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Ideas for 'Are there propositions?', '12: Colossians' and 'Coming-to-be and Passing-away (Gen/Corr)'

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5 ideas

19. Language / D. Propositions / 1. Propositions

13976	'Propositions' name what is thought, because 'thoughts' and 'judgments' are too ambiguous [Ryle]
	Full Idea: As the orthodox terms 'thoughts' and 'judgments' are equivocal, since they may equally well denote 'thinkings' as 'what-is-thought', the 'accusatives' of acts of thinking have come to be called 'propositions'.
	From: Gilbert Ryle (Are there propositions? [1930], I)
	A reaction: I have understood propositions to be capable of truth or falsity. 'What is thought' could be a right old jumble of images and disjointed fragments. Propositions are famous for their unity!

19. Language / D. Propositions / 4. Mental Propositions

13981	Several people can believe one thing, or make the same mistake, or share one delusion [Ryle]
	Full Idea: We ordinarily find no difficulty in saying of a given thing that several people believe it and so, if they think it false, 'make the same mistake' or 'labour under the same delusion'.
	From: Gilbert Ryle (Are there propositions? [1930], IV)
	A reaction: Ryle is playing devil's advocate, but this (like 13980) strikes me as quite good support for propositions. I suppose you can describe these phenomena as assent to sentences, but they might be very different sentences to express the same delusion.

13987	We may think in French, but we don't know or believe in French [Ryle]
	Full Idea: Although we speak of thinking in French, we never talk of knowing or believing or opining in French.
	From: Gilbert Ryle (Are there propositions? [1930], 'Substitute')
	A reaction: Once again Ryle is playing devil's advocate, but he does it rather well, and offers good support for my belief in propositions. I love this. 'I know, in French, a bank where the wild thyme blows'.

19. Language / D. Propositions / 6. Propositions Critique

13989	There are no propositions; they are just sentences, used for thinking, which link to facts in a certain way [Ryle]
	Full Idea: There are no substantial propositions...There is just a relation between grammatical structure and the logical structure of facts. 'Proposition' denotes the same as 'sentence' or 'statement'. A proposition is not what I think, but what I think or talk in.
	From: Gilbert Ryle (Are there propositions? [1930], 'Conclusions')
	A reaction: The conclusion of Ryle's discussion, but I found his support for propositions much more convincing than his critique of them, or his attempt at an alternative linguistic account. He never mentioned animals, so he self-evidently hasn't grasped the problem.

13982	If we accept true propositions, it is hard to reject false ones, and even nonsensical ones [Ryle]
	Full Idea: All the arguments for the subsistence of true propositions seem to hold good for the subsistence of false ones. We might even have to find room for absurd or nonsensical ones like 'some round squares are not red-headed'.
	From: Gilbert Ryle (Are there propositions? [1930], 'Objections')
	A reaction: A particularly nice example of a Category Mistake from the man who made them famous. Why can't we just make belief a proposition attitude, so I equally believe 'sea is blue', 'grass is pink' and 'trees are bifocal', but the status of my belief varies?