The distinction between linguistic utterances and what they express is borne in on us by many common experiences, for instance, that of finding out how to say something in another language, and that of rephrasing something we have said to make it clear to our hearer. What a sentential utterance expresses is a proposition.
And this has started me thinking about propositions. What is a proposition? What a sentential utterance expresses. But to what does it refer? And I'm not sure there's quite enough concern about this. To be sure, there are debates about whether propositions 'exist' and what 'nature' they have; there have been claims that moral sentences do not express propositions, and so forth; but really, these are, I think, contributors to my point, which is that it's very, very hard to tell what analytic philosophers mean when they talk about 'propositions'. They're what sentences express; they're the 'meaning' of sentences. But this doesn't really tell us anything.
I've said there have been discussions of the existence and nature of propositions. Usually the idea seems to be that there is some abstract object that is both the intentional object of a mental act of judging (that something is so or not so) and the meaning of a sentence, or of one of the two (usually the latter). What an 'abstract object' is is a very thorny question. For all practical purposes we can just replace 'some abstract object' with 'a somewhat' or 'a something-or-other'; this something-or-other is the meaning of a sentence and maybe the intentional object of an act of judging. Not very helpful.
My point is not that all talk of propositions is foolish, or that there might not be accounts of propositions that work - indeed, if by 'proposition' we mean anything at all, there's bound to be some good account of it. My point is rather that there really is no standard account of what these mysterious things are; and the illusion one might get from analytic philosophers themselves that it's pretty obvious what propositions are is precisely an illusion. The 'roles' of the proposition are real, in the sense that we do judge whether things are so or not, and we do mean things when we speak or write; but 'proposition' seems to waver between being a mere synonym for these judgments or meanings, and being a je-ne-sais-quoi floating around that magically does all the work. Perhaps there is some third thing; my point is that there is no consensus of it among the people appealing to it.
I wonder, indeed, why anyone thinks that a proposition would be an abstract object at all. The word itself suggests not an abstract object but an action; a proposition would be the proposing of something. To be sure, by a standard sort of ambiguity we use names for actions for the objects of the actions; e.g., a remembrance can either be the remembering or what is remembered. Likewise, a proposition would be the proposing or what is proposed; but it isn't clear why what is proposed would have to be an abstract object, any more than a sensation, i.e., the object of the act of sensing, would have to be a 'sense-datum'. There still will be uses for the word 'proposition'; but perhaps we should ask whether much of what is attributed to 'propositions' is really just due to taking a figure of speech or two too literally.
Perhaps I'm just missing something; it wouldn't be the first time....
