Propositions as Cognitive Acts

Scott Soames My topic is the concept of information needed in the study of language and mind. It is widely acknowledged that knowing the meaning of an ordinary declarative sentence, or the content of a representational mental state, involves knowing which things it represents as being which ways. Knowing this gives one knowledge of the truth conditions of the sentence or state, which are ways the world must be in order to conform to how it is represented. Intensional semantics provide precise models of truth conditions, which are approximations of meaning and content. But models that imperfectly approximate is all they are. Meanings and cognitive contents are not truth conditions; which are severely limited even as models. In order to continue to progress in semantics plus the philosophy of mind and language, we must overcome these limitations by identifying what information really is. Pieces of information are propositions. The two leading conceptions are the structured conception from Frege and Russell, and the truth-conditional conception from intensional semantics. Both suffer from intractable problems. Rather than listing the problems, I will sketch a new view based on the old idea that propositions are neither things we interpret nor things we use to carry information;