vanishes (evaporates) and “What Percy says” undergoes significant alteration. Williams takes this version as both needing refinement and as basically correct: “But plausibility is also achieved by a short, sharp, easily understood thesis such as ‘For some p….’ But if the first version of the thesis is not the whole truth about truth it is still, I believe, a good deal more true than false”.22 Williams is thus following in Russell’s footsteps. “The present King of France is bald” for Russell cannot be a simple subject-predicate proposition (although he has no trouble with “is bald” except for some witty remarks about a wig). For to agree with that, to continue to treat the subject term as a denoting expression, as object-designating, would commit us to holding that France does have a King–and we know that not to be so. Russell rids himself of the troubling description by holding that it is really a quantifier. For Williams, the same route is followed: “What Percy says” cannot be, despite how it may seem, an expression we use to pick out something, some object. It must therefore really, logically, be a quantifier. “An expression like [what Percy says] cannot therefore be regarded as naming, standing for, denoting something. It can much more properly be compared to a quantificational expression.”23 That brings us to the crux of the matter. Both Russell and Williams assume that there are only two choices: either the expressions in question are object-designating or they are really grammatically muddled quantifiers. Russell thought that “the present King of France” cannot be objectdesignating because to be meaningful, as it is, there would have to be something (for the meaning of a term is the object named) answering to the description “the present King of France”. His view of the status of the description is thus generated by a mistaken account of what the meaning of an expression is. Williams, however, does not object to the seemingly

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object-designating status of “What Percy says” for the same reason. But if it were object-designating, if it were a denoting expression, then for “What Percy says is true’” to be true, as it can be, would require both there to be some object answering to the expression “What Percy says” and for it to have the property of being true. Williams does not accept either conjunct: there is no such property and there are no such inhabitants of the universe as Propositions. Hence, “What Percy says” cannot be object-designating and must therefore really be a type of quantifier. Why do Williams and Russell have only those two choices, either object-designating or hidden quantifier? Because they can see no other options. So, when each has a reason to reject their respective troublesome expressions as denoting or designating expressions and since they are nonetheless subject terms of something with a truth-value, both, given their commitment to the comprehensiveness of logic, are left with no choice but to treat those expressions as quantifiers masked by a misleading grammatical form. Williams, because he thinks “What Percy says” is prima facie an expression referring to an entity, and yet, because “What Percy says is true” will be true or false even though the world does not contain an object named “What Percy says”, must find a way out. And logic, following Russell’s lead, offers him the means. It has to be a quantified expression that is grammatically mis-shapen. So “What Percy says” becomes “For some p, Percy says p” and the entire claim or proposition becomes “For some p, Percy says p and p”. Williams is so pleased with that solution that he thinks it obvious once pointed out: “the suggestion that the meaning of ‘What Percy says is true’ is given, roughly, by ‘For some p, both Percy says that p and p’, once made, will seem to some so obvious that it is difficult for them to imagine how a whole book, albeit a short one, could justifiably be devoted to the subject”.24 Despite Williams thinking it is obvious that his move captures the meaning of “What so-and-so says”, there are problems. The background to holding that the “what” phrase must be treated as a quantifier is the rejection of the simpler view that it is what it looks to be, namely a singular subject term. We have learned (I think) from Russell’s similar maneuver that his rejection of the alternative, namely that a definite description is a singular term, rested upon a serious philosophical mistake.25 I shall argue that Williams’ solution equally is generated by a philosophical misconception, though one quite different from Russell’s. But first, let me look at two problems with the idea that “what” phrase operates as a quantifier.

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The first trouble stems from the fact that, while Williams is trying to spell out the meaning of “What Percy said is true”, he does so in a mixture of formal devices and terms of ordinary language. Doing logic, we typically say that each occurrence of the same variable, the same placeholder, in a single truth claim must be filled by the same proposition. However, that is not to be taken seriously: the variable in the quantifier cannot be replaced by the same material that goes to occupy the same variable in the remainder of the statement. Suppose what Percy said was (that) the cat is on the mat. It makes no sense to understand Williams’ formula as “For some the cat is on the mat, Percy said the cat is on the mat and the cat is on the mat”. How then does one read the “p” occurring in the quantifier? No doubt as “For some proposition”. But now “For some proposition, Percy said the cat is on the mat and the cat is on the mat” does not reproduce the meaning of the original as it, awkwardly, spells out what it was that Percy said whereas the original “What he said” left it unspecified. Hence to retain that feature of the original’s meaning and to get a smooth reading of the whole one must take Williams’ version to be understood as “For some proposition, Percy says it and it”. There are two difficulties in that, even though it succeeds in retaining the lack of specificity of the original. First, although Williams takes “said” as paradigmatic of what has truth-value, it doesn’t fit with the word “proposition” in the quantifier: one does not say propositions as I pointed out earlier (what one says is whatever one says, something quite specific). Rather, as I also held, one makes propositions. Even if you change “proposition” to (for example) “assertion”, “claim”, “statement”, those too aren’t said but made. So, Williams has trouble obtaining a natural reading of the meaning of the original in that way. Secondly, most strikingly, if one wishes “is true” to evaporate, having it vanish in this best version of his account is impossible for it leaves a dangling ‘it’. Only by adding “is true” back in so we have “it is true” can we have intelligibility–and that undercuts Williams’ insistence that “is true” is redundant and must disappear in the final logical form of “What Percy said is true”. In short, Williams, in trying to capture in appropriate logical form the meaning of the problematic claim “What Percy said is true”, ends up, despite his sense that his solution is obvious, with a quite troubled representation of the original. There is a second problem with Williams’ solution. How would the following claim be rendered into logic: “Percy said something” (where we assume the something to be something with a truth-value)? Unquestionably, it would be (following Williams’ reading of the quantifier) “For some p,

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Percy said p”. That is, Williams’ representation of “What Percy said” is identical with the standard representation of “Percy said something”. Since Williams treats “For some p, Percy said p” as setting out the meaning of “What Percy said” and since the proper representation in logic of “Percy said something” is the same, Williams’ view entails “Percy said something” and “What Percy said” mean the same. But they don’t mean the same. One is a remark with a truth-value–the other is neither true nor false. One appropriate response, among many others, to “Percy said something” is “What did he say?” But the only appropriate response to someone’s saying “What Percy said” (out of the blue, not in response to a question, e.g. “What are you talking about?”) is “Continue” for the saying there is only an uttering and not a remark. As the representation of “Percy said something” as “For some p, Percy said p” is correct, it follows that Williams’ is wrong in what he claims to be the meaning of “What Percy said”. Supposing that Williams has not gone wrong in showing that, if “What Percy said” is a quantifier, it must mean, be represented in logic as, “For some p, Percy said p”. But that analysis of the expression’s meaning won’t do. Hence it is not a concealed quantified expression. (Part of the attraction of Williams’ maneuver is that it enables him to maintain a redundancy thesis. But if “What so-and-so said is true” must be accepted both as paradigmatic truth talk and yet incapable of being reformulated so that the predicate evaporates, no redundancy thesis will be possible.26 ) Must we, then, retreat to the other option that Williams gives for understanding “What Percy said”: that it is an object-designating phrase? I shall argue that the correct solution to the problem is an option that Williams never considers.

5. What Kind of Being Do Truth-bearers Have? Williams’ starting point is his denial that what so-and-so says is an object. Hence, since “What so-and-so said” is an intelligible form of words, it cannot have the role of designating an object, despite what function it appears (according to Williams) to have. Despite his meticulous argument on so many topics, Williams is not careful when it comes to considering what the objects would be that whatphrases apparently designate. His assumption is that it would be a Proposition. “Before attempting to analyse expressions beginning with ‘What’ which occur in sentences ascribing truth (expressions which might unguardedly be said to refer to mysterious entities called ‘Propositions…”). 27

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If we take it that “what someone said” was to designate something, his assumption that the something would be a Proposition cannot be right. In the first place, as I argued earlier, we do not say propositions or Propositions – “what he said is a proposition” is as illegitimate as “what he fears is a proposition”. Secondly, in assuming that propositions are what would be designated, Williams is re-producing the confusion wrought by the Roman logicians and philosophers when they introduced the term “proposition” as what is true or false. They did not consider how the new terminology meshed with what we ordinarily call true or false, namely what someone says. Williams, in assuming that a proposition is what would be designated, conflates the two systems of talk. Objecting to propositions conceived traditionally as truth-bearers is one project, considering the metaphysical status of what someone says is quite a different one. Williams does not do the latter. It is not remotely plausible to regard what someone says as an object, even given the fuzzy boundaries of that category. Ryle (I think it was) somewhere said that people say horrible things to each other but do not say objects, horrible or otherwise. Further, a basic feature of the grammar of objects, what must be satisfied in order for something to count as an object, is that it makes sense to talk of “a such-and-such”, “the such-and-such”, “such-and-suches”.28 However, those things make no sense in connection with what is said: “He said seven different things” is fine–“there were seven different what he saids” is nonsense. There are other features of the grammar of objects (entities): they persist, come into being and pass away. What is said does not persist nor does it pass away. Entities have a location, a size, a shape, typically are made of stuff (rainbows may not be). We cannot say any of those things about what someone says: there are no sensible issues about the location, the size, the shape, the stuff of what someone says. Someone may object that that only proves that what is said cannot be a physical object: the fact that it makes no sense to talk of temporal and spatial matters in connection with what is said is why we have to treat it as a transcendent object. That objection, however, begs the question in assuming that what is said is an entity and merely “relocates” it. Of course, what happens is that those who talk of supernatural objects fit them into stories that outfit them surreptitiously with object grammar. For example, Plato’s stories encourage us to wave our hands heavenward as we talk of Forms, as if they have a location. He tells tales of travelling to get to the realm of Forms, of visiting them (as if psyches were tourists visiting the Parthenon), of observing Forms, of the Form of Man being a perfect man (leading to Aristotle’s Third Man argument). Much less colorfully, Frege

