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Part of
Essays on Linguistic Realism
Edited by Christina Behme and Martin Neef
[Studies in Language Companion Series 196] 2018
► pp. 235–254

Chapter 9
Cognitive propositions in realist linguistics

| University of Southern California

The paper presents a cognitive conception of propositions as semantic contents of (some) declarative sentences. The conception expands solution spaces for previously intractable empirical problems in natural-language semantics and pragmatics, while also explaining how an agent who is unable to cognize propositions can know or believe them, and how sophisticated agents acquire the concept and believe things about them by monitoring their own cognitions. Finally, an account is given of what it is for a sentence to mean that p in a language that doesn’t require having thoughts about p or L. Nevertheless, semantics isn’t psychology; agents with different psychologies can speak semantically identical languages, while those with the same purely internal states (embedded in similar immediate environments) can speak different languages. Cognitive semantics can be realist and naturalistic without being a branch of psychology.

Keywords: semantics, hyperintensional, representational content, cognitive content, recognition of recurrence
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Propositions
    • 2.1Propositions in intensional semantics
    • 2.2Propositions as cognitive act types
    • 2.3Predication
    • 2.4Complex propositions
  • 3.Foundational and empirical advantages of cognitive propositions
    • 3.1Cognitively distinct but representationally identical propositions
    • 3.2Linguistic cognition
    • 3.3The Millian modes of perceiving and recognizing
  • 4.Cognitive propositions in a realist conception of linguistics
    • 4.1Semantic contents excluding Millian modes
    • 4.2Semantic content vs. individual psychologies
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.196.09soa
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Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Hodgson, Thomas
2021. Act‐type theories of propositions. Philosophy Compass 16:11 DOI logo
Soames, Scott
2022. Anti-descriptivism 2.0. Philosophical Studies 179:3 ► pp. 977 ff. DOI logo

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