Propositions and attitudes

According to the popular, though rarely explicitly defended thesis of propositionalism, informational content is always truth conditional. In particular, the objects of mental attitudes need to be propositions – in some sense, which includes propositional concepts as well as perspectival (or subjective) content. In particular, propositionalists seek to reduce attitudes towards “intentional” objects in terms of propositional attitudes: someone who is looking for a unicorn strives for it to be the case that he or she finds a unicorn; someone who fears Superman is afraid that Superman might do something to him or her; someone who likes chocolate likes it when he or she consumes chocolate; etc.

In linguistic semantics, propositionalism comes in various guises, usually relating to intensionality. In its most straightforward form (aka sententialism), propositionalism treats all intensional constructions as clausal embeddings. Less ambitious varieties claim that intensionality can always be paraphrased in terms of propositional embedding, possibly in some more refined language. In this talk I will define and compare different forms of propositionalism and discuss various strategies of defending or rejecting them, thereby focussing on two particular aspects: the very notion of a proposition and the risk of trivializing propositionalism by type-shifting.