Propositions in the wild: Towards a non-ideal theory of utterance content Event

My talk targets a set of less-discussed idealisations about communicated contents that however have important consequences. These idealisations involve the assumption that contents are expressed by full declarative sentences, that they are uncentered and non-perspectival, and that they are independent of other attitudinal contents or referents.

I show that, while removing some of these assumptions, especially sententiality ad non-perspectivity, remains ontologically and semantically inconsequential. Removing others especially uncenteredness and independence, requires significant changes to our informational ontology.

I describe these changes and the resulting account of non-ideal(ised) utterance content. To support this account, I show that it has a number of useful applications. For example, to Floridi’s informational taxonomy, to Vendler’s puzzle about imagination, and to the debate about accuracy in episodic memory.