Structures and circumstances: Two ways to fine-grain propositions


Συγγραφέας: David Ripley


David Ripley: Structures and circumstances: Two ways to fine-grain propositions (pdf, 23 pages)
In this paper, I’ll be concerned with propositions. Propositions have been invoked to serve many roles: they can be the compositional values of clauses, the objects of our attitudes, the bearers of truth, necessity, and possibility, components of logical arguments, and so on. It’s forgivable to wonder whether any one sort of thing can bear all these distinct roles, but that won’t be an issue for us here. As I’ll use the word, a ‘proposition’ is simply the compositional value of a (closed) clause.1 A number of authors have thought that propositions must be fine-grained; that is, that propositions must be individuated more finely than coarse-grained propositions—sets of possible worlds. I agree, and will assume as much for the purposes of the paper. In §1, I’ll examine some of the arguments for this conclusion, and present two different strategies for giving a theory of fine-grained propositions—structuralism and circumstantialism. Both of these strategies have been argued for on the grounds that they address the problems faced by coarse-grained propositions. In §2, however, I’ll argue that structuralism, on its own, does not do enough; it solves only certain special cases of the trouble, and must be supplemented in some way to address the full range of problems faced by coarse-grained propositions. I’ll consider some of the supplements that structuralists have offered, and argue that where these supplements work, they undermine the fineness-of-grain motivation for structuralism. In §3, I’ll show that circumstantialism can satisfy the fineness-of-grain motivation in its full generality. Most of this section responds to an argument due to Soames, which purports to show that circumstantialism too must fall short. In the end, then, I conclude that circumstantialism is better-positioned than structuralism to address concerns about fineness of grain; unlike structuralism, it can address the full range of fineness-of-grain considerations without supplementation. This does not, on its own, mean that we should reject structuralism in favor of circumstantialism; I intend only to undermine one familiar argument for structuralism, not structuralism itself. I talk of compositional values rather than semantic values, mainly to avoid what I take to be an irrelevant debate...