David Kelley's new work presents a groundbreaking theory of propositions, based on the theory of concepts developed by Ayn Rand in her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. As Rand noted, "The organization of concepts into propositions, and the wider principles of language...are outside the scope of this work." The goal of this paper is to develop an Objectivist theory of propositions.

Kelley’s paper focuses on two core issues about propositions:

Unity: A proposition has components put together in a certain structure. The proposition that dogs are animals is built from the concepts DOG and ANIMAL. But the proposition has a unity as the content of a complete thought, expressed in a grammatical sentence; and that unity goes beyond the mere combination of concepts. What explains the unity of a proposition?

Truth: Philosophers who hold that our knowledge is about reality typically say that truth means correspondence to facts. Yet the correspondence theory of truth has been notoriously difficult to defend, or even to state clearly, because of difficulties in accurate understanding of two concepts: facts as the things true propositions correspond to, and correspondence as a relation between true propositions and facts. How can this problem be overcome?

Kelley provides new answers to both questions, based on Rand’s theory of concepts and on her distinction between what exists intrinsically in reality apart from our minds; and what exists objectively, the identity of things as grasped through our cognitive processes.