eophil_P2 10/25/05 8:35 AM Page 74 PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES: ISSUES IN SEMANTICS community, society, or humanity at large that one keep Machan, Tibor R. The Right to Private Property. Stanford, CA: the air or river or lake clean, and to what degree. Hoover Institution Press, 2002. Marx, Karl. Selected Writings, edited by David McLellan. A more recent defense of the right to private prop- London: Oxford University Press, 1970. erty is closer to that which we get from John Locke; Nagel, Thomas, and Liam Murphy. The Myth of Ownership: namely, that we require this right so as to have a sphere of Taxes and Justice. London: Oxford University Press, 2003. moral authority—as Robert Nozick (1938–2002) called Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1974. it, “moral space,” or as Ayn Rand (1905–1982) noted, Ockham, William. Opus Nonaginta Dierum Lewiston, NY: E. Bear in mind that the right to property is a right Mellen Press, 2001. to an action, like all others: it is not the right to Rand, Ayn. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New York: New an object, but to the action and the conse- American Library, 1967. quences of producing or causing that object. It is Rommen, Heinrich A. “The Genealogy of Natural Rights.” Thought 29 (1954). not a guarantee that a man will earn any prop- Thucydides. The History of the Peloponnesian War. Mineola, erty, but only a guarantee that he will own it if NY: Dover Publications, 2004. he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use Tibor R. Machan (2005) and to dispose of material values. (1967, p. 322) Basically, then, the main normative reason given for why one has a right to private property is that it is the propositional means by which one’s liberty to act free of others’ im- position is secured within a social context. It is also a attitudes: issues in precondition for individuals to act prudently and pro- semantics ductively in human communities without the legal per- mission for others to take from them what they have Propositional attitudes like knowledge, belief, and asser- earned. Economists tend, in contrast, to defend it as a fea- tion play an important foundational role for semantic ture of the infrastructure by which productivity and pros- theory, the goal of which is to specify the meanings of perity is best encouraged in a society. Another support sentences and their semantic contents relative to contexts given to the idea is that it makes it possible for individu- of utterance. Meanings are plausibly regarded as func- als to remain sovereign and to distribute resources as they tions from such contexts to semantic contents, which in see fit rather than others would demand. turn are closely related to the assertions made, and the There are innumerable objections to the right to pri- beliefs expressed, by utterances. For example, the seman- vate property, most recently the idea that property is held tic content of I live in New Jersey in a context C with x as by the public at large and government merely permits agent and t as time is standardly taken to be the proposi- individuals to make use of it to the extent government tion that x lives in New Jersey at t. To understand the meaning of this sentence is, to a first approximation, to deems this in the public interest. For why this is a trou- know that a competent speaker x who sincerely and blesome view the general theory of natural rights would assertively utters it in C asserts, and expresses a belief in, need to be explored and scrutinized. this proposition. Roughly put, if p is the semantic content See also Civil Disobedience; Cosmopolitanism; Postcolo- of S in C, then an assertive utterance of S in C is an asser- nialism; Republicanism. tion of p, and is standardly taken as indicating the speaker’s belief in p. Whether the semantic content of a sentence is always among the propositions asserted by an Bibliography utterance of the sentence, and whether, in those cases in Aristotle. Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. which it is, the assertion of any other proposition by the Bandman, Elsie and Bertram Bandman, eds. Bioethics and utterance is always parasitic on the assertion of the Human Rights: A Reader for Health Professionals. Boston: semantic content, are matters of detail. Though impor- Little, Brown, 1978. tant, they do not affect the foundational point. A seman- Comte, August. The Catechism of Positive Religion. 1852. tic theory for a language is part of a larger theory that Clifton, NJ: Kelley, 1973. Locke, John. The Second Treatise on Government, edited by interprets the assertions and beliefs of its speakers. This, Thomas P. Peardon. