About Propositions

In Chapter 1 , Davidson considers some of the various roles that propositions are thought to play. He divides these into three roles: Linguistic, Alethic, and Propositional Attitude roles. He focuses on two linguistic roles that propositions are thought to play, as meanings of declarative sentences and referents of that-clauses. He argues that propositions should be thought of as meanings of sentence tokens and perhaps of sentence types. He considers various sorts of evidence that that-clauses refer to propositions and argues that the evidence is equivocal. He argues that the most important roles that propositions play are alethic roles: as entities that stand in entailment relations and are true or false and necessary or contingent. He concludes the chapter by advocating that we think that propositions are objects of belief even if we deny that they are the referents of that-clauses.