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compares a Thought to a pencil, thereby encouraging us, without argument, to regard Thoughts as objects. What is said simply does not belong in the category of object and trying to get us to think of it as supernatural, transcendent, already presupposes that it is an object. Think: when a person says something or when we hear or see (or whatever) someone say something, does some object have anything to do with what is going on? Well yes: if someone says ‘That looks like Joe’s car out there”, the car has something to do with the remark. Is there, however, anything remotely like Frege’s pencil involved, some further object that the person is having dealings with? When you tell someone that Joe’s car is in the street, the possibility of Joe’s being here an hour early may cross her mind, but the notion that there is some further object beyond Joe, the car, the street, does not have any relevance at all to the speech situation. Despite hearing the words spoken, we may have to work out what was said. To take the most straight-forward type of case, if a French speaker says “Il pleut”, someone who doesn’t speak French may ask “What did he say?” To provide the direct discourse account of what he said, “He said: ‘Il pleut’”, is of no use whatsoever. It will not even help to shift into indirect discourse: “He said that il pleut” is a jumble. What is needed is a representation in indirect discourse that correctly specifies what he said but that does not, like the perfectly correct direct discourse representation, leave the questioner clueless. It is perfectly proper to say what someone says by making a change in their words. So, a spectator at a soccer match may say “That number 6 should have stayed in bed today”. To the question “What did he say?” by someone who didn’t hear, a correct answer might well be “He said that Smith is having a terrible game”. The activity of reporting what someone said is totally different from pointing out, referring to, an object. It might be objected that I am being too literal, that Williams’ calling what is said an object is a philosophically broad use of “object”. Of course, philosophers do tend to use “object” broadly. Wittgenstein in #373 of the Investigations held that grammar tells us what kind of object (Gegenstand) anything is. He does not mean there literally “object”: that we can sensibly say “The car is blue” or “It is a blue car” but cannot intelligibly say “The blue is car” or “It is a car blue” tells us (shows) that a car is an object but it equally shows that blue is not an object, that it is a property (attribute). He would have been more accurate if he had said “Grammar tells us what kind of thing anything is” using ‘Ding’ not ‘Gegenstand’. However, when Williams speaks of objects, he means objects. For what he worries about is whether when we truly say “What he said is true” there is some entity in reality, non-empirical of course, corresponding to “What

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he said”. That worry is the sort of worry that Quine is dealing with in Word and Object (note the title), for instance in section #50 entitled “Entia Non Grata”. There are meaningful words that appear to be object words but can’t really be since there can’t be such objects. “Thus we habitually say ‘for the sake of’, with ‘sake’ seemingly in term position, and never thereby convict ourselves of positing any such objects as sakes…”.29 Given that there is no good reason for thinking that what is said is an object, why then did Williams think that that is what it seems to be? Because he thinks that the expression “What is said” seems to be an object designator. And why does he think that? There is no attempt in his text to answer that–he simply assumes that that is what its function would be if it weren’t a quantifier. The absence of even a hint of a defense of that claim suggests that he is captured by a picture of how things must be with a noun, a substantive such as “What is said”. What picture would that be? It is an ancient doctrine about language, one that occurs in many versions with several names (unum nomen, unum nominatum, “Fido”-Fido) in the history of thought. In contemporary philosophy it has acquired the title “the Augustinian picture of language” from Wittgenstein’s attribution of it to Augustine at the opening of the Investigations: “These words, it seems to me, give us a particular picture of the essence of human language. It is this: the individual words in language name objects–sentences are combinations of such names.”30 There seems to be no other reason than acquiescence in that picture for Williams to have held, without examination, that “What is said” would be (if not a quantifier) object-designating and that consequently what is said would be an object. Being held by that picture, Williams does what Wittgenstein noted we philosophers are inclined to do: coming upon a noun (phrase), a substantive, Williams immediately takes it that it must stand for a substance, an object. So far, I have followed Williams’ use of “designating” as the preferred term for setting out his position. But he himself is not wedded to that. In various places he talks of expressions naming, referring to, denoting, as well as designating.31 Since those terms, as well as “standing for” and others have been used historically as approximately equivalent, in discussing the picture I will follow Williams’ lead and treat them as such. Despite the vast critical investigation that the picture calls for, that is here not necessary. What is relevant is a set of considerations that loosen the grip of the picture on the expression “What so-and-so said” (and its fellow truth-bearers). What is needed is a consideration of other expressions that have a role similar to that but are ones we are not inclined to take as object words. These are expressions that, in Quine’s words, are in “term position”, that are typically subject words in subject-predicate expressions

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(“What he said was not original”), though they may also occur in statements of relations (“I heard what she said”). For example, we do talk about, refer to, the spirit of adventure, the course of European history since World War II, the meaning of the word “of’”-those items are not objects and the expressions used to refer to them are thus not to be thought of as names, as object-designating. (To echo Quine: by using them we do not convict ourselves of positing such objects.) There is another side to the picture that must be noticed in any critical examination, even a limited one. For the worry connected to the picture is that if bits of language are not firmly hooked to some piece of the world, talk would be nothing but sounds floating in the void. (Hence Hume: intelligibility requires that there must be an impression for every idea.) Consequently, a response to the Augustinian picture must also have the aim of showing that the words in question are not about nothing. Consider then the following extended story. Suppose someone, an alien, keeps crossing the Equator over and over, traveling the circumference of the Earth diligently inspecting the spot where he was told the Equator is, looking for it. He finds that it is not observable by the naked eye and so proceeds to inspect further using all manner of highly sophisticated detection equipment. None of those record a trace of the Equator. In the end, he concludes that the Equator is a human fiction, a nothing, only a name, something to be grouped with the Abominable Snowman, the ether, Valkeries, as objects talked of by humans but not found. We humans laugh at our alien friend. We recognize that he thinks of the Equator as an object somehow similar to the lines down the middle of the road or a fracture in the earth’s crust and so thinks he can detect it either with his senses or with instruments that extend his sensory capacities (as if he were looking for the Higgs boson). We see that he has put the Equator into the wrong category and therefore he thinks it should be observable by means appropriate to things of that category. However, we may not recognize that we too have our own problems of expressing what kind of thing it is. People are inclined to say that the Equator is an imaginary line running around the center of the earth. However, it is not imaginary. Contrast it with a child’s imaginary friend. If the child says his imaginary friend has grown an inch taller this week, we cannot say “I’ll check that out”. What he sincerely says is authoritative. That is not the way things are with the Equator. We can measure exactly where it is and obtain agreement that we have got it right. We can measure how much it drifts north-south in the course of a year. That is not what it is to be imaginary, nor what it is to be a fiction. Rather, the Equator is not a something but not a nothing either. It is not an object but not a fiction either.

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It is not, of course, only the Equator that might appear from our manner of speech to be an object.32 There are numerous cases. When we say “There are three miles between here and the highway”, we do not understand that to be analogous to (say) “There are three cows between here and the highway”–“a mile” does not function to pick out some mysterious unobservable object located between here and there. However, it does have a perfectly intelligible role in our talk and thought. So too do other words of spatial measurement: a given patch of earth of can be measured in yards or meters or cubits but those things are not there in that patch competing with each other for adequate space along with a sizable number of living creatures. Time does not flow through our clocks as water through a flow-meter, but we can nonetheless measure the amount that has passed (two hours and sixteen minutes) and regret or welcome its passing. Monday (say) is not a fiction or imaginary or nothing–we talk about it, refer to it, determine its boundaries, tell when fifty percent of it has passed. Nonetheless it is not an entity, not observable either by biological senses or by any technological surrogate. The relevant cases extend in different directions as well. The average plumber with his 2.3 children is not to be encountered on the street. The empty set is important in set theory. We can do things for the sake of world peace although, as Quine noted, that particular sake, or any others, would not be counted (or overlooked) in an inventory of the entities of the world. What so-and-so said belongs to that group: it is not nothing but not an entity either. The expression “What so-and-so said”, and its variations, are not, as Williams thinks they must be if they are not quantifiers, objectdesignating. However, they are not therefore empty words, mere whistling in the dark. Just as with the spirit of adventure and the Equator, we can talk about what someone said: we can say that she said it in English, that it is not original and so on, even that it is true or false. We can discover whether she really did say it or not and, if so, inquire as to whether and how she meant it. If the “what is said” expressions (and presumably all analogous “what” phrases) are not object-designators are they nonetheless designators, referring expressions? Is their role to stand for, name, pick-out, denote, although what they stand for, etc. is something other than an object? Wittgenstein begins his criticism of the Augustinian picture shortly after setting it out in #1 of the Investigations: “Augustine does not speak of there being any difference between kinds of word. If you describe the learning of language in this way you are, I believe, thinking primarily of nouns like ‘table’, ‘chair’, bread’, and of people’s names, and only secondarily of the