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1952. more than any other fact, allows one to subject semantic Machan, Tibor R. Individuals and Their Rights. La Salle, IL: theories to empirical test. Competent speakers of a lan- Open Court, 1989. guage are relatively good at identifying the propositions ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY 74 • 2nd edition eophil_P2 10/25/05 8:35 AM Page 75 PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES: ISSUES IN SEMANTICS asserted and beliefs expressed by utterances. To the extent With this in mind, one can return to the ascriptions to which assignments of semantic content issued by a in (1). If, as many theorists believe, (i) ©that S™ in (1) des- semantic theory lead to verifiably correct characteriza- ignates the semantic content of S (in the context), (ii) tions of speakers’ assertions and beliefs, the semantic these ascriptions report relations between agents and theory is confirmed; to the extent to which these assign- those contents, and (iii) sometimes substitution of sen- ments lead to verifiably incorrect characterizations, it is tences with necessarily equivalent semantic contents fails disconfirmed. to preserve the truth values of such ascriptions, then semantic contents must be more fine-grained than the attitude ascriptions sets of possible world-states in which they are true. On these assumptions substitution in such ascriptions can be This point is closely related to the use of attitude ascrip- used to discriminate different but intensionally equiva- tions lent semantic analyses of S. (1a) N asserted that S propositions, possible world- (1b) N believed that S states, and truth supporting to test different semantic analyses of S. It is convenient to circumstances express this in terms of the relational nature of the atti- This has significance for possible world semantics. In this tudes. Consider assertion. In each case of assertion there framework a semantic theory is a formal specification of is someone, the agent, who does the asserting, and some- truth with respect to a possible context of utterance and thing, the object of assertion, that is asserted. The term circumstance of evaluation. The semantic content of S in proposition is used to designate things that are objects of C is the set of possible circumstances E such that S is true assertion (and other propositional attitudes) and bearers with respect to C and E. Circumstances of evaluation are of truth value. Assertion is a mediated relation holding traditionally identified with possible world-states— between agents and propositions. An agent asserts a thought of as maximally complete properties that the proposition p by doing something or employing some world genuinely could have had. As a result, the semantic content-bearing representation associated with p. The contents of all necessarily equivalent sentences are taken most familiar cases are those in which the agent asserts a to be identical. This, plus the standard treatment of atti- proposition by assertively uttering a sentence. tude ascriptions as reporting relations between agents Ascriptions like those in (2) report the assertions of and the semantic contents of their complement clauses, agents: leads to the counterintuitive prediction that substitution of necessarily equivalent sentences in such ascriptions (2a) Edward asserted the proposition that Martha never changes truth value. If one adds the apparently denied. obvious fact that (3a) entails (3b), (2b) Edward asserted the proposition that the Earth (3a) A asserts/believes that P&Q is round. (3b) A asserts/believes that P&A asserts/believes (2c) Edward asserted that the Earth is round. that Q That in (2a) asserted is flanked by two noun phrases sug- one gets the further counterintuitive results (i) that any- gests that it is a two-place predicate and that a sentence one who asserts or believes a proposition p asserts or ©NP assert NP™ is true if and only if the first (subject) believes all necessary consequences of p, and (ii) that no noun phrase designates an agent who bears the assertion one ever asserts or believes anything necessarily false, relation to the entity designated by the second (direct since to do so would involve simultaneously asserting or object) noun phrase. This analysis also applies to (2b), believing every proposition. which is true if and only if Edward asserted the proposi- In 1983 Jon Barwise and John Perry attempted to tion designated by the proposition that the Earth is round. evade these results by constructing a semantic theory in On the assumption that this proposition is also desig- which metaphysically possible world-states were replaced nated by that the Earth is round, this analysis can be by abstract situations—thought of as properties that need extended to (2c), which is equivalent to (2b). Similar be neither maximally complete, nor genuinely capable of remarks hold for other propositional attitude verbs, being instantiated by any parts of the world. This strategy including believe, deny, refute, and prove. was shown to be unsuccessful by Scott Soames (1987), ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY 2nd edition • 75 eophil_P2 10/25/05 8:35 AM Page 76 PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES: ISSUES IN SEMANTICS where it was demonstrated that variants of the problems to contexts and assignments of values to variables.