Sentences with genuinely distinct truth conditions across contexts—e.g., 'The King of France is not bald' being true when there is no King versus false—cannot be unified under a single sense-general proposition without violating compositionality.

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Reasons For

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Reason for

1.Compositionality requires that a sentence's truth value depends only on constituent meanings plus structure, not on external existence facts.
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2.If 'The King of France is not bald' flips truth value based on whether the referent exists, the sentence expresses different propositions across contexts.
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3.A single sense-general proposition must preserve truth conditions; variable truth conditions indicate multiple distinct propositions are expressed.
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Reasons Against

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Reason against

1.Presupposition failure (non-reference) can be treated uniformly as truth-value gaps rather than variable truth conditions across contexts.
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2.Compositionality constrains how meanings combine, not how propositions vary contextually—context-sensitivity is orthogonal to compositional structure.
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3.Dynamic semantics can assign the same propositional content different truth values by updating context without violating compositional principles.
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Key Terms

Bald(as used in logic and philosophy of language): In this example, just a simple property (lacking hair) used to illustrate a logical puzzle—not meant to be about baldness itself.
King of France(as used in logic and philosophy of language): A famous example used by philosopher Bertrand Russell to talk about statements that refer to things that don't actually exist; France hasn't had a king in modern times, so this creates puzzles about how to understand sentences about the King of France.
Truth conditions(used to describe how we determine whether a thought accurately represents reality): The specific circumstances or facts that would make a statement true or false—what has to be the case for a thought to be correct.
compositionality(Philosophy of language; the passage treats idioms as candidate counterexamples because their meanings appear not to be so constructed): The property of natural language whereby the meaning of a complex expression is built from the meanings of its constituting parts
context(Used in the Kaplanian framework to distinguish the circumstance of utterance from the content expressed): A situation of utterance that supplies parameters (such as the speaker) used to determine the content of context-sensitive expressions.
proposition(Used in the context of a semantic theory sensitive to differences in subject matter.): The content expressed by a sentence, individuated at least in part by the subject matter of the sentence and the contents of its subsentential expressions.
sense(Fregean semantics): The mode of presentation by which a name presents its referent; the component of meaning that can differ between two co-referential names

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Philosophy of Language1 linked

A single sense-general proposition must preserve truth conditions; variable trut...Compositionality constrains how meanings combine, not how propositions vary cont...Compositionality requires that a sentence's truth value depends only on constitu...Dynamic semantics can assign the same propositional content different truth valu...

Details

Type: claim
Perspectives: 2 (1 for, 1 against)
Edits: 1 edit