School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemTruth-theories : content and structure( 1981)A meaning-theory for a language, L, ought to be able to function as a description of what is sufficient to understand L, it could then be called a theory of interpretation.) As such it must be capable of generating, for each complete linguistic act licensed by L, a re-description of the act as an item of behaviour that is intelligible to the speaker. Because it is the sentence that is usable to perform complete linguistic acts the meaning-theory ought somehow "state the meanings" of the sentences of L, that is it must be able to effect a re-description of behaviour - initially described in terms of the utterance by some speaker, U, of some sentence, s, in some node f (assertive, imperative, or whatever) - in terms of U f-ing that p, where P gives the content of s. But a theorist will only be justified in constructing a theory which makes such re-descriptions of linguistic behaviour if the behaviour as described in the output of that theory is intelligible in the lights of propositional attitudes that can plausibly be attributed to speakers of L (as indeed any behaviour can only be made sense of against the background of beliefs, desires, etc. of the subject of that behaviour). Thus the behaviour described as a f-ing that P by U is made intelligible if that content, P, can be ascribed to U as the content of some propositional attitude fitting to his mode of utterance of s. And so a constraint (the Propositional Attitude Constraint) on a meaning-theory for L will be just that it assign contents to sentences of L apt for ascription of plausible propositional attitudes to speakers of L on the grounds of their utterances of those sentences.