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names of certain actions and properties; and of the remaining kinds of word as something that will take care of itself.” More recently, philosophers have abandoned the picture’s narrow idea that words are names of objects, exploiting Wittgenstein’s suggestion that the picture fits some words only secondarily, that some words are names of things other than objects. “Here ‘think’ denotes the psychological state that people are in when they think.”33 Or words apply to, pick out, “objects, events, and properties”. 34 The question can now be put more precisely: on the expanded picture, does “what was said” designate, denote, one of these other kinds of things– states, events, properties, actions, etc.-or is it among the words that the picture does not fit at all, that can take care of themselves, that do not designate, refer? Certain of those non-referring words have been recognized since the medievals: syncategoremata, i.e. “of”, “if”, “whereas”. Since Lewis Carroll the group has included “Nobody” and even more recently quantifiers “all”, “at least one”, “a whole bunch”) have been realized to not be referring expressions (which is what enables Williams’ attempt to turn “what Percy said” into a quantifier). Are there, however, cases with more significance for the fate of the expanded Augustinian picture? In Chapter V, I argued that “believes” (“thinks”) and “belief” are not names of, are not labels for, a state be it psychological, neural or behavioral. Rather, they function to claim that with respect to a given matter a given person is to be seen as located within a set of “rules” constituting the language game of belief. “Citizen” is also not the label for a condition of someone: it is used to say that a given person has certain rights and responsibilities. “Good”, I would argue, is not a word that picks out a property and ascribes it to various objects. But to deny that the word refers to a property is not nonsense-it is the outcome of an attempt to describe the functioning of the word. The view may be mistaken (I think not), but that it is could only be discovered by careful argumentation about how the word functions in human discourse. It cannot be rejected by arguing “All nouns and adjectives are names, are intended to stand for things; ‘good’ is an adjective; hence it must be the name of a property.”35 “What she said” and so on belong to that group: one of the other kinds of word that are not noticed by the traditional “Fido”-Fido picture of language. What kind of being does what someone said have, what category does it belong to? It is not an object–but it is also not a stuff, relation, state, property, event, act, number, and so on through the list of category terms, of formal concepts. Where do we put what is said?

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Quine avoids the issue: “Units of measure turn out somewhat like sakes and behaves. ‘Mile’, ‘minute’, ‘degree Fahrenheit’, and the like resemble ‘sake’ and ‘behalf’ in being defective nouns: they are normally used only in a limited selection of the usual term positions.”36 Since no one thinks that sakes and miles are objects but since the words ‘sake’ and ‘mile’ partially satisfy Quine’s criteria for referring to objects, he calls them defective pieces of language and solves the “problem” they create by revising the verbal structures into which the words can occur so that they no longer occur in term position anywhere. However, it is quite unclear what a defective piece of language would be. “Sake” and “mile” are perfectly respectable as linguistic items. Nor are sakes and miles defective beings. Quine is right of course in finding them not to be entities, but their situation is not that they aspire to that category but fall short – rather they have a different kind of being than cats and doormats. There is no category term sanctioned by the history of philosophy into which we can put what so-and-so said, sakes, miles, the Equator, Ruy Lopez, etc. Perhaps that is why there is the temptation to treat them as objects–we think that they must fit somewhere and that, given our list of categories, appears to be the only plausible placement. But to make that move is to accept the historically approved list as complete and then to try to find a place for the problem cases. The best solution, even if not fully satisfying, is to treat what so-and-so said as a thing–to use “thing” as the name of a rather messy collection of beings that belong nowhere else in the set of categories. The truth-bearers, then, belong with other things that are not things (i.e. objects), things that are not a nothing but not a something either. So far, because that is where looking into Williams takes us, I have considered only the “what was said” form of truth-bearer. What is the status of statements, claims, suspicions, implications and so on? As I remarked earlier, philosophers passionately debate whether reality contains propositions, but there is no similar debate about whether there are assertions, remarks, implications, conclusions, etc. (Questions have been raised in recent neuroCartesian philosophical writings as to whether there are beliefs and also no doubt some of the other “mental” truth-bearers.) Despite the entifying propensities of philosophers, we have had a dim realization that statements et al aren’t entities. That does not, however, say much about how we should take them. Statements, claims, theses, etc., the noun-denominated truth-bearers, also are things, things the names for which have the grammatical appearance of object words but only the appearance. The assumption or the fact that there are enough chairs to seat everyone does not require objects other than

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chairs and people. The proposition that inequality is rife has nothing to do with an eternal object. They, along with the average plumber, cubits, truth, what someone says or denies, are not objects, natural or super-natural. It is not that I have invented a new metaphysical category or formal concept, that of Thing. I have merely pointed out that that if we philosophers are to make sense of certain things that people do talk about, things that we make use of in our accounts of the world, then we need to recognize that there is in the human form of life a category that has no better title than Things. It might be thought that it would be better to give the group a more formal name–perhaps Discourse Objects. However, it is best, given our philosophical history and propensities, to avoid the word “object” in this context and retain the simpler talk of Thing to mark out the status of truthbearers and much else that plays a role in our ways of thought and talk.

NOTES

Introduction 1. C.J.F. Williams, What is Truth?, Cambridge University Press, 1976, reissued 2009.

Chapter I 1. I shall use the term “truth-bearer” with no implication that truth is a property that something has (bears) in the way (say) that an apple has the property of redness. The nature and status of truth, e.g. whether it is a property or not, is for me in this work, though not for all writers on the subject, a further issue. The terminology of truthbearing as I employ it here is merely a contemporary way of talking of something being either true or false, of having a truth-value (in further contemporary terminology). 2. To observe the irrelevance of such attributions as “true Irishman” and “false lover” to the topic under study is not to deny that they may be relevant to the more general question “What is truth?”, to the issue of making sense of our practice of calling things true or false. 3. It must not be forgotten that a language may, and English certainly does, contain not only the formal and solemn expressions eponymous of truth-talk, especially the paradigmatic form “That’s true” as well as its close relative “That’s false”, but also a wide and everchanging range of idioms which perform the same logical role. These expressions in (current) English include “Right on!”, “That’s not so”, “You’d better believe it”, “It is not the case that”, “You’re wrong about that”, “That’s the truth”, “That’s a crock”, etc., etc. 4. In the current practice of philosophy there will be skeptics who wonder about the justification for my claim that “That’s true”, said as a comment on what someone says, is paradigmatic for the language of truth. To argue that matter here would lead us far off the tracks. I hope to write something about it soon. What I find surprising is that those who urge the need for “evidence” are replaying a debate of some years ago. The chief replies to the skeptic’s position apparently have been forgotten but are still powerfully relevant. Those replies are: Richard Hare, “Philosophical Discoveries”, (Mind LXIX N.S. No. 274, 1960), reprinted in Richard Hare, Essays on Philosophical Method (University of California Press, 1971); Stanley Cavell, “Must We Mean What We Say”, Must We Mean What We Say: A Book of Essays (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969)–see p. xi for the history of the essay. The case for my claim about what is paradigmatic truth talk does not rest

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solely on what I am entitled to say as a native speaker, given thoughtful reflection about that, and defended by the arguments of Hare and Cavell: I have in the paragraphs following that remark in the text examined alternatives to the thesis. The skeptic of course will not accept those as they issue from the same kind of thought that the original claim does: not supported by empirical studies. So be it for now. 5. There is perhaps another source for the philosophical idea that “p is true” is the primary form of truth talk. When we philosophers are explaining truth-tables, we are likely to say “When p is true, then not-p will be false” or even “When (say) ‘Cows give milk’ is true, then ‘Cows do not give milk’ will be false.” That may incline philosophers to think that what we say there can be generalized to talk everywhere. However, the logic situation is a very special explanatory context and shows nothing about what happens in ordinary contexts. 6. At this point a critic is more than likely to haul out the semantics/pragmatics distinction and claim that I have violated it. It is true that I find that the distinction is seriously mistaken, but not completely so as very many different things standardly get put on the pragmatics side of the fence. One place it goes wrong is precisely in the sort of cases to which this is a note. To say that “It is true” is has a special role in discourse, that of conceding or admitting, is to hold that it is used a) to comment on a previous remark, b) to call that remark “true” (and so is similar in function to “That’s true”) and c) differs from “That’s true” in that it is usable only in a specific context, that of conceding. To understand “It is true that”, i.e. to know what it means, to know its semantics, is to know precisely those matters. (For a recent general criticism of the semantics-pragmatics distinction, see Avner Baz, When Words Are Called For: A Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 2012).) 7. J. L. Austin, "Truth," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1950); reprinted in his Philosophical Papers (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed. 1961), p. 117. 8. That what someone says is the bearer of truth-value has been recognized by others. Chiefly, some time ago, by Alan R. White in Truth (Macmillan, 1970;) by Richard Cartwright, “Propositions” in Analytical Philosophy, First Series, ed. R.J. Butler (Basil Blackwell, 1962); by C.J.F. Williams, op. cit.; even more recently by HansJohann Glock, “Truth Without People”, Philosophy 72 (1997) pp. 85-104; G.P. Baker and P.M.S. Hacker, Language, Sense and Nonsense (Blackwell, 1986), pp. 182-190; P.M.S. Hacker, “Davidson on the Ontology and Logical Form of Belief”, Philosophy 73 (1998), pp. 81-96. What I have to say here has been to various degrees and in various ways influenced by those works. 9. Gilbert Ryle, “Ordinary Language”, Philosophical Review, LXII (1953); reprinted in Ryle, Collected Essays (Barnes and Noble, 1971), vol. 2, p. 311 and W.V.O. Quine, Elementary Logic, rev. ed. (Harper and Row, 1965), p. 5. 10. Michael Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language (Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 2. 11. Howard Wettstein, “Can What is Asserted be a Sentence?”, Philosophical Review LXXXV (1976), p. 196 for the realization that this is what lies behind the identification of what is said with a sentence. 12. Cartwright, op. cit., pp. 83 and 103. 13. loc. cit.

