Simplicity Made Difficult

In their new book Relativism and Monadic Truth, Herman Cappelen and John Hawthorne seek to defend a " mainstream " view of the contents of thought and talk, which they call Simplicity, against recent " analytic relativist " here-says (including my own). Simplicity consists in five theses: T1 There are propositions and they instantiate the fundamental monadic properties of truth simpliciter and falsity sim-pliciter. T2 The semantic values of declarative sentences relative to contexts of utterance are propositions. T4 Propositions are the objects of illocutionary acts; they are, e.g., what we assert and deny. T5 Propositions are the objects of agreement and disagreement. (1) The real locus of dispute, though, must be T1. After all, analytic relativists tend to accept T3, T4, and T5. 1 T2 is a technical claim; whether it is correct is a matter of what sorts of abstract objects it is most useful to assign to embedded occurrences of sentences in a compositional semantic theory. There 1 It is not clear to me what T5 comes to, exactly. If it means that people can disagree about whether p, where p is a proposition, then I know of no relativist who would reject it.