On the Very Idea of a Minimal Proposition

論極小命題

Can the idea of a minimal proposition be successfully held? I will first formulate what the minimal proposition is in the minimalist’s mind, taking Emma Borg as the representative. What a minimalist seeks for a minimal proposition is the abstract and skeletal core meaning of a sentence, and this faith is founded on the notion of minimal word meaning—an atomic, code-like, conceptual thing. I show that the problem of this notion of minimal proposition lies in the three features, intuitive read-off, invariantness, and truth-evaluability, that Borg ascribes to it. I shall argue, first, that positing a conceptual-like thing as the invariant minimal content of word cannot support the invariantness of the minimal proposition of a sentence, and second, that the skeletal content, as the minimal proposition of a sentence, is a grammatically analyzed product and thus is hardly truth evaluable. According to the analyses, the idea of a minimal proposition with these three features identified by minimalists cannot be maintained. 本文探討極小命題成立與否的基礎。首先，本文將以Emma Borg為極小主義之代表，釐清極小主義者所謂的極小命題是種語句本身抽象而結構化的核心意義，並被賦予三種特色：直覺的、不變的、有真假可言的。本文論證具有此三種性質的極小命題是難以成立的。首先針對此主張的基礎－－字詞本身的極小內容是一種不可再分、密碼般、概念化的對象－－本文論證字詞展現在語句中的意義並非如此不變，因此難以支持極小命題的不變性。其次，本文論證，抽象而結構化的極小命題是邏輯分析後的產物，因此難以有真假值可言。