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Full Idea
A person who utters 'It's raining' one day does not normally make the same statement as one who utters it the next. But these variations are not accompanied by corresponding changes of meaning. The words 'It's raining' retain the same meaning throughout.
Gist of Idea
'It's raining' makes a different assertion on different occasions, but its meaning remains the same
Source
Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 10)
Book Ref
Cartwright,Richard: 'Philosophical Essays' [MIT 1987], p.42
A Reaction
This is important, because it shows that a proposition is not just the mental shadow behind a sentence, or a mental shadow awaiting a sentence. Unlike a sentence, a proposition can (and possibly must) include its own context. Very interesting!
| 13941 | Are the truth-bearers sentences, utterances, ideas, beliefs, judgements, propositions or statements? [Cartwright,R] |
| 13942 | Logicians take sentences to be truth-bearers for rigour, rather than for philosophical reasons [Cartwright,R] |
| 13943 | We can attribute 'true' and 'false' to whatever it was that was said [Cartwright,R] |
| 13944 | We can pull apart assertion from utterance, and the action, the event and the subject-matter for each [Cartwright,R] |
| 13946 | To assert that p, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to utter some particular words [Cartwright,R] |
| 13947 | 'It's raining' makes a different assertion on different occasions, but its meaning remains the same [Cartwright,R] |
| 13948 | For any statement, there is no one meaning which any sentence asserting it must have [Cartwright,R] |
| 13951 | Assertions, unlike sentence meanings, can be accurate, probable, exaggerated, false.... [Cartwright,R] |
| 13950 | People don't assert the meaning of the words they utter [Cartwright,R] |
| 13945 | A token isn't a unique occurrence, as the case of a word or a number shows [Cartwright,R] |