These are exciting times for philosophical theorizing about propositions, with the last 15 years seeing the development of new approaches and the emergence of new theorists. Propositions have been invoked to explain thought and cognition, the nature and attribution of mental states, language and communication, and in philosophical treatments of truth, necessity and possibility. According to Frege and Russell, and their followers, propositions are structured mind- and language-independent abstract objects which have essential and intrinsic truth-conditions. Some recent theorizing doubts whether propositions really exist and, if they do, asks how we can grasp, entertain and know them? But most of the doubt concerns whether the abstract approach to propositions can really explain them. Are propositions really structured, and if so where does their structure come from? How does this structure form a unity, and does it need to? Are the representational and structural properties of propositions really independent of those of thinking and language? What does it mean to say that an object occurs in or is a constituent of a proposition? The volume takes up these and other questions, both as they apply to the abstract object approach and also to the more recently developed approaches. While the volume as a whole does not definitively and unequivocally reject the abstract objection approach, for the most part, the papers explore new critical and constructive directions. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.

The work of Bertrand Russell has a decisive influence on the emergence of analytic philosophy, and on its subsequent development. The essays in this text recapture aspects of Russell's philosophical vision during his most influential period, the two decades following his break with Idealism in 1899.

Propositions are routinely invoked by philosophers, linguists, logicians, and other theorists engaged in the study of meaning, communication, and the mind. To investigate the nature of propositions is to investigate the very nature of our connection to each other, and to the world around us. As one of the only volumes of its kind, The Routledge Handbook of Propositions provides a comprehensive overview of the philosophy of propositions, from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Comprising 33 original chapters by an international team of scholars, the volume addresses both traditional and emerging questions concerning the nature of propositions, and our capacity to engage with them in thought and in communication. The chapters are clearly organized into the following three sections: I. Foundational Issues in the Theory of Propositions II. Historical Theories of Propositions III. Contemporary Theories of Propositions Essential reading for philosophers of language and mind, and for those working in neighboring areas, The Routledge Handbook of Propositions is suitable for upper-level undergraduate study, as well as graduate and professional research.

Metasemantics presents new work on the philosophical foundations of linguistic semantics. Experts in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and the theory of content provide new perspectives on old problems about linguistic meaning, pose questions that suggest novel research projects, and sharpen our understanding of linguistic representation.

"This volume features original essays that advance debates on propositional and doxastic justification and explore how such thinking shapes and is shaped by a range of established and emerging topics in contemporary epistemology. This is the first book-length project devoted to the distinction between propositional and doxastic justification. Notably, the contributors cover the relationship between propositional and doxastic justification and group belief, credence, commitment, suspension, faith, and hope. They also consider state-of-the-art work on knowledge-first approaches to justification, hinge-epistemology, moral and practical reasons for belief, epistemic normativity, and applications of formal epistemology to traditional epistemological disputes. Finally, the contributors promise to reinvigorate old epistemological debates on coherentism, externalism, internalism, and phenomenal conservatism. Propositional and Doxastic Justification will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in epistemology, metaethics, and normativity"--

This book takes a deep dive into Ayn Rand's theory of knowledge. It explains why her followers failed to develop a model of the proposition fulfilling the promise of her pioneering work on concepts--and it reveals the essence of propositions and the principles by which they operate in our gaining knowledge by identifying the facts of reality.These revelations are based on a fuller appreciation and application of some of Rand's most pregnant ideas: the metaphor of concepts as "mental file folders"--the unit-perspective as the key that unlocks the conceptual stage of awareness and welds together its three levels--form and content of cognitive awareness both being objective--and consciousness essentially consisting of differentiation and integration (functionally) and subject and object (structurally). On this basis, the author offers a significant revision to Rand's model of concepts and a new model of propositions, giving considerable attention to axioms and statements about nonexistent subjects and offering a fuller explanation of how syllogisms function in grasping truth.The author's main contention is that Objectivism's epistemology (and epistemology in general) lacks a viable model of propositional knowledge due to neglect of the "unit-perspective" view of concepts. This pioneering insight of Rand's, he says, not only is an essential building block of her concept theory, but also is the means for providing the clearest X-ray picture of our multilayered conceptual knowledge. Using the unit-perspective to expand Rand's theory of concepts, the author then introduces "duplex" and "triplex" units, which he shows are the components of propositions and syllogisms, which are composed of concepts that integrate single or "simplex" units, as he calls them.The author also argues that Rand's largely underdeveloped concept of the "dual-aspect objective" is vital for understanding how knowledge is grounded in reality. he explains how consciousness essentially involves an interaction between a conscious subject (i.e., organism) and some of aspect of the world which becomes the object of that subject's awareness, then applies this idea to perception, introspection, concepts, propositions, and syllogisms. The author also defines content of awareness carefully distinguishing it from both object and form of awareness, and applies those distinctions throughout.In addition, the author discusses how truth is both dual-aspect and contextual, and he shows how units, too, have a dual aspect, even on the level of syllogisms. He also shows how differentiation and integration are the conscious processes at work, for better or worse, in both logic and in logical errors, which include the fallacies of "Frozen Abstraction" and "False Alternative," as well as a long-standing Objectivist conflation of falsity and contradiction and a relatively more recent Objectivist error, the fallacy of "genuine awareness."

Philosophy (especially philosophy of language and philosophy of mind), science (especially linguistics and cognitive science), and common sense all sometimes make reference to propositions—understood as the things we believe and say, and the things which are (primarily) true or false. There is, however, no widespread agreement about what sorts of things these entities are. In New Thinking about Propositions, Jeffrey C. King, Scott Soames, and Jeff Speaks argue that commitment to propositions is indispensable, and that traditional accounts of propositions are inadequate. They each then defend their own views of the nature of propositions.