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Lifting the Church-Ban on Quotational Analysis: The Translation Argument and the Use-Mention Distinction

Lifting the Church-Ban on Quotational Analysis: The Translation Argument and the Use-Mention... According to quotational theory, indirect ascriptions of propositional attitudes should be analyzed as direct ascriptions of attitudes towards natural-language sentences specified by quotations. A famous objection to this theory is Church's translation argument. In the literature several objections to the translation argument have been raised, which in this paper are shown to be unsuccessful. This paper offers a new objection. We argue against Church's presupposition that quoted expressions, since they are mentioned, cannot be translated. In many contexts quoted expressions are used and mentioned simultaneously, and the quotational analysis of propositional-attitude ascriptions is such a context. Hence the translation argument is unsound. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal for General Philosophy of Science Springer Journals

Lifting the Church-Ban on Quotational Analysis: The Translation Argument and the Use-Mention Distinction

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References (29)

Publisher
Springer Journals
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 by Kluwer Academic Publishers
Subject
Philosophy; Philosophy of Science; History, general; Philosophy of Education; Methodology of the Social Sciences; Social Sciences, general
ISSN
0925-4560
eISSN
1572-8587
DOI
10.1023/A:1013197914982
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

According to quotational theory, indirect ascriptions of propositional attitudes should be analyzed as direct ascriptions of attitudes towards natural-language sentences specified by quotations. A famous objection to this theory is Church's translation argument. In the literature several objections to the translation argument have been raised, which in this paper are shown to be unsuccessful. This paper offers a new objection. We argue against Church's presupposition that quoted expressions, since they are mentioned, cannot be translated. In many contexts quoted expressions are used and mentioned simultaneously, and the quotational analysis of propositional-attitude ascriptions is such a context. Hence the translation argument is unsound.

Journal

Journal for General Philosophy of Science – Springer Journals

Published: Oct 16, 2004

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