Sentence examples for Indicative sentences from inspiring English sources
Indicative sentences apt for expressing these mental states (in one sense of 'express') also semantically express the contents of these nondescriptive states just as on a more standard picture indicative sentences semantically express the propositions that are the contents of sentences that (in a different sense of 'express') express beliefs.
For indicative sentences, such contents are typically called Propositions.
They are, after all, typically expressed in indicative sentences, and people appear to dispute moral claims.
Minimal beliefs would need only to be states of mind expressed in assertions by indicative sentences, while robust beliefs would meet some stronger requirement of representationality (Blackburn 2006).
Such theorists regard it as a platitude about indicative sentences that they are conventionally apt for making assertions and that assertions express beliefs.
They think that typical utterances of indicative sentences containing moral predicates express beliefs in the same way that other sentences with ordinary descriptive predicates typically do.
Strawson claimed that such a sentence is meaningful but neither true nor false, because its presupposition that there is a present king of France is false; he thus challenged the widely held view that every indicative sentence is either true or false.
So the truth condition of an indicative sentence is the set of possible worlds in which it is true.
Minimalism allows us to generate a minimal truth condition for any meaningful indicative sentence, such as 'Lying is wrong' is true iff lying is wrong.
One can consistently hold that an indicative sentence has truth value, and even that it may be uttered in such a way as to say something true, while denying that its utterance is an assertion.
Competent speakers are usually well aware when a grammatically indicative sentence is being used to give a command or express a desire (indeed, this is one of the criteria of linguistic competence!).