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14. Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), p.73. 15. The terminology used is taken from P.F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (Methuen, 1959), pp. xiii-xvi. 16. Some might say that it is much more than “intellectually unsafe” to draw the discussion to a conclusion here. For, it might be claimed, what I have employed above is the infamous Paradigm Case Argument (PCA) that is widely held today to be an unacceptable form of argument. It is so disreputable that Tyler Burge believed resort to it to have been the death of Ordinary Language Philosophy: “But as a philosophical method, it [the ordinary language tradition] faced numerous difficulties, never adequately dealt with in deriving philosophical conclusions from linguistic examples.... The discussion of the paradigm case argument marks, I think, the downfall of the method.” “Philosophy of Language and Mind, 1950-1990” in Readings in Language and Mind, ed. Heimir Geirsson and Michael Losonsky (Blackwell, 1996), pp. 6 and 26. Not all hands do agree that the PCA is an unmitigated disaster: for a defense of the PCA, see Oswald Hanflin, “What is Wrong with the Paradigm Case Argument”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n.s. Vol LXXXXI (1991). Whatever the acceptability of the PCA (or forms of it as Hanfling holds), my argument above is not an example of it. (1) Usually the PCA was intended as a reply to various pieces of skepticism about whether something exists (say free will) (see Keith S. Donnellan, “The Paradigm Case Argument”, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (MacMillan/Free Press, 1967). There was no skeptical issue to which I was responding. (2) The PCA claims that there must be certain paradigm situations in order for crucial terms to have meaning, to be understood. There was no claim about the possibility of meaning and understanding in my argument. (3) The PCA was intended to be a dispute stopper, the last word. Since at least the remainder of this chapter and the next three as well continue the criticism of sentences as truth-bearers, whatever I argued about the paradigm answer to “What bears truth-value?” cannot have been intended by me to be more than the opening salvo in a protracted inquiry. 17. The origin of the argument is probably in P.F. Strawson, “On Referring”, Mind 59 (1950), reprinted in Strawson, Logico-Linguistic Papers (Methuen, 1971), pp. 68. An inverted form of the argument can be found in Strawson’s Introduction to Logical Theory (Methuen, 1952), p. 4. Paul Ziff had an important presentation of the argument in Semantic Analysis (Cornell University Press, 1960), p. 199. 18. Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford University Press, 1984), “Truth and Meaning”, p. 33. 19. The historical origin of this criticism, though done in terminology other than that of types and tokens (he speaks of “being relative to a context” and of not being “absolutely” true or false), looks to have been E.J. Lemmon, “Sentences, Statements and Propositions”, British Analytical Philosophy, ed. Bernard Williams and Alan Montefiore (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966); see especially p. 91. Lemmon’s criticism seems to have first been put into the type-token terminology by R.J. and Susan Haack in “Sentences, Translation and Truth-Value”, Mind 74 (1970), pp. 4057.

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20. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 436. 21. I cannot now find this reference in Chomsky’s writings. I will have to do as Searle does in a similar situation and invoke the oral tradition: “I do not know who first heard of it or first thought of it but it has become part of the oral tradition.” John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (The Free Press, 1995), p. 103 note. 22. The Atlantic Monthly, May 18, 1988, column ‘Word Watch’, by Anne H. Soukhanov. 23. Great Events of Bible Times (Doubleday, 1987), p. 8. 24. Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford University Press), 1994, entry on “Type-token ambiguity”. 25. William Kneale and Martha Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 47. 26. Baruch Brody, “Logical Terms, Glossary of”, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Paul Edwards, Ed. in Chief (MacMillan, 1967), vol. 5. 27. Raymond Bradley and Norman Swartz, Possible Worlds: An Introduction to Logic and Its Philosophy (Hackett, 1979), p. 72. 28. W.V. Quine, Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary (Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 217. 29. ibid., p. 218. 30. loc. cit. 31. Linda Wetzel, “Types and Tokens”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N. Salta (ed.) URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/types-tokens/; Linda Wetzel, “TypeToken Distinction”, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward Craig (General Editor) (Routledge, 1998); and Linda Wetzel, Types and Tokens: On Abstract Objects, (MIT Press, 2009.) It needs to be noticed here that Wetzel has written the type-token entries in those two standard encyclopedias mentioned above. Moreover, the entry in the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (2nd ed., edited Robert Audi, 1999), written by Kent Bach, is written with Wetzel’s thesis in mind. Hence, she has changed in those standard reference works what has been the normal practice in recent decades. 32. All the quotes from Wetzel are taken from the Stanford entry. 33. This consideration was raised by Charles Chihara when I read a version of parts of this chapter to the North American Wittgenstein Society at the Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association. 34. I have never encountered anyone actually using the “will be true” predicate, probably because it is so odd: “It will be true that he is coming” and “It will be true that he will be coming” are both too jarring for anyone to say. However, I have encountered the past tense of the predicate. For instance, William Pfaff, “The History Beyond History”, The New York Review, Vol. LIX, No. 19, December 6, 2012: Pfaff says that an older Portuguese friend “had been educated to think that Portugal was a world actor whose civilization and power extended to China, tropical Africa, and Brazil, which was true.” Why the “which was true”? Why didn’t he say “which it was”? The verb of the “that” clause is already in the past tense (“was a world actor”) so that “which is true” could indicate that the person was not educated

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in a false belief. The reasonable guess is that Pfaff conflated “which it was” and “which is true”, either of which he could have said, and so ended up with a crossbreed of an expression. There is no reason in the occurrence of “was true” in that case to reject the thesis that there are no past and future tenses of truth language. 35. See R.J. and Susan Haack, op. cit., pp. 44-45. 36. Davidson, op. cit., p. 33 and p. 34. 37. At the time of writing Word and Object Quine knew the relevant work of Strawson’s (which seems to have been the original version of the argument from indexicals) quite well; and he did then, and afterward, think that sentences have first call for being treated as what has truth-value. He does not, however, mention opposition to Strawson and his version of the argument as a motivating factor in developing the notion of eternalization. Still I think that one could make out a case that Strawson is lurking in the background even on this topic. 38. W.V. Quine, Philosophy of Logic (Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 13.

Chapter II 1. Michael Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language (Harvard, 1981, 2nd ed.), p. 34; G.P. Baker and P.M.S. Hacker, Wittgenstein; Meaning and Understanding, paperback edition (University of Chicago Press, 1983), p.75. 2. J.R. Searle, Speech Acts (Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 25; Michael Devitt and Kim Sterelny, Language and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language (The MIT Press, 1987), p. 15. 3. Gilbert Ryle, “Ordinary Language”, The Philosophical Review LXII (1953); reprinted in Ryle, Collected Papers, Vol II (Barnes and Noble, 1971), pp. 301-318; also “Use, Usage and Meaning”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, XXXV (1961); also reprinted in Collected Papers, Vol II, pp. 407-414. 4. P.F. Strawson, “Review of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations”, Mind LXII (1954); reprinted in G. Pitcher, ed., Wittgenstein: The Philosophical Investigations: A Collection of Critical Essays (Doubleday Anchor Books, 1966); Alan White, “The Use of Sentences”, Analysis XVII (1956-7); G.J. Warnock, “Words and Sentences”, O.P. Wood and G. Pitcher, eds., Ryle: A Collection of Critical Essays (Doubleday Anchor Books, 1970); John Passmore, “Professor Ryle’s Use of ‘Use’ and ‘Usage”’, The Philosophical Review LXIII (1954); L. Jonathan Cohen, “On the Use of ‘The Use of”’, Philosophy XXX (1955). 5. G. Frege, “The Thought: A Logical Inquiry”, trans. A. and M. Quinton, Mind LXV (1956); reprinted in E.M. Klemke, ed., Essays on Frege (University of Illinois, 1968), p. 511 and in Nathan Salmon and Scott Soames eds., Propositions and Attitudes, Oxford Readings in Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1989). 6. This claim is not in fact all that obvious. For closer consideration of it, see the following chapter. In the current chapter, I shall continue to downplay doubts strongly expressed in the next chapter about this claim. 7. G.J. Warnock, “Words and Sentences”, op. cit., p. 275. 8. Strawson, op. cit., note #2, p. 26. 9. White, “The Use of Sentences”, op. cit., p. 2.

