Page 313 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

the morning and that the agent does not believe that Phosphorus is seen in the morning may be to ascribe a belief meeting a certain condition in a proposition and lack of any belief meeting a different condition in the same proposition (where the conditions are specified contextually).
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See also: Intensionality; Sense; T ruth.
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Verbs such as know, believe, hope, fear, regret, and desire are commonly taken to express an attitude that one may bear towards a proposition and are therefore called verbs of prepositional attitude. Thus in (1) below the agent Cathy is reported to have a certain attitude—namely that of regret—towards the prop- osition that is the meaning of the embedded sentence:
since intuitively there are myriads of meanings while there are only two truth values, truth and falsity.
Attitude reports provide a way to refute such a theory. Contrast sentence (1) with sentence (2):
Cathy regrets that Joe didn't call her. (2)
Cathy regrets that Jim didn't callher.
(1)
Now suppose that in fact neither Jim nor Joe called Cathy. If the meanings of the embedded sentences would simply be their truth values then, since they are both true, they would have the same meaning and Cathy would bear the relation of regret to one pre- cisely if she would bear that relation to the other. Thus the theory predicts that (2) follows from (1). This is absurd of course, and it may be concluded that mean- ings are not simply truth values.
Note the structure of the argument. The starting point was the supposition that meanings were to be equated with certain entities. From this it was derived that two given sentences had the same meaning and that therefore bearing some attitude towards one implied bearing the same attitude towards the other. This turned out to be absurd and it was concluded that meanings were not the things they had been sup- posed to be. This sort of argument can be brought up against many proposals about the nature of meaning and it can be used to show that there is no real same-
This immediately raises the question what it is exactly that can be the object of an attitude. Attitude reports produce a context in which to study this issue and thus have a central importance for the semantics of natural language. However, the study of propositional attitudes mainly helps to reveal what meanings are not. Unfortunately it does not give much clue about what meanings are.
1. The Object of an Attitude as a Truth Value
A widely accepted principle in semantics is that if two sentences have different truth values, they cannot have the same meaning (see Cresswell 1982 for a par- ticularly clear statement of the role of this principle). On a naive account of semantics it might even be thought that meanings just are truth values. Of course a theory to this effect would be rather hard to accept,
Propositional Attitudes R. A.Muskens
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