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    Carmelics

    A reasoning platform. Break down any belief into clear reasons, explore both sides, and weigh the evidence honestly.

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that A semantic theory that limits its ontology to sentence types cannot provide a true analysis of propositional attitude sentences such as 'Seneca believed that man is a rational animal'.

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    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.If a semantic theory is restricted to sentence types rather than propositions, it lacks the resources to correctly capture the meaning of propositional attitude reports.
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    • 2.Church's translation argument (CTA) shows that any such restriction leads to semantic failures in the analysis of propositional attitude sentences.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Sentence types are individuated by syntactic and phonological properties, not by the cognitive content they express across languages or contexts.
      ?

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    • 2.Frege's puzzle shows that 'Hesperus is Hesperus' and 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' differ in cognitive significance despite sharing truth conditions, a difference sentence types cannot capture.
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    • 3.Propositional attitude verbs like 'believes' are intensional operators requiring fine-grained objects of belief that sentence types, lacking intensional identity conditions, cannot supply.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Church's translation argument demonstrates that replacing a that-clause with a synonymous translation changes the sentence type while preserving the reported belief, proving sentence types are not the objects of belief.
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    • 2.If sentence types were the objects of belief, a monolingual Latin speaker like Seneca could not hold beliefs expressible only in Greek, yet clearly he could hold such beliefs under any adequate theory of mind.
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    Strongest counterpoint
    Explore the most compelling reason on the other side.