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10. Jonathan Bennett, Linguistic Behavior (Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 18. 11. White, “The Use of Sentences”, op. cit., p. 3. 12. ibid., p. 4 13. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 9. 14. ibid., p. 95. 15. Searle, op. cit., p. 3. 16. I don’t want to be drawn into an extended discussion of problem cases. For instance, it is usually said that a parrot’s utterance of “Polly wants a cracker” is not a case of meaningful speech, is just the bird making noises. But it is only because the bird utters a recognizable piece of language, in the midst of its gabble, that the case is philosophically interesting. The difficulty is solved not by declaring that the parrot is simply making a noise but rather in talking more extensively about the circumstances of the parrot’s life as compared with a speaker. Again, Lewis Carroll’s “Twas brillig…” is not marks or sounds. However, it is only potentially a piece of language but nonetheless not (mere) noises or marks. 17. Susan Haack, The Philosophy of Logics (Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 75 & 77. 18. S. Gorowitz, et al, Philosophical Analysis: An Introduction to its Language and Techniques (Random House, 3rd ed., 1979), p. 88. 19. There is one existing attempt to sort out these puzzles. That is Frank Ebersole, ‘The Complexity of Speech Acts’, Meaning and Saying (University Press of America, 1979). While it does not take Ebersole much time to discern that speaking is not a matter of making sounds, his attempts to integrate that understanding with the remainder of how we talk about sound, while making some progress, fails to be the satisfactory discussion needed. His procedure is too precious and he comes at the matter by an extraneous route, that of the question of basic actions. 20. I have not attempted to state the modern doctrine of physicalism and its differences from traditional materialism with any precision. But, given my aims, I do not think that the omission is significant. 21. The kind of cases presented here as counter-examples to physicalism are obviously related to what Searle calls “institutional facts”. John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, (The Free Press, 1995); see especially Chapter 1. However, the discussion above is not intended to be understood in connection with Searle’s detailed account of the notion of social reality. The argument here shares with Searle chiefly the idea that, in giving a philosophical account of what there is, of reality, social reality cannot be done away with.

Chapter III 1. See, for instance, P.H. Matthews, Syntax (Cambridge University Press, 1981) p. 275. 2. The latter kind of incompleteness is rampant in conversation. Was it wrong of the authors to annotate the following (taped) ordinary conversation, riddled with

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incompleteness, with the full paraphernalia of sentences when they transcribed it into written form? A: “Going to buy one?” B. “Don’t know. Perhaps.” A. “Better hurry, they’re packing up.” B. “Oh all right.” To C: “That one over there, please, the big one.” (Michael Gregory and Susanne Carroll, Language and Situation (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 39-40.) If sentences must be grammatically complete, then the authors should not have treated the conversation as consisting of sentences. 3. Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 348. 4. Michael Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language, (Harvard University Press, 2nd ed. 1981), p. 34. 5. ibid., p. 3. 6. Devitt and Sterelny, loc cit. 7. David Crystal, A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, (Basil Blackwell, 1985), p. 277. 8. “But of all linguistic units this [the sentence] is the most problematic, and the one whose nature has been most debated. In a monograph published in the early 30s, Ries listed seventeen pages of varying definitions, to which later schools have added several more, still with no consensus.” (Matthews, op. cit., p. 36.) Perhaps the extent of the current Bloomfieldian agreement in linguistics as to what a sentence is can be gauged from the fact that some recent comprehensive encyclopedias and dictionaries of linguistics do not even have an entry under ‘Sentence”: see notably the ten volume The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, R.A. Asher editor-in-chief, (Pergamon Press, 1994) and the four volume International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, William Bright editor-in-chief, (Oxford University Press, 1992). 9. John Lyons, Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics, (Cambridge University Press, 1968). 10. ibid., pp. 172-173. 11. ibid., p. 173 12. Frank Palmer, Grammar, (Penguin, 1972), p. 73. 13. Lyons, loc. cit. 14. Lyons, loc. cit. Lyons is disposed, as above, to say that the use of a pronoun presupposes the prior occurrence of a noun(-phrase). That, of course, is not true: we can say “He is cheerful” while looking at John without ever having previously uttered anything about John. In that case, “he” is still required by the context. The point Lyons is making, that the grammar of a sentence containing a pronoun is shaped by something outside the sentence itself, stands even with that modification. 15. ibid., p. 174. 16. Lyons, loc. cit. 17. Lyons, loc. cit. 18. ibid., pp. 174-175. Certain kinds of elliptical sentences are not what is at issue here. Wittgenstein’s “Slab!”, for example, is not incomplete in the same ways as “John’s, if he gets here in time.” We know “Slab!” means “Bring me a slab!” because

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that is the only possibility in the language (if it is the only possibility); “John’s” means “We are going in John’s car, if…” only because of the local context, the previous question. Lyons is not regarding “Slab!” as a problem for Bloomfield’s definition of sentence, at least not under this category of anomaly, though it is a problem, as we have seen, for the traditional account and will be a problem for the Bloomfieldian definition under a later heading. 19. ibid., p. 173. 20. ibid., p. 177. 21. Palmer, loc. cit. 22. Lyons, op. cit., p. 176. 23. Lyons, loc. cit. 24. Lyons, in attempting to specify what those (purportedly) different senses of “sentence” are, discusses the project of theoretical linguistics. While he fails to establish that there are the requisite senses, one could, in a different context, spend time examining with some sympathy what Lyons has to say about the aim of linguistics and how pursuing it landed him in a contradiction revolving around what a sentence is. 25. ibid., p. 177. 26. Lyons, loc. cit. 27. Lyons, loc. cit. 28. Lyons, op. cit., both p. 173 and p. 174. 29. ibid., p. 174. 30. David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 94. 31. On the phrase “folk linguistics” see Devitt & Sterelny, op. cit., p. 8. 32. Or as a second thought. The OED definition of a sentence quoted above continues “in popular use often…such a portion of a composition or utterance as extends from one full stop to another.” Clearly, a definition not for the learned. 33. Lyons, op. cit., p. 174. 34. And what about the rest of us? To worry about what we would say would be to take “folk linguistics” seriously. 35. Matthews, op. cit., p. 28. 36. Matthews, loc. cit. 37. M.B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West, (University of California Press, 1993); E.G. Turner, Greek Manuscripts of the Ancient World, (Oxford University Press, 1971). Edward Maunde Thompson, A Handbook of Greek and Latin Paleography, 1893 (reprinted by Argonaut Publishers, Chicago 1966). 38. “New conventions, such as word separation, features of layout and punctuation, were developed to make it easier for readers to extract the information conveyed in the written medium.” Parkes, op. cit., p. 1. In the story of the tribe I set up two different problems to be solved: in the case of separating words, the problem was ease of comprehension, in the case of punctuating sentences the problem was resolving ambiguity. I do not mean that sentence punctuation solves only ambiguities. Our overall understanding may be improved by organizing the text into relatively brief and distinct units whose boundaries can be discerned in a glance.

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39. “Such aids to the reader as are offered are intended to help him to understand correctly, and to do so by breaking up sentence structures at the place; they are in fact, separators.” (Turner, op. cit., p. 9.) 40. ibid., p. 10-11. 41. See Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude 1872-1921, (The Free Press, 1996), p. 170, 4th line from the end for a case where the compositor has surely made a mistake and omitted the relevant punctuation. Of course, this reference is likely to vanish on future printings. 42. See Lyons, op. cit., p. 171 on the definition of a clause. 43. “In pre-modern times, all genres of texts, including poetry, were customarily written from top to bottom… in long strips of unbroken, equidistantly spaced characters, with no indication of word breaks or punctuation. Punctuation became common in the 20th century, although it remains unstandardized and not fully utilized.” “Modern Chinese Writing”, Victor H. Mair, p. 201, in The World’s Writing Systems, ed. Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1996). I have not found any work that thoroughly considered the introduction of punctuation in Asian written languages as the Parkes’ work did for the west. A Vietnamese student of mine told me that there has always been some punctuation in Vietnamese but that was to be expected as it was the west that introduced written Vietnamese. My wife’s Japanese students have told me about the complexities of punctuation in the various Japanese writing systems. But as I said I have not managed to find any work that brings all of the Asian languages into the discussion. 44. Crystal, Encyclopedia, op. cit., p. 94. 45. See the reference in Edwin R. Steinberg, The Stream of Consciousness and Beyond in Ulysses, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), p. 112. 46. ibid., pp. 112-113. 47. No matter whether there are two or eight, no one should hold the mad view that Joyce used those sentences. They were clearly constructed. 48. W.S. Merwin, The Folding Cliffs, (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 3. 49. Crystal, Encyclopedia, op. cit., p. 94. 50. Philosophers are drawn to the idea that sentences are theoretically important entities because of materialist leanings and the idea that sentences can be thought of as tools in the accomplishment of communication purposes. That is not at all what makes sentences attractive as theoretical entities in linguistics: the centrality of sentences there is not a result of materialist longings but of long-standing disciplinary conceptions. 51. N.E. Collinge, An Encyclopedia of Language, (Routledge, 1990), p. 88. 52. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, ed., G.H. von Wright, R. Rhees, and G.E.M. Anscombe, (Blackwell, 1965), p. 11 (Part I, 28) and p. 185 (Part V, 33). 53. “There is…the distinction between the speech of those whose language is highly influenced by long and constant immersion in written language forms, and the speech of those whose language is relatively uninfluenced by written forms of language…. In particular situations the speech of, say, an academic, particularly if he is saying something he has said or thought about before, may have a great deal in common with written language forms. For the majority of the population, even of a

