Actions, Products, and Truth-Bearers: A Critique of Twardowskian Accounts

Abstract

Friederike Moltmann has recently proposed an account of truth-bearers that draws on Kazimierz Twardowski’s action/product distinction. Her account is meant to provide a third way between the dominant view of primary truth-bearers as mind-independent entities and the recently revived construal of them as mental or linguistic acts. This paper argues that there is no room for Twardowskian accounts because they are based on a notion of “nonenduring product” that defies comprehension, and no need for them because the linguistic data that Twardowskians take to refute the act-theoretic approach can, in fact, be handled by that approach.

Actions, Products, Demonstrations

“…jump as a product of jumping or demonstration as a product of demonstrating) has been recently criticized by some authors (cf. Bronzo (2020)). I am not offering here a reply to this criticism as the issue deserves an independent study.…”

Act‐type theories of propositions

“…The content–force distinction is connected to the Frege–Geach problem (Geach, 1965; Schroeder, 2008); this is discussed in the context of the act‐type theory by Hom & Schwartz (2013) and Reiland (2012); Reiland (2019). Philosophers sympathetic to the act‐type theory have offered alternative accounts of the phenomena that Hanks’ theory of cancellation, discussed below, is supposed to explain (Bronzo, 2020; Recanati, 2019; Reiland, 2019; Schwartz & Hom, 2021). Schiller (2019) criticises the act‐type theory applied to desires.…”