Propositions

 Propositions (statement)

A sentence or statement viewed from the perspective of its meaning is called proposition. A proposition is a technical term used by philosophers, and they distinguish it from a sentence (syntactic entity) and a statement (a unit of pragmatics).

Hence, for example, the same proposition might be said to be expressed by both "I understand French" and in Italian, ""Ca pisco il Francese". It is a property of propositions that they have truth values. Thus, this proposition would have the value "true" if the speaker did understand French and the value "false" if the speaker did not understand, that is, "positive proposition" (yes) or "negative proposition" (no).

The "propositional content" of a sentence is that part of its meaning which is seen, in some accounts, reducible to a proposition.

Eg: The porters had shut the gates.                                                                                                                         The gate had been shut by the porters.                                                                                                               Had the porters shut the gate?                                                                                                                          If only the porters had shut the gates!

These sentences would be said to have the same propositional context, though in other respects their meanings differ.

A proposition is composed of a "predicate" together with its associated arguments.


Propositions are the central elements used in the investigation of sentence meaning in formal semantics/ truth conditional semantics and speech act theories. "I am hungry" uttered by different speakers is obviously an instance of the same sentence but as the reference changes with every speaker, we have many different propositions as we have speakers.

In his development of J. L. Austin's (1964) speech act theory, John Searle (1969) divided locutionary acts into utterance acts (uttering noises and words) and propositional acts, by which the speaker is referring and predicating. In uttering sentences,

  1. Sam smokes habitually.
  2. Does Sam smoke habitually?
  3. Sam smoke habitually!
  4. Would that smoke habitually?
The speaker performs an assertion, asks a question, gives an order or expresses a wish. But at the same time, she/he refers to a certain person "Sam" and expresses the predication "smokes habitually" with respect to that person. Thus, the reference and predication are the same in all four sentences, and thus the same proposition is made, regardless of their respective illocutionary acts. 

Prepared by:
Dr. Susan Mathew

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