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‘literate’ country, spoken language will have very much less in common with the written language.” Gillian Brown and George Yule, Discourse Analysis, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 14. 54. Crystal, Encyclopedia, ibid., p. 94. 55. Matthews, op. cit., p. 33. 56. Palmer, op. cit., p. 72. 57. Palmer, loc. cit. 58. There are several reasons why that conclusion cannot now be drawn definitively. I shall be discussing some of them soon. But one merits separate mention here. The conclusion I suggest is that since there are no boundary markers in spoken language, there are no sentences there either. But it is also true that in speech there are no boundary markers between words: there are no pauses in speech between words as there are spaces in modern written language between words (another result of empirical investigation using appropriate technology). Should one, then, analogously to the case of sentences, draw the conclusion that there are no words in speech either? I think not: words were not defined in terms of spaces. In the case of words, we are inclined to think that they pre-exist and it is merely shown, for convenience sake, where one leaves off and another begins by the device of spaces in writing. To say that, however, does not give an answer to the question of what it then is to characterize a linguistic form as a word. That is not part of my project here but is another issue straddling philosophy and linguistics. 59. Crystal, Encyclopedia, p. 94. 60. Palmer, op. cit., p. 72. 61. Crystal, “Neglected Grammatical Factors in Conversational English”, Studies in English Linguistics for Randolph Quirk, ed. S. Greenbaum, G. Leech & J. Svartvik, (Longman, 1980), p. 159. 62. ibid., p. 160. 63. ibid., pp. 165-166. 64. Compare Ian Hacking on treating sign language as a genuine language and not just as a country cousin of speech. “Signing”, London Review of Books, 5 April 1990, pp. 3-6. Are there, must there be, sentence indicators and thus sentences in Sign? 65. For some other versions of how to conceptualize patterns in speech, see, e.g., Brown and Yule, op. cit.; Gregory and Carroll, op. cit.; M.A.K. Halliday, Spoken and Written Language, (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 1989); Michael Stubbs, Discourse Analysis, (University of Chicago Press, 1983).

Chapter IV 1. Dummett, op. cit., p. 3; see also p. 34. 2. It is philosophically a much less interesting question as to whether two sentence occurrences are the same occurrence; cases of recording a spoken occurrence and, presumably replaying it, or of possibly cutting and pasting a written occurrence cause different problems of a more practical nature. 3. As evaluators of students’ philosophical, historical, etc., essays, we all come to feel that we are spending, or having to spend, too much of our evaluation time upon the language in which the thing is said, including its constituent sentences, and

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consequently not enough on what the game is about after all, namely the views and arguments produced by the student, what they are saying and why. 4. In less colorful language, I can borrow from Lakatos and say that philosophy is today dominated by research programs that put sentences in the hard-core. I have been arguing that that is wrong-headed and should be replaced by a research program that puts what is said in the hard-core. 5. Although proponents of truth-conditional semantics speak boldly of “Each sentence” of a language having its meaning spelled out by a T sentence, the reality, of course, is that the theory is about the meaning of, approximately, declarative sentences only. Transforming truth-conditional semantics as I am proposing into a theory about the meaning of statements sets its boundaries less promiscuously. 6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, op. cit., #10. 7. If one does not think we talk about the meaning of sayings (and more broadly of things said) consider the following. Irving Copi in his Introduction to Logic (MacMillan, 1986, 7th edition) has an exercise (pp. 381-382) in which he gives a symbolic vocabulary and then some formulae and asks the student to determine which saying is rendered in the symbolism. Problem 10 is the formula (x) [Px-(y)(Qxy--Oxy)], where Px = is a person, Qxy = x keeps company with y and Oxy = x is judged by y. Clearly the intended saying is “A person is judged by the company he keeps”. Given the formula, Copi does not understand the saying, does not know what it means. He thinks that it means “If I keep company with you, you will judge me”. It does not mean that. 8. G.P. Baker and P.M.S. Hacker, Frege: Logical Excavations (Basil Blackwell, 1984), passim. 9. Dummett, op. cit., p. 2. 10. ibid., p. 4. 11. ibid., p. 3. 12. Baker and Hacker, op. cit., p. 200ff. 13. Michael Dummett, “Nominalism” in Truth and Other Enigmas (Duckworth, 1978), p. 38. 14. Michael Dummett, Origins of Analytic Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1993, p. 5. 15. Quoted by Dummett, Frege, op. cit., p. 3. 16. loc. cit. 17. ibid., p. 4. 18. Baker and Hacker, op. cit., pp. 193-230. 19. One can find a much longer account of shortcomings with the compositionality principle in Baker and Hacker, Meaning and Understanding: Essays on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (University of Chicago Press, 1980), especially pp. 155-157. Baker and Hacker oddly enough do not properly distinguish the contextual and compositionality principles: hence the criticisms I refer to they tend to think of as problems of contextualism.

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Chapter V 1. Gottlob Frege, “Thoughts”, in G. Frege, Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy (Basil Blackwell, 1984), ed. B McGuinness, trans. P. Geach and R.H. Stoothoff, pp. 351-372; reprinted in Propositions and Attitudes, ed. N. Salmon and S. Soames (Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 36. 2. The last philosopher I know to do so was D.J. O’Connor, The Correspondence Theory of Truth (Hutchinson & Co, London, 1975), p. 58. 3. There is now a collection of essays on the topic from a variety of perspectives though not including the one here: Moore’s Paradox: New Essays on Belief, Rationality and The First Person, editors Mitchell S. Green and John N. Williams (Oxford University Press, 2007). 4. Stephen Stich, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief (MIT Press, 1983); Radu Bogdan, ed., Belief: Form, Content, Function (Oxford University Press, 1986) [examine especially the literature review on pp. 1316]; Lynne Rudder Baker, Saving Belief: A Critique of Physicalism (Princeton University Press, 1987) [given her aims here, it may not have been relevant for Baker to have discussed Moore’s Paradox] and Explaining Attitudes (Cambridge University Press, 1995); Salmon and Soames, op. cit.; William Lycan, Judgment and Justification (Cambridge University Press, 1988); Mark Crimmins, Talk About Beliefs (MIT Press, 1992). There is an entry on Moore’s Paradox in A Companion to Epistemology, ed. Jonathan Dancy and Ernest Sosa (Blackwell, 1994): Wittgenstein, however, is not mentioned [see note 5 below]. 5. Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford University Press, 1950), pp. 66-67. See also Ludwig Wittgenstein, Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore, ed. G.H. von Wright (Cornell University Press, 1974), letter M432, p. 177. 6. Roy Sorensen begins Blindspots (Oxford University Press, 1988) by citing Malcolm’s report that Wittgenstein took Moore’s only impressive work to be the discovery of the paradoxical belief sentences. About that Sorensen says “This book might be considered an anti-Wittgensteinian study of this kind of ‘nonsense’”. (p. 1) That claim is most curious. At no point in the text does Sorensen discuss Wittgenstein’s examination of Moore’s Paradox in Part II of the Philosophical Investigations. Nor is there an inquiry in the book into Wittgenstein’s views about belief even if unattributed. Further there is not a reference to the Investigations in Sorensen’s extensive bibliography. It is hard to conceive how the book could be an anti-Wittgensteinian study of the paradox when there is no evidence that Sorensen knew what Wittgenstein’s views were. Perhaps he meant by calling his work “antiWittgensteinian” only that he was objecting to Wittgenstein’s claim that the paradox is important: though if he does not know the reasons Wittgenstein, in the Investigations, held it to be important, it is not obvious why a fat book should be written with that aim. Sorensen is also the author of the entry on Moore’s Paradox in Dancy and Sosa’s A Companion to Epistemology (op. cit.). Wittgenstein is not mentioned there either. 7. For previous discussions describing and extending Wittgenstein’s views about Moore’s Paradox (discussions which significantly overlap but are not co-extensive with the present account), see Merrill Ring and Kent Linville, ‘Moore’s Paradox:

