 Defensive Response #2. From ‘S believes that p’ we can infer ‘S believes the proposition that p’ and ‘S believes a proposition.’ And the same goes for ‘reject’, ‘assert’, ‘deny’, and many other attitude verbs. If we concede that these sentences assert relations to propositions, then we are conceding that there are propositions. Against this, it might be argued that the many substitution failures give us reason to rethink the cases in which the substitutions go through.