CFP: Force, content and the unity of the proposition

Submission deadline: March 15, 2017

Conference date(s):
May 19, 2017 - May 20, 2017

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Conference Venue:

Institut für Philosophie, Universität Wien
Vienna, Austria

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The distinction between the force (mode) of speech acts (propositional attitudes) and their propositional content has been of central importance in analytic philosophy since Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. Frege argued that in order to make sense of the fact that an assertion can be an answer to a question, we need to suppose that there is an common element, the thought or proposition, which is both asserted or questioned and thus neutral between different kinds of force. This also brings with it a commitment to a notion of predication as neutral between forces. John Searle, in his version of speech act theory, extended this line of thought to all forces, arguing that all speech acts raise the question of the truth of a proposition. Finally, Frege also claimed that only propositions, not assertions, can form the clauses of conditionals and disjunctions – the ‘Frege point’ later popularized by Peter Geach and Searle.

Recently this traditional understanding of force and content has been questioned in interesting ways. Peter Hanks has argued that we cannot account for the unity of the proposition if we accept the traditional force-content distinction. We cannot make sense of predication independently of truth ascription and thus of assertion. So we need to assume that predication carries force to account for the unity of the proposition. But if predication is not forceless, we need to reconceptualize what propositions are, and we need a new response to the Frege-Geach problem. Hanks’ criticisms as well as his positive proposals regarding these issues have triggered a lively debate with interesting critiques and counterproposals by Mitch Green, Francois Recanati, Scott Soames and others.

We will discuss these matters at a workshop in Vienna from May 19-20 with Peter Hanks, Francois Recanati, John Searle and the co-organizers Gabriele Mras and Michael Schmitz. There is still a small number of speaking slots available, for which we invite submissions of abstracts. We are interested in contributions to the recent debate as well as in ones that illuminate the historical background or approach the issues from different systematic perspectives. Questions to be addressed include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Are the recent criticisms convincing, or can the traditional force-content distinction and / or the notion of the neutrality of predication be defended?

• Must the idea that there is a common element to the different classes of speech acts be given up with the traditional understanding of the proposition, or are there alternative ways of identifying this element?

• What consequences might the reconceptualization of the force-content distinction have for our understanding of the meaning of force indicators? Searle already recognized an influence of mode / force on satisfaction conditions, and Recanati has argued for a more direct relationship. Might we even think of force itself as representational?

• Hanks proposes to solve the Frege-Geach problem by introducing a notion of force cancellation, while Recanati has appealed to Hare’s distinction between a tropic and a neustic sense of force and Austin’s notion of the locutionary act. How do these proposals relate to one another and possibly to other responses to the Frege-Geach problem?  

• Can all issues connected to the problem of the unity of the proposition be addressed in the manner described above, or does the problem have aspects that require different approaches like, for example, Searle’s recent proposal to elucidate it in terms of the relation of propositions to perception?

• The force-content distinction and the attended construal of propositions is also implicated in our understanding of logic and of the boundary between semantics and pragmatics. What consequences might a reconceptualization of the distinction and of propositions have for these issues?

• What is the relation between Frege’s doctrine of the unsaturadness of predicate expressions and his version of the force-content distinction?   Please send an anonymized abstract of 800-1000 words to [email protected] or [email protected] in a PDF file and your contact details in a separate file by

March 15. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by the end of March.

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