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Assertion and Implication’, Behaviorism, Vol. 1 (1973); Kent Linville and Merrill Ring, ‘Moore’s Paradox Revisited’, Synthese 87 (1991), reprinted in Wittgenstein in Florida, ed. Jaakko Hintikka (D. Reidel, 1991). 8. G.E. Moore, ‘A Reply to My Critics’, The Philosophy of G.E. Moore, ed. P.A. Schilpp (The Library of Living Philosophers, 1942), pp. 542-543. 9. Wittgenstein said that solipsism results from holding that “I believe that p” is about the speaker and that all statements “p” can be prefaced with “I believe”–see Philosophical Investigations #24. Another related way of producing solipsism is by taking the solution to Moore’s Paradox to be that since the “I believe” clause is about me so too must be the “p” clause. I’m writing that solution off without further comment, though it might have some appeal to some postmodernists. 10. G.E. Moore, op. cit., p. 543.11. None of this entails that belief is not a state. What has been denied is that “believes” refers to or picks out some state of a person. “Depressed” (as in “He has been depressed this week”) and “sore throat” (as in “I have a sore throat today”) do name, stand for, states of mind and body: “belief” does not. While belief is a mental state, it is not a state of mind. No report on the condition of a psychiatric patient’s state of mind would mention the person’s beliefs unless they were delusional (“He thinks his head a pumpkin”). For an extended discussion of this, see P.H. Hacker, “Davidson on the Ontology and Logical Form of Belief”, Philosophy, 73 (1998), pp. 81-96. However, it is a metaphysical truism that beliefs are states. For “state” is what Wittgenstein in the Tractatus called a formal concept or, in the terminology of the Investigations, “S is a state” is a grammatical remark. The predicate “is a state” contrasts with “is an event”, “is an object”, “is a color”, “is a number”, etc. To note that belief is a state is to note something about the grammar of belief, namely that it makes sense to ask “How long have you believed that?” and does not make sense to ask, e.g., “When did the belief happen?” In that respect beliefs do not differ from rashes and despair: they, so far, have the same grammar. But “rash” and “depression” are also names of conditions of persons-to say “I have a sore throat” or “I am depressed” is to offer a report about oneself, to call attention to some phenomenon; however, given all the argumentation above, “belief” is not a term which designates, picks out, some condition of a person whose existence can then be reported by saying “I believe that...”. To think, as philosophers typically do, that we can infer from belief being a state to belief being a phenomenon which occurs in our lives is to “predicate of the thing what lies in the method of representation.” (Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations, op. cit., #104.) 12. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, op. cit., #304. 13. This claim is not to contradict Searle, Geach, Frege: “good” does not evaluate in “I wonder if it is good.” But it doesn’t follow from that and similar uses of the word “good” that the central characteristic of the use of the word “good” derives from the primacy of calling something good, i.e. saying “That is good”. There we are offering a positive assessment. The denial that “good” is a property word has largely been lost from current accounts of these matters–see, for instance, Alexander Miller, An Introduction to Contemporary Metaethics, Polity Press, 2003. 14. See Merrill Ring, ‘Knowledge: The Cessation of Belief’, American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol 14, 1977.

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15. Ryle had said that a gardener who expects rain “leaves the watering can in the toolshed, keeps his coat handy, beds out more seedlings and so on”. (Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, Barnes & Noble, 1949, p. 175.) Geach objects that Ryle is not entitled to identify those actions as rain-expecting behavior “unless we take for granted, or are somehow specially informed about, the needs and wants of the agent. In Ryle’s example this information is smuggled in by his speaking of a gardeners’ rain-expecting behavior (and tacitly assuming that the gardener is not e.g. a discontented or corrupt servant who wants the garden to be ruined). When Dr Johnson did penance in Utoxeter market-place, he may have begun by standing around bareheaded until the threatened shower should fall; this would not be recognizable as rain-expecting behavior without a knowledge of Johnson’s wish to do penance.” (Peter Geach, Mental Acts, Routledge & Paul, 1957, p. 8).

Chapter VI 1. Letter from Russell to Frege, reprinted in N. Salmon and S. Soames eds, Propositions and Attitudes (Oxford Readings in Philosophy, Oxford University Press: 1989), p. 56-57. 2. Dummett calls Frege’s Third Realm “philosophical mythology”. (Michael Dummett, “Frege’s Myth of the Third Realm”, Frege and the Philosophers, (Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 249.) But thinking of it as mythology is misguided: asserting the existence of propositions is not like what, say, Hesiod was doing in his kind of account of the history of the universe, not the sort of thing Joseph Campbell would have any interest in. Rather it is most similar to what Wittgenstein called “grammatical illusions”, to Kantian transcendental illusions, even to Rylean category mistakes. Baker and Hacker also talk of mythology in this connection: see G. P. Baker and P.M.S. Hacker, Frege: Logical Excavations (Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 358-359. 3. J. L. Austin, ‘Truth’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume XXIV 1950; reprinted in J.L. Austin, Philosophical Papers (Clarendon Paperbacks, Oxford University Press, 3rd ed. 1990), pp. 118. 4. Ramsey’s Maxim: “it is a heuristic maxim that the truth lies not in one of two disputed views but in some third possibility, which has not yet been thought of, which we can only discover by rejecting something assumed as obvious by both disputants.” Frank P. Ramsey, The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays (Routledge, 1954), pp. 115-116. 5. Matthew. McGrath, “Propositions”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2011), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/entries/propositions/ (The reference to Lewis is to David K. Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Blackwell: 1986), p. 54.) 6. William and Mary Kneale, The Development of Logic, (Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 177-178. 7. ibid., p. 178. 8. See G.P. Baker and P.M.S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Meaning and Understanding: Essays on the Philosophical Investigations Vol 1 (Blackwell1983), pp. 36 and 48 especially. Also Hans-Johann Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Blackwell, 1996),

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pp. 45-50. For an account of the Kantian background to that autonomy see Hubert Schwyzer, The Unity of Understanding: A Study in Kantian Problems (Oxford, 1990): “Human understanding is essentially something autonomous, not something that is a response to, or that conforms to, something else…. Understanding… is from first to last ‘spontaneous’.” (p. 2). 9. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, op. cit., #373. 10. W. v. Quine, “On What There Is”, From A Logical Point of View (Harvard University Press, 1953), pp. 7-8. 11. L. Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (Blackwell, 1958), p. 1. 12. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, op. cit., #104. 13. Raymond Bradley and Norman Swartz, Possible Worlds: An Introduction to Logic and Philosophy (Hackett, 1979). 14. ibid., p. 85. 15. ibid., p. 70. 16. ibid., p. 69. 17. Alan White, Truth, op. cit. p. 12. 18. Sadly the source for this, somewhere in Russell’s late talks or papers, has disappeared from my files. 19. Frege, ‘The Thought: A Logical Inquiry’, translated A.M. and M. Quinton, Mind (Vol. LXV, No. 259, July 1956), p. 292. 20. Bertrand Russell, “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism”, The Monist 1918, reprinted in Russell, Logic and Knowledge, ed. R.C. Marsh (Unwin Hyman, 1956), p. 227. 21. Zeno Vendler, Res Cogitans: An Essay in Rational Psychology (Cornell University Press, 1972), p. 11 and passim. 22. Peter Hylton, Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford University Press, USA, 1993), see for instance pp. 109 and 137. 23. An echo of the idea that “propositional attitudes” are private mental states that relate a person to an independently existing entity, i.e. a proposition, is found in the thesis that belief is a relation. In epistemic logic “S believes that p” is symbolized as “Bsp”. But belief cannot be a relation. Of any given relation one can wonder whether it is symmetrical–if Rab, does it follow that Rba?–or transitive–if Rab and Rbc, does it follow that Rac? But those questions make no sense if asked of belief. There is no such possibility as that symbolized by “Bpa” (e.g. p believes Albert), i.e. no question as to whether belief is a symmetrical relation. So too for transitivity. Thus, it is senseless, not false, that belief is symmetrical or transitive. Hence it is not a relation. It is not just the picture that belief is a Cartesian state reaching out across quasispace to seize upon a relevant entity that produces the idea that belief is a relation. The requirements of Logic also play a role. Given the idea that Logic as we have it can represent all claims that have a truth-value and given that “So-and-so believes that p” has a truth-value, then it must be representable in logical symbolism. It appears to be a singular statement but it can’t be represented as ‘Ba’ for then it would not be distinguishable from “So-and-so believes that not-p”. The only remaining possibility is setting it out as a two-place relation. And that consorts perfectly with the realist metaphysical thesis-but not with the truth. However, given my arguments earlier about belief “I believe that p” must be represented differently from “He

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believes that p”. The best device for doing that would be to represent the first person present as a more faint “p”– that is not, however, a means of representation found in Logic. How far any of these considerations apply to the other propositional attitudes will not be investigated here. 24. See Tyler Burge, Truth, Thought, Reason: Essays on Frege (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 306; Burge supplies several references to Frege’s use of the analogy. 25. Even the new materialism, the turn to the brain, cannot shake Cartesianism: John Dupre has called recent philosophy of mind “neuro-Cartesianism” in The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 106–while the spirit has become flesh, the remainder of Descartes’ thinking about the mind has become the framework for current thinking about the brain. 26. I.G. McFetridge, “Propositions and Davidson’s Account of Indirect Discourse”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol 76, pp. 131-145; reprinted in I.G. McFetridge, Logical Necessity and Other Essays, edited John Haldane and Roger Scruton, (The Aristotelian Society, 1990). 27. ibid., p. 131. 28. loc. cit. 29. McFetridge, op. cit., pp. 133, 132, 138. 30. Donald Davidson, “On Saying That”, Synthese 19 (1968-69). 31. “In fact, for two of the more extensively analysed ones, Standard Mandarin (pǎtǀnghuà) and Cantonese, it has generally been held that there are no subordinating conjunctions similar to that in English, que in French, or ti in Shona which serve to introduce indirect speech or an embedded clause.” Hilary Chappell, “Variation in the grammaticalization of complementizers from verba dicendi in Sinitic languages”, Linguistic Typology 12.1: 45-98 (2008). 32. For a recent criticism of Davidson on this matter, see Michael Alan Johnson, “Indirect Discourse: Parataxis, the Propositional Function Modification, and ‘That’”, Aporia vol. 19 no. 1, 2009. By tracing backward through the bibliography in Johnson one can track down much of the criticism of Davidson’s position. 33. Russell, “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism”, op. cit., p. 227. 34. Alan White, Truth, op. cit. p. 1. 35. Propositional verbs are transitive: that is, they require what grammarians/linguists call ‘a direct object’. Philosophers, with their ontological noses aquiver, construe the grammarian’s phrase ‘direct object’ to be a requirement that there exist an entity named or otherwise referred to by the relevant phrase. The often made response is an exemplification of Wittgenstein’s remark “A whole cloud of philosophy condensed into a drop of grammar.” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, op. cit., p 222.) A direct object is but a word (or set of words) that are required for the sake of meaningfulness. To require a direct object is not to require an object other than words–the idea that matters are otherwise has the odor of the ontological argument about it. “John fears” is incomplete without a direct object, say ‘Divine Wrath’. That claim may well be true even if there is no divinity or wrath thereof.

