The Unity of the Proposition Replies to Vallicella, Schnieder, and García-Carpintero Richard Gaskin † Reply to Vallicella I am grateful to Bill Vallicella for his interesting and thought-provoking discussion of my book. After some preliminary, and characteristically generous, remarks, his paper divides into two parts. In the first part, which comprises sections 2–3, he asks whether my solution to the problem of the unity of the proposition is correct, without at this stage calling into question its background linguistic idealism. Then in sections 4–6 he tackles that linguistic idealism in its own terms. I shall take his points in order. 1. In section 2 Vallicella asks how the unity problem can arise for me in the first place, given that I regard words and their referents as abstractions from sentences and propositions. He writes: For if words and their referents are abstractions from sentences and propositions respectively, then there is no problem about how words and their referents combine to form sentences and propositions respectively, for the simple reason that, had no such unproblematic combinations been available, then there would have been no sentential/propositional unities from which to abstract words and their meanings in the first place. Vallicella notes that I am aware of this objection in my book, but he does not accurately report my response to it, which is that even granted the metaphysical priority of sentences and propositions to their components – and the context principle forces this priority upon us – we still have the task of distinguishing sentences from lists and propositions from mere aggregates, because a list may duplicate a sentence at the level of language, and a mere aggregate a proposition at the level of reference. Any given combination of words may be a list, so that in those cases where we are inclined to say that we have a sentence on our hands, not a list, we incur an obligation to say what that difference – what our treating the item as a sentence rather than as a list – consists in. 1 Vallicella takes exception to † Department of Philosophy, University of Liverpool, 7 Abercromby Square, Liverpool, L69 7WY, UK; Email: R.M.Gaskin@liverpool.ac.uk 1 See The Unity of the Proposition, esp. pp. 19–25, 207, 283–286, 393–394. dialectica dialectica Vol. 64, N° 2 (2010), pp. 303–311 DOI: 10.1111/j.1746-8361.2009.01212.x © 2010 The Author. Journal compilation © 2010 Editorial Board of dialectica. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA