Project Team
Principal Investigator: Mieszko Tałasiewicz
Students: Filip Kolasa, Bartosz Młotkowski
Project Overview
The project addresses the problem of how to account for the fact that propositions, understood as representational structures, have truth-conditions and serve as the contents of propositional attitudes conceived as mental states.
Contemporary philosophical responses to this problem fall into two dominant camps. The first holds that propositions are forceless: they can be entertained without any commitment-laden stance and are derivative of the more primitive notion of predication. This position faces two main challenges. First, it is unlikely to offer a satisfactory account of predication if predication itself is not grounded in a more primitive notion of propositionality. Second, if propositions are bearers of truth or falsity, they must involve some form of commitment to how things are.
The second camp claims that propositions are unified by assertoric force. While this explains their capacity to bear truth-values, it struggles to account for propositional contexts in which no assertion is made, such as embedded propositions or fictional discourse. Attempts to address this difficulty appeal to doxastic decoupling, according to which assertoric force is cancelled in such contexts.
The present proposal develops a third kind of theory, inspired by an analytical tradition stemming from Husserl’s Logical Investigations. This project aims to advance this tradition by arguing that propositions are neither forceless nor assertive, but instead involve a primitive, sui generis propositional force.