That which is proposed or stated; the content of a declarative sentence, capable of truth and falsity. To grasp a proposition is to understand what is said, supposed, suggested, and so on. The same proposition is expressed by any two sentences, from the same or different languages, that are synonymous, or correctly intertranslatable (where translation is judged without regard to tone, rhythm, and other implicatures). The doctrine of the indeterminacy of radical translation casts doubt on the objectivity of this test, and some philosophers, notably Quine, have concluded that no respectable criteria of identity for propositions can be given. For some philosophers, propositions are the primary bearers of truth and falsity, with sentences only true and false derivatively, in virtue of expressing true and false propositions, but for others propositions are the doubtful shadows of what is empirically given, which are utterances in specific contexts. See also propositional attitude.