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Full Idea
There is the speaker's thought and the thought formed by the hearer. That is all there is. We don't need an additional entity, the thought expressed by the utterance.
Gist of Idea
There are speakers' thoughts and hearers' thoughts, but no further thought attached to the utterance
Source
François Recanati (Mental Files in Flux [2016], 7.2)
Book Ref
Recanati,François: 'Mental Files in Flux' [OUP 2016], p.119
A Reaction
This fits my view of propositions nicely. They are the two 'thoughts'. The notion of some further abstract 'proposition' with its own mode of independent existence strikes me as ontologically absurd.
| 22242 | Mental files are concepts, which are either collections or (better) containers [Recanati] |
| 22243 | The Frege case of believing a thing is both F and not-F is explained by separate mental files [Recanati] |
| 22245 | A linguistic expression refers to what its associated mental file refers to [Recanati] |
| 22246 | A train of reasoning must be treated as all happening simultaneously [Recanati] |
| 22247 | Indexicality is not just a feature of language; examples show it also occurs in thought [Recanati] |
| 22248 | How can we communicate indexical thoughts to people not in the right context? [Recanati] |
| 22249 | The Naive view of communication is that hearers acquire exactly the thoughts of the speaker [Recanati] |
| 22250 | There are speakers' thoughts and hearers' thoughts, but no further thought attached to the utterance [Recanati] |