An Alternative Approach
An Alternative Approach
This chapter offers an alternative approach to assigning truth conditions to complex descriptive sentences. Truth conditions are first motivated as a kind of composite of the assertability conditions on sentences and mistake conditions on mental states. It is then suggested that given biforcated attitude semantics, plausible assumptions about what mistake conditions will involve can be used to assign the right truth conditions to complex descriptive sentences — a result which is proven in an appendix to the chapter. It is further suggested that given an appropriate semantics for ‘believes that’, the expressivist can go on to maintain that the states expressed by complex descriptive sentences really are beliefs, after all.
Keywords: truth conditions, complex descriptive sentences, assertability conditions, mistake conditions, belief
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