I’ve been thinking a bit about sententialism, which is the view that the relata in attitude reports are people and sentences. I’ve found recent paper by John Collins and James Higginbotham that defend the view:
- Collins, John. 2003. “Expressions, Sentences, Propositions.” Erkenntnis 59 (2): 233–262.
- Higginbotham, James T. 2006. “Sententialism: the Thesis That Complement Clauses Refer to Themselves.” Philosophical Issues 16: 101–119.
I’ve also found some things to read about a related approach, sometimes called the interpreted logical form theory:
- Clapp, Lenny. 2002. “Davidson’s Program and Interpreted Logical Forms.” Linguistics and Philosophy 25 (3): 261–297.
- Dusche, M. 1995. “Interpreted Logical Forms as Objects of the Attitudes.” Journal of Logic, Language and Information 4 (4): 301–315.
- Edwards, Jim. 1999. “Interpreted Logical Forms and Knowing Your Own Mind.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99: 169–190.
- Fiengo, Robert, and Robert May. 1996. “Interpreted Logical Forms: a Critique.” Rivista Di Linguistica 8 (2): 349–373.
- Harman, Gilbert H. 1972. “Logical Form.” Foundations of Language 9 (1): 38–65.
- Higginbotham, James T. 1991. “Belief and Logical Form.” Mind & Language 6 (4): 344–369.
- Larson, Richard K, and Peter Ludlow. 1993. “Interpreted Logical Forms.” Synthese 95 (3): 305–355.
- Ludlow, Peter. 2000. “Interpreted Logical Forms, Belief Attribution, and the Dynamic Lexicon.” In The Pragmatics of Propositional Attitude Reports, K. M. Jaszczolt ed. Oxford: Elsevier Science.
What am I missing?
EDIT: As Daniel Harris pointed out in his comment below, I should have Church’s criticism of Carnap’s early sententialism:
- Church, Alonzo. 1950. “On Carnap’s Analysis of Statements of Assertion and Belief.” Analysis 10 (5): 97–99.
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Depending on how you define the view, Carnap is a sententialist in Meaning and Necessity and Quine sounds a lot like a sententialist in some places (though he rejects it in Word and Object starting on around p.213).
For some serious arguments against sententialism, you should look at Church’s translation argument, which is here:
http://philpapers.org/rec/CHUOCA
(This paper is crazily influential. Nathan Salmon never stops talking about it for example.)
Also check out Schiffer’s 1987 book, Remnants of Meaning, for a fairly comprehensive attack on sententialism. (Also a killer book in lots of other ways.)
Thanks. I remember seeing a reference to a paper of Salmon’s on the translation argument. I’ll have a look.