Syntax, truth, and the fate of sentences

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Collins, John (2024) Syntax, truth, and the fate of sentences. The Philosophical Quarterly, 74 (1). 125–144. ISSN 0031-8094

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Abstract

Truth appears to be a predicate of sentence-like structures. This raises the question of what a sentence is (or what it is to be sentence-like) such that it is truth-apt. A natural move is to treat sentences and truth-aptness as somehow conceptually or metaphysical coeval—made for each other. This resolution conflicts, however, with now standard approaches in syntactic theory that treat sentences as mere epiphenomena. Siding with the developments in syntax, the paper argues that truth-aptness properly belongs, not to sentences, but to clauses as structures that can be selected by verbs that specify truth-apt states. It is further argued that this arrangement is perfectly consistent with truth-conditional semantics.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	semantics,sentences,syntax,truth,philosophy ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1200/1211
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies (former - to 2024)
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Philosophy
Related URLs:	http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	27 Jan 2023 17:30
Last Modified:	12 Nov 2024 01:38
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/90850
DOI:	10.1093/pq/pqac068

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