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Chapter VII 1. The classic essay is John McPhee, “Atchafalaya” in The Control of Nature (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux) 1989, pp. 3-94. 2. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, op. cit., #293. 3. I have not considered issues arising from problems in determining what is said on a given occasion of speaking. A most instructive examination of those issues is that of Charles Travis in “On What is Strictly Speaking True”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Vol 15, #2 (June) 1985, pp. 187-229. The matters discussed there are important because there are two conflicting philosophical views: that of Grice and his opponents (Travis wrote in opposition to Grice). Grice thinks that what is said on an occasion, and consequently what is true or false in that circumstance, is fixed by the meaning of the words. All else, including reference and time, falls outside what is said and is only “implicated” in conversation. The other view is that what is said may well vary for reasons other than reference and time from speaking to speaking of the same words; what Grice makes into circumstances are in fact determiners of what is said. 4. American teenagers who report conversations as “He went… I went” are replacing “said” with a slang use of “went’” Our being struck by them using “went” should remind us how often “say” is used 5. For a recent bumping together of such fundamentally opposed deep disagreements, see the review by Colin McGinn of John Searle’s Making the Social World (in The New York Review of Books, November 11, 2010) and the letters by Searle and McGinn in the February 24, 2011 issue. Searle says that a large range of human institutions cannot be understood without “linguistic representation”, i.e. that people could not have those institutions without language (roughly my position about truthbearers); McGinn denies that and holds that it is sufficient to “think in concepts” (roughly that, e.g., “discovering that” is a natural state not requiring a location in language and discourse). 6. The starting place for similar investigations into concepts and their connection with discourse is, of course, Wittgenstein. His entire discussion of the possibility of private language about pains and sensations is the paradigm of such investigations. I have borrowed hugely from his discussion of belief in Section x of Part II of the Philosophical Investigations. Attention should also be called to section i of Part II: “Can only those hope who can talk? Only those who have mastered the use of a language.” 7. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book IV (Gamma), 2. 8. Peter Geach, “Ascriptivism”, Philosophical Review, 1960, v. 69, pp 221-225 and “Assertion”, Philosophical Review, 1965, v. 74, pp. 449-465. John Searle, Speech Acts (Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 136 – 141. 9. Before responding to the question, I must point out that a parallel difficulty would appear if one holds, as so many do, that it is sentences that are true or false. There is only one sentence there, namely the entire ‘if-then’: in ‘If Messi is injured’ there is no sentence whatsoever. One can imagine a sentence ‘Messi is injured.’ occurring in some other context, but that sentence does not occur in the specimen hypothetical. 10. An adherent of the correspondence theory of truth might call attention to the fact

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that it is the world, reality, that makes things true or false and how the world is (at least in many features) is not created by human discourse practices. Even accepting the philosophically orthodox but nonetheless strange expression “makes things true”, the objection quickly fails. For the entire aim of the correspondence theory is to point out the relationship between facts, taken to be pieces of the furniture of reality, and something else that is true or false, say statements, etc. Hence, the correspondence theory, if correct, is on my side of the issue: it distinguishes the world from our talk and thought of it and puts the notion of truth on the human side of the correspondence. 11. The philosophical realist will say that in holding that what is true or false is paradigmatically what some person says, I am siding with William James’ “The trail of the serpent is over everything”. That “everything” is far too strong for what has been argued here. All that has been in question is whether truth-bearers are entities independent of human talk and thought. In this case, James was right: truth-bearers are within the trail of the serpent. 12. To say that basic truth language comes into operation only when we are commenting on what has been said does not conflict with the “normativity of assertion”, the realization that speakers (normally) aim at the truth when making claims. This is far too simple, but speakers and more generally those who seek the truth are aiming at the approbation of having it said of what they say or discover “That’s true”. (That is not a psychological thesis.) However, the issue of truth as an ideal is not under consideration here: it belongs to investigation into the nature of truth–the extended discussion in this work is a preliminary to that. 13. Williams, op. cit., p. 32. 14. ibid., p. 46. 15. ibid., p. 1. 16. loc. cit. 17. loc. cit. 18. ibid., p. 42, 43, 44. 19. Notice that Williams, perhaps Geach too, seems to think that when the term “proposition” is cleansed of a transcendent reference it refers to a “linguistic entity”. He (they?) do not distinguish between elements of a language (sentences) and pieces of discourse (statements, what she claimed, etc.) That distinction is crucial to what is being argued here. 20. Williams, op. cit., pp. 32-42. 21. Williams, op. cit., p. xi. 22. loc. cit. 23. Williams, op. cit., p. 35. 24. Williams, op. cit., p. xv. 25. So far as I can tell from a casual survey, logic books continue to treat definite descriptions in Russell’s manner, as incomplete symbols, as logically quantifiers. That despite Keith Donnellan’s recognition that some are (attributive cases) and some aren’t (referential cases) (Keith Donnellan, ”Reference and Definite Descriptions”, Philosophical Review (77) 1966, pp. 281-304)–and, despite what I take to be the wide-spread recognition, deriving from Wittgenstein, that Russell’s analysis was based on the misguided idea that the meaning of a term is what it stands

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for. The representation in logic of ‘The present King of France is bald’ should be ‘Ba’. 26. The word “redundancy” is itself wrong. Such theories take it that “is true” is redundant in “The cat is on the mat is true” as if that claim has standing but simply contains extra and unneeded baggage. As I held in Chapter 1, it is nonsense to stick the predicate on in that location. There are places where “is true” really is redundant; it cannot be added to ‘What she knows/has shown/established/proved’ without redundancy–for being true is a necessary condition of the applicability of the terms “knows”, “proved”, etc. and so is built into the meaning of those terms. Redundancy theories also hold that in “It is true that Peter is snoring”, the reference to truth is (again) redundant, that it adds nothing to “Peter is snoring.” That is true though only with a limitation placed on it. For the very specialized purposes of logic, no extra symbol is needed to represent “It is true that”–we can do our logical business simply with Sa or p depending upon which calculus we are engaged in. However, if our aim is to understand how truth language functions, “It is true that” plays a distinctive role in our discourse and is not redundant baggage (is not, as Williams holds, “merely stylistic or rhetorical”: Williams, op. cit. p. 46). 27. Williams, op. cit., p. 32. 28. Dummett says “Chess moves are objects by Frege’s criteria, for they can be named and have predicates applied to them. There is nothing wrong with Frege’s criteria, nor with the principle of classifying things as objects, properties or concepts, relations, and functions of various types.” (“Frege’s Myth of the Third Realm”, op. cit., p. 249.) That one can name a chess move–Ruy Lopez say-is connected to the fundamental grammatical feature of objects, namely that we can speak of “a suchand-such” (“Ruy Lopez is the name of a move in chess”). But it doesn’t follow from the fact that chess moves are nameable that a chess move is an object. Adding that we can have predicates applied to them–“Ruy Lopez was first used in …”–doesn’t succeed in creating an entity. So, there is something wrong with Frege’s criteria–not individually but taken as jointly sufficient to delineate the category of objecthood. 29. W.V. O. Quine, Word and Object (The MIT Press, 1964), p. 236. 30. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, op. cit., #1. 31. Williams, op. cit., pp. 35, 40, 54, 55. 32. Here John Wisdom must be remembered: “It is the style not the stuff that stupefies”: “Philosophical Perplexity”, reprinted in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, (Blackwell, 1964), p. 38. 33. Herman Cappelen, Philosophy Without Intuitions (Oxford University Press, 2012), p.38. 34. Frank Jackson, “On Gettier Holdouts”, Mind and Language 26: 468-481, p. 473. 35. It seems that D.Z. Phillips considered God to be not a something but not a nothing either: “God”, for Phillips, is an apparent object-designator while actually not a denoting term at all, though philosophers (and in this case many ordinary people) have a penchant for misrepresenting the kind of being God has and so try to prove or disprove his or her existence. This reference is not intended to be an endorsement of Phillips’ view: it is simply a reminder that it is a possible philosophical thesis that God is a thing that is not an object. 36. W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object, p. 244.