Volume 40, Issue 97

I compare a relatively standard response to the challenge of the Unity of the Proposition with the very different attitude towards it of the later Wittgenstein. I articulate the problem as it arises within a Tarskian framework, explain (what I think ought to be) Davidson’s response to it and also the earlier Wittgenstein’s response to it, and then explain why, from Wittgenstein’s later perspective, the problem collapses.

It is often taken for granted that predication is something that happens on a mental, nonlinguistic level, that the grammatical operation of predication is merely a shadowy epiphenomenon of our mental gluing together of the entities stood for by the grammatical subject and the grammatical predicate. I argue that there is nothing - or at least nothing clearly graspable - that could be reasonably called predication save the grammatical operation. Predication, I argue, is what happens when we use a linguistic ‘tool’ having built it of two specific parts, where the parts, already furnished with certain inferential roles, conspire to produce a sentence with a specific inferential potential, which then can be used within a plentitude of our language games.

Donald Davidson, in his Truth and Predication, suggests that Plato’s concern with “gluing together” subject and predicate in assertive sentences might be traced back to Parmenides. Taking his lead this paper discusses the connection, proceeding in three steps. A short overview of the literature on Parmenides’ fragment B2 will be given and a Davidsonian move to reduce the complexity of the hermeneutical situation will be proposed. Secondly, given this reduction, a Parmenideian tableaux will be put forward and compared to our present understanding of elementary propositional and predicate logic. This will provide the basis for the concluding discussion of Plato’s characteristic transformation of Parmenides’ dictum into the bundle of arguments that give rise to the problem of the unity of propositions.

Many philosophers have been puzzled by the problem of the unity of a proposition which, according to some of them, is provided by its structure and by its relation to the states of affairs it represents. In the present paper it is argued that this specific quality attributed to propositions by Russell has not necessarily to be regarded as something due to a structural property that is simply there but as the result of the way we use language in order to assert something. This is demonstrated by an analysis of the relationship between descriptive and prescriptive predications in aesthetics, and of the conditions that are necessary in order to be justified to move from one language game to the other one.