“Somos criaturas de la lógica y no del silencio”: la unidad proposicional según Alberto Moretti

Abstract

In this comment I refer to some aspects of Moretti´s proposal about the problem of propositional unity, based on his interpretation of Frege’s and Davidson’s ideas. It maintains that, beyond their obvious differences, both conceptions of language and sentence meaning, as much as they ascribe an essentially representational function to language, share a way of understanding the primacy of assertion over all the other types of linguistic utterances. In turn, according to Moretti, assertions reflect the importance of language to understand the constitutive features of human cognitive capacities as well as their limits. After examining Moretti´s interpretation, I articulate a set of questions and objections to the theoretical presuppositions and commitments of the Fregean-Davidsonian approach which arise from various alternative proposals (cognitive, pragmatic, and semantic). These proposals can converge in a vision of linguistic systems that considers their communicative uses to be more basic than their representational functions. Thus, the propositional unity could be better explained as a feature derived from the speaker´s cognitive acts (including their communicative intentions). And the semantic contents of linguistic expressions would ultimately be determined by the factors that intervene in the performance of speech acts, without giving primacy to assertions, and even less to their products, namely, declarative sentences.