Glossar-English:Proposition

Sub-Item to: Sign theories: Overview

Original: Proposition

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Statements and their propositional angles While all sign acts have an interactional angle through their illocutionary component, not all of them also have a propositional angle: The utterance ‘Hello!’, for instance, is already sufficiently characterized by the description of the illocution and the expressive angle. An utterance of the type statement (assertion) is different, for example, ‘This apple is ripe’ or – clearly more complex – ‘Georg is the maternal grandfather of the author of the book we bought yesterday’: With the help of statements and the illocutions derived from them, sign-actors attempt to direct the focus of their joint attention to a state of affairs that may or may not exist – each in a particular context. It is this propositional angle that can be true or false. The part of the overall sign action that conveys its propositional angle is called a proposition. Propositions are abstract aspects of sign acts, which never occur without this environment and, therefore, cannot be represented without further ado. However, there are linguistic forms of expression that specifically address the propositional angle of an utterance and, thus, offer themselves as a linguistic normal form for the representation of propositions, in German, in particular, the dependent subordinate clauses introduced with ‘dass’ (‘that’). The joint propositional angle of utterances with such different sentences as ‘Paul doesn't limp anymore.’, ‘Does Paul limp?’, ‘Paul, please limp now.’, and ‘May Paul never limp.’ can, thus, be expressed – with regard to a certain context – as the proposition ‘that Paul limps’. The use of a pictorial sign also has, at least at first glance, a propositional angle: what is shown with its help, what the picture contains. That raises the question of whether and in what form images can or should be equated with statements and how the proposition is formed. However, this interpretation of the propositional angle of pictorial sign uses becomes doubtful on closer analysis. Aspects of propositions Nomination and predication Propositions are determined by a very characteristic breakdown into dependent sub-actions: They are always composed of one predication and at least one nomination. Through predication, a habit of distinguishing, which the sender believes represents new information for the receiver, is applied to objects identified via the nominations and considered to be already mutually known. The functional splitting involved allows statements to refer to contexts other than the utterance situation. In this context, the modality of the statement determines which context is meant in each case. Types of propositions Propositions can be simple or composed of other propositions; they can concern single things (singular) or multiple things (general); and they can refer to concrete or abstract matters, whereby in the latter case, rules can indeed be hidden behind the apparent propositional angle. The way of determining whether a proposition is true depends on the kind of proposition. To make the comparison of proposition and image rationally comprehensible, it is crucial to specify exactly what kind of images are to be related to what kind of propositions. Contextuality of propositional angles The central prerequisite for the explicit propositional angle of a sign action, and thus for propositions, is the possibility of being able to relate explicitly to a context. It is true that, in principle, any instance of sign acts is oriented to a context, namely to the situation in which it takes place. However, only in the case of sign acts with a propositional angle can the fixation on the respective current context be loosened, and states of affairs from a completely different situation – past, future, distant, hypothetical, or fictitious – can be communicated. Therefore, propositions can only be used together with an (explicit or implicit) context-building act, to which the preceding utterances may contribute, as well as the tense and aspect of the sentence used. The truth of a proposition Truth (and falsity) of a singular concrete assertion result from the relation between the asserted states of affairs and the states of affairs in the meant context. A distinction must be made as to whether it is possible to empirically verify the validity of the asserted state of affairs in the context or whether direct access to the context is not possible and, therefore, only a logical comparison with prior knowledge succeeds. In the other types of propositions, truth is referred back to the basic form of the singular concrete propositions in various ways, depending on how this propositional form arises from the singular concrete propositions. Image as a proposition: On the propositional angle of pictorial sign acts Figure 1: A mug shot The fundamental question of propositional image theories is whether images have a propositional angle at all. Spontaneously, one might be inclined to understand the image content as a proposition: It seems that the picture clearly conveys something that should be presentable as a propositional angle in the form of ‘that something is the case’. In the case of a mug shot, this could be the proposition ‘that the wanted person looks like the man depicted’. Nevertheless, this intuition raises a number of problems. What kind of proposition could be meant? Although it is difficult to understand the propositional angle assigned to an image (use) as a simple proposition (if at all) since a paraphrase usually makes use of complex verbal assertions (⊳ Ecphrasis), it also remains unclear in what way the propositional or predicate-logical composition of the complex paraphrase should be understood as isolable structures of the image composition: Conjunction and disjunction, for instance, would presuppose that partial propositions independently presented as images would in each case be