propositionele

Propositionele is a term used in some strands of philosophy of language and formal semantics to denote the content of a declarative sentence treated as an abstract, truth-conditional object. The notion is not widely standardized and appears primarily in niche scholarly discussions, where it is used to distinguish propositional content from its linguistic form.

Etymology and scope: The word blends proposition with a suffix that in certain theoretical vocabularies marks a distinct category or unit. In practice, propositionele are invoked to emphasize that propositions can be studied independently of how they are realized in language. Some writers contrast propositionele with sentence-level representations or with illocutionary acts.

Formal treatment: In many accounts, a propositionele is modeled as an intension—a function from possible worlds to truth values. It encodes the content that can be asserted, believed, or questioned, and can be evaluated across alternative contexts. Logical operators such as negation, conjunction, and modality act on propositionele in ways analogous to their effects on propositions.

Context and use: The propositionele concept is often employed in analyses of attitude reports, belief ascriptions, and cross-linguistic or cross-dialect semantics, where researchers aim to separate content from linguistic form. This separation facilitates comparisons of propositional content that may be realized by different syntactic structures across languages.

See also: Propositional logic, proposition, intension, possible-world semantics, philosophy of language.