Volume 39, Issue 96

The article argues that a reasonably unified account of the established use of ‘concept’ and its cognates can be provided by a cognitivist approach. Such an approach starts out from the role the ascription of concepts plays in characterizing certain cognitive operations and abilities, yet without treating concepts as symbolic representations or particulars in the minds of individuals. In particular, it explores the idea that concepts are rules or principles of classification and inference. At the end I argue that a cognitivist account can deal not just with the role of concepts in cognition, but also with the idea that they are components of propositions.

By examining the views of Frege, Russell, and Davidson it is shown that what a sentence is about cannot be determined without taking into account the interconnections among the other parts of a sentence. This is illustrated by considering in particular the effects of negating the predicate of a sentence.

What is it for predicates to mean what they do and what is their contribution to the meaning of an utterance? It is exactly this question to which Davidson dedicates his book Truth and Predication (2005). Most commentators focus on Davidson’s discussion of failed accounts, in particular of Frege’s account. In contrast to this tendency, I focus here on Davidson’s own account. The structure is as follows. First, I sketch the problem of predication and I glance at Davidson’s discussion of failed accounts. Then I present his solution and integrate it in his theory of interpretation, thereby bringing out the particularity of the account. In doing so I shall scrutinize some criticisms as well, for as I intend to show, they originate from a wrong understanding of his comprehensive theory of interpretation.

The question of the unity of the proposition has recently enjoyed an increasing amount of attention. The paper aims at reconstructing its development and its historical starting points, focusing especially on Bradley’s regress argument, Russell’s concerns about the unity of the proposition and Frege’s notion of unsaturatedness. It is held that a clear view of the central issue (how one can distinguish between a complex composed out of other entities and the aggregate of its constituents) has only recently been isolated from some more peripheral questions, such as that of internal vs. external relations or the realism-nominalism debate, which for a long time were almost inextricably interwoven with it.