Aboutness

Stephen Yablo

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781400845989
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Langue en philosophie

Aboutness has been studied from any number of angles. Brentano made it the defining feature of the mental. Phenomenologists try to pin down the aboutness-features of particular mental states. Materialists sometimes claim to have grounded aboutness in natural regularities. Attempts have even been made, in library science and information theory, to operationalize the notion.
But it has played no real role in philosophical semantics. This is surprising; sentences have aboutness-properties if anything does. Aboutness is the first book to examine through a philosophical lens the role of subject matter in meaning.
A long-standing tradition sees meaning as truth-conditions, to be specified by listing the scenarios in which a sentence is true. Nothing is said about the principle of selection--about what in a scenario gets it onto the list. Subject matter is the missing link here. A sentence is true because of how matters stand where its subject matter is concerned.
Stephen Yablo maintains that this is not just a feature of subject matter, but its essence. One indicates what a sentence is about by mapping out logical space according to its changing ways of being true or false. The notion of content that results--directed content--is brought to bear on a range of philosophical topics, including ontology, verisimilitude, knowledge, loose talk, assertive content, and philosophical methodology.
Written by one of today's leading philosophers, Aboutness represents a major advance in semantics and the philosophy of language.

- 1 -

I Wasn’t Talking about That

1.1 EXCUSES

Carl Hempel, in whose honor these lectures are given, once wrote of some other lectures, given by Rudolf Carnap at Harvard in the 1930s. Carnap is supposed to have introduced his topic as follows:

Let A be some physical body, such as a stone, or a tree, or—to borrow an example from Russell—a dog.¹

I wish I could explain my topic the way Carnap explained his, with an example devised by Russell. But I am going to be talking about subject matter, meaning, truth, reasons for truth, contents, parts of contents, extricability of one content from another—as in Wittgenstein’s famous example of subtracting My arm went up from I raised my arm—and philosophical applications of the above. These sorts of notions do not especially lend themselves to introduction by example, or to the extent they do, the examples won’t mean much except surrounded by so much commentary as to defeat the purpose.²

I will try to set the mood with some stories. They are, to begin with anyway, on the theme of semantic excuses—excuses that might be given for saying things that are or may be untrue.

“You never take me out for ice cream any more,” Zina complained recently. I observed that we had been out for ice cream the day before, on her birthday. “I know,” she said, “I wasn’t talking about that.” This struck me at the time as not a very convincing reply.³ If you advance a generalization, and there are counterexamples, it seems a lame defense to say that you weren’t talking about them. Later, though, I realized matters were not so simple. For I was reminded of another story in which a basically similar excuse did not seem so lame.

The second story concerns a metaphysician