1. I will talk about talk of propositions in the next section. A complete theory of
expression-meaning would have to talk about sub-sentential expressions too and should
say something about the role of literal meaning in non-literal usage. I will briefly
mention these issues later in this chapter.
2. Metaphysical necessity is meant here.
3. So, the notion of a population using* a language* is also a technical
notion and not any ordinary notion.
4. The example is from Horwich (1990), p. 89. The line of reasoning that I am
suggesting here is discussed there as well. See also Schiffer (1994b). And see Moore
(1953), chapters 3 and 14, for an early (1910-1911) and extremely lucid discussion of the
motivations for taking seriously propositions as objects. See also Frege (1918).
5. Perhaps Jerrold Katz has a view like this. Katz does seem to think, for example, that
the epistemology of abstract objects should be explained in non-naturalistic terms. See
Katz (1990), pp. 298-307. See also Katz (1981).
6. Fodor (1985), p. 12. The view of this quote, however, is not Fodor's, though he wrote
it. He was merely expressing a possible view.
7. See Lewis (1969) and Lewis (1975).
8. For example Robert Stalnaker; see Stalnaker (1972).
9. See Soames (1987).
10. See, for example, the paper by Mark Richard in Salmon and Soames (1988).
11. I couldn't say whether anybody has ever really thought this.
12. Again, I really don't know whether anybody has ever actually directly argued this
way. It's just a possible position.
13. See Schiffer (1990a) and Schiffer (1994b).
14. I am only going to consider here what Schiffer says in Schiffer (1994b), section V.
15. There is at least one other issue that Schiffer suggests motivates his conception, but
I am simplifying for now and just presenting some of what might make Schiffer's
conception attractive.
16. There are other aspects to Schiffer's account, but I don't see these as relevant here, so
I won't mention them.
17. The following example is my own. Schiffer gives no examples, but only speaks of
properties, propositions, events, and states.
18. I am not being tedious about the use of quotation-marks here. But things should be
clear enough.
19. But see Langendoen and Postal (1984) and Langendoen and Postal (1985) for the
rather esoteric view that natural languages have vastly more than countably many
sentences.
20. Perhaps, for example, Langendoen and Postal are right (see previous note).
21. Keep in mind that I am pretending that there are no indexicals and no non-indicatives
- I will discuss these below.
22. Notice that it doesn't matter how the factoring - as we might call it - of the
sentences goes. It could just as well have been said that English speakers speak three
languages, one that doesn't contain "Sinatra really swings" at all, then one that contains
only that sentence paired with the proposition that Sinatra really swings, and then one
that contains that sentence paired with the proposition that Paris is a cool city.
23. This definition captures the notion of ambiguity in a population perfectly, it
seems to me. If a sentence is three-ways ambiguous, this definition entails that it is
ambiguous. It should be clear how to come up with definitions for fancier notions, like
5-ways ambiguous in a population, etc.
24. Loar seems to inherit Lewis's method of dealing with ambiguity in Loar (1976) and
this just complicates his discussion there.
25. I will assume throughout that an account of characters can be given, but I doubt that
this is wholly unproblematic.
26. I will mention wh-questions in a note below, but for now I will stick with yes-no
questions.
27. This sort of proposal is due to David Lewis. See Lewis (1969) and Lewis (1975).
28. It should be clear that the propositions that are paired with the code words in
meanings on the present proposal could be replaced by characters to thereby provide a
fully general account of sentence meaning.
29. Nothing has been said so far, really, about wh-questions. There doesn't seem to be
a propositional content to wh-questions so it is hard to see how these can be
accommodated by the present strategy. I tend to think that this is, in part at least,
motivation for looking at questions as a species of command. Then, the question "who
was at the party?" can be taken as the command "Tell me which people were at the
party". I don't believe that this is unproblematic, but I cannot discuss this further here.
30. I haven't mentioned anything at all about other sorts of speech-act notions which a full
theory should treat. See chapter 4 of Schiffer (1972) for a discussion of such notions.
31. I guess with angels things might be different, though.
32. I understand that such talk of belief-boxes, et. al., is an innovation of
Schiffer's from a few years ago.
33. When I speak of an M-sentence being tokened in the belief-box, I will always mean
an unembedded tokening. An M-sentence s can occur as part of
another M-sentence, say s'. Then if s' is tokened in the
belief-box, so is s, but this does not mean that what s means
is believed. s could mean, for example, that snow is highly nourishing, and
s' could mean that Steve believes that snow is highly nourishing. Nell may have
s' tokened in her belief-box without believing that snow is highly nourishing.
34. I say "roughly" in this sentence because I am not sure about my use of "would" here,
especially with respect to very large M-sentences.
35. You also need to have a principle that says that disjunctions of physical properties are
also physical properties and you need not to be queasy at the sight of possibly indefinitely
large disjunctions of properties. I don't see any problem with either of these.
36. And the property of having a sentence in the desire-box can be identified with an
analogously understood physical property
D, etc.
37. I thank Ching-Ching Lin for help with this point.