composed in a syntactically distinct manner to form an overall image. Nevertheless, it seems clear that, at least in the case of figurative images, it can at most be a matter of singular propositions since here, spatiotemporally located individual material objects (such as ›this person‹) and a selection of their visually perceptible properties and relations to each other are shown: Schematically, therefore, the propositional angle of the image act – relative to that situation – seems to be: ‘That these individual objects have such properties and stand in such relations to each other’. Thus, it would also be a concrete proposition insofar as no abstractors are used. On the other hand, an interpretation as an existential statement is not entirely absurd, for instance, in the case of the mug shot: ‘There is a person who looks like this’ – hence a general proposition with existential quantification. On the other hand, structural images would have a strange intermediate status since they might represent abstract things, i.e., things that are not spatiotemporally located but in a concrete, spatiotemporally arranged manner. Thus, the metaphorical concretization of abstracts in structural images would lead to interpreting the pictorial propositional angle as equivalent to an existential statement about abstracta. In this interpretation, however, it remains to be clarified whether the proposition is to be understood more precisely in an extensional (object level) or intensional-conceptual (observer level) way. Does it mean that, for instance, certain spatial configurations of certain things – which under certain circumstances are supposed to stand metaphorically for other relations of other things – exist in a certain context that is more closely determined by the modality of the pictorial sign act (extensional way of reading)? Or is it supposed to mean that it makes sense to form a certain (usually quite complex) concept (conceptual way of reading; ⊳ Exemplification)? The problem of compositionality If images have a propositional angle, the question also arises in which way the functional components of the proposition are formed here. Are there syntactically identifiable parts of the picture to which the functions of nominations and predication are assigned in a sufficiently unambiguous way? Most image researchers doubt that performing such a functional division of syntactic picture elements is possible or even sensible. Apart from the lack of consensus on what actually are syntactic units in pictures (⊳ Image syntax), even critical discussion of nominatory or predicative picture uses does not lead to generally usable assignments. Rather, predicative and nominatory functions appear to be projected onto image use primarily from the context in which they are used. Another indication for a propositional image theory would be the possibility of negating the propositional angle conveyed by an image (⊳ Image and Negation). Since a negation of a given image content based on pictorial rather than conventionally introduced means is not apparent, this indication also tends to reject a propositional theory of images. Verification of pictorial propositional angles Finally, which verification procedure should be used and which concept of truth should be employed to verify a propositional angle of a pictorial sign use remains to be seen. At first glance, it may seem reasonable, at least in the case of figurative images in the sense of a complex singular proposition, to empirically compare the image with the corresponding situation. One may imagine how the gaze swings back and forth, detail by detail, between the image and the original – with each detail, as it were, taking into account a particular partial proposition (⊳ Naturalism and Realism). However, given the fundamental inexhaustibility and interpretive openness of the pictorial sign act, where does this comparison end? Moreover, the procedure is useless for images that are not depictions, such as mythical scenes or planned views. Here, only a logical verification procedure could be employed, in which what is depicted is checked for consistency with what is otherwise known about that scenery. If, on the other hand, one interprets the assumed pictorial proposition in the sense of an existential assertion, the question arises as to which context is indeed meant in which those objects that look like this relate to each other spatially in this manner: In contrast to verbally embedded propositions, for which a complex system of linguistic context-building acts has been established and is also regularly used, there remain few options for such a context-referencing act apart from picture titles or similar verbal references in connection with the image presentation (⊳ Language-Image Relations). More sensible seems the view that the propositional paraphrases (of parts) of the hypothetical propositional angle of a pictorial sign act are, in fact, secondary sign acts in which the image content is indeed employed as the reference situation. Accordingly, these problems of the propositional angle of an image use are circumvented in modal image theory, which ascribes to image usage the function of context-building acts. See also: Composition Context Context-building acts Ecphrasis Exemplification Excursus: Types of propositions Excursus: Verification procedures Illokution Image and negation Image content Image syntax Interactional, expressive, and propositional angles Language-image relations Modality Naturalism and realism Nomination Predication Structural image Verbal metaphors and general metaphorology

Notes Literature Es wurden keine Literaturverweise im Artikel gefunden. Version 1: 2013 Responsible: Schirra, Jörg R.J. Editing: Sachs-Hombach, Klaus Contributions by: Joerg R.J. Schirra und Marcel Lemmes — (Note) Quote as: Schirra, Jörg R.J. (2013). Proposition. (Ausg. 1). In: Schirra, J.R.J.; Halawa, M. & Liebsch, D. (Hg.), Glossar der Bildphilosophie. (2012-2026). [bildglossar.org/index.php?title=Proposition].