Abstract

According to an act-based conception of propositions, propositions are types of cognitive or linguistic acts. Such accounts are advertised as having major metaphysical and epistemological advantages over traditional platonic accounts. However, existing versions of such accounts appeal to platonic properties and relations in order to account for the contents expressed by predicates, reintroducing many of the problems they aim to solve. Characterizing both *that a is F* and *that it’s F* as different types of “assertibles” (the former can be asserted full-stop and the latter can be asserted of things), the issue can be seen as a limitation of existing act-based approaches: they apply only to a restricted class of assertibles. In this paper, I show how adopting a normative functionalist approach to linguistic meaning enables one to generalize the act-based approach to all assertibles such that no appeal to extrinsic properties and relations is needed. I show, further, how this radicalized act-based account provides the resources for a satisfactory account of our knowledge of objective states of affairs, properties, and relations (which I dub “instantiables”) in terms of our mastery of linguistic norms.