Suppose that John asks, ‘Is the window open?’ and Mary replies, ‘The window is open.’ Then John and Mary have produced two distinct utterances, and in doing so, they have performed two different kinds of speech act. But clearly there is something that these utterances have in common. According to the standard theory of speech acts, in these utterances different illocutionary forces have been applied to the same propositional content. Similarly, if John and Mary both believe that roses are red, (...) the same propositional content is attributed to their individual mental states.The propositional contents of utterances and beliefs have traditionally been identified with propositions. In turn, propositions have been characterized as language-independent particulars that can be re-identified in different contexts. In this article, I will argue that various phenomena that have hitherto been explained by propositions are better understood in terms of propositional acts. (shrink)

In his 1987 book _Conditionals, Frank Jackson presents an argument to the effect that the indicative conditionals of natural language have the same truth conditions as the material conditional of truth-functional logic. This Jackson refers to as the "paradox of indicative conditionals." I offer a solution to this paradox by arguing that some conditionals that appear to be in the indicative mood are actually subjunctives, to which the paradox does not apply. I support this proposed solution with some historical observations (...) on the evolution of the English verb phrase. (edited). (shrink)

The article provides an example of the application of the techniques and results of historical linguistics to traditional problems in the philosophy of language. It takes as its starting point the dispute about the nature of facts that arose from the 1950 Aristotelian Society debate between J. L. Austin and P. F. Strawson. It is shown that, in some cases, expressions containing the noun fact refer to actions and events; while in other cases, such expressions do not have a referring (...) function at all. Thus, nothing corresponding to Strawson's 'pseudomaterial correlate' need be postulated in order to account for the reference of the noun fact. It is suggested that many philosophically problematic expressions may be better understood by tracing their historical evolution in natural language. (shrink)