Semantic Values, Beliefs, and Belief Reports

It is commonly assumed that propositions play a number of different theoretical roles. At one and the same time, propositions are supposed to be the semantic values of sentences, the objects of propositional attitudes, the contents of that-clauses, the contents of illocutionary acts, as well as the bearers of truth-values and modal properties. In this paper, I will focus on the first three of these roles. I will inquire into the question of whether propositions can play all three roles simultaneously and what kind of objects they have to be to do so. I am going to argue that they cannot be standard propositions, i.e. entities whose truth-value varies only relative to a possible world, to play any one of the roles. As it turns out, we will need rather nonstandard entities, if we want something to do all the jobs at once.