Merricks vs . the Russellian Orthodoxy

The recent explosion of work on propositions has, in large part, emerged from dissatisfaction with two traditional views: first, that propositions are a sui generis category of abstract object; and second, that propositions have primitive, inexplicable representational properties. In his argumentatively rich Propositions, Trenton Merricks provides a welcome push-back in favor of these traditional views. Merricks takes propositions to have primitive, inexplicable representational properties, and resists the idea that propositions can be understood as sets, facts, acts, etc. But there is another sense in which Merricks is a counter-revolutionary: he pushes back not just against the contemporary trends just sketched, but also against a set of widely held theses which I’ll jointly call ‘the Russellian orthodoxy’: