The Circumstances of a Successful Act-Type Theory

Document Type : The Quarterly Jornal

Author

School of analytic philosophy, Institute for research in fundamental sciences, Tehran

Abstract

According to traditional theories of the nature of propositions, propositions are primary vehicles of representations. An act-type theory of the nature of propositions holds that traditional theories cannot satisfactorily account for the representational character of propositions. We should therefore set aside the traditional theories. According to an act-type theory, when an agent predicates a property of an object, she represents the object as something that possesses that property. That is, the agent is the primary vehicle of the property of representation in virtue of the act of predication that she does. On this theory, propositions are types of tokens of the act of predication, inheriting the property of representation from those tokens. In this article, I introduce two main versions of the act-type theory: Soames’s and Hanks’s. I will then overview the main weaknesses and strengths of these two versions. Considering the flaws of both versions, I conclude that neither can qualify as a successful act-type theory. Moreover, given the strengths and weaknesses of the two versions, I show the conditions that an act-type theory must fulfil in order to qualify as successful.

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References

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