New Essays on the Nature of Propositions

David Hunter is Associate Professor at Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada. He works on issues at the intersection of belief and action, and is the Editorial Board Coordinator of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy. Gurpreet Rattan is Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, Canada. His primary interests are in the philosophy of language, mind, and epistemology. His current project attempts to articulate unified accounts of truth, disagreement, and relativism, accounts organized around the semantics and epistemology of the metarepresentation involved in critical reflective thinking and disagreement. His longer term project is on the comparative metaphysics and epistemology of propositions and numbers.

1. Introduction Part I: On Act- and Language-Based Conceptions of Propositions 2. Two aspects of propositional unity 3. An empirically-informed cognitive theory of propositions 4. What are the primary bearers of truth? 5. Not the optimistic type 6. Why it isn’t syntax that unifies the proposition 7. Why we should not identify sentence structure with propositional structure Part II: Constituents and Constituency 8. Individuating Fregean sense 9. The metaphysics of propositional constituency Part III: Theoretical Alternatives to Propositions 10. Propositions, attitudinal objects, and the distinction between actions and products 11. What are Propositions? 12. Conversational implicature, communicative intentions, and content 13. Propositions and higher-order attitude attributions Part IV: Modal Metaphysics 14. Unnecessary existents 15. Contingently existing propositions