In this book, Scott Soames argues that the revolution in the study of language and mind that has taken place since the late nineteenth century must be rethought. The central insight in the reigning tradition is that propositions are representational. To know the meaning of a sentence or the content of a belief requires knowing which things it represents as being which ways, and therefore knowing what the world must be like if it is to conform to how the sentence or belief represents it. These are truth conditions of the sentence or belief. But meanings and representational contents are not truth conditions, and there is more to propositions than representational content.
This sentence means that I have a cow which is partly white and partly black. But If I say ‘I have a black and a white cow’, I have two cows – one black and the other white…
In sentence 1, the noun John is the subject. It is the answer to the question ‘Who broke the window? ‘The group of words ‘broke the window’ is the predicate. The predicate contains the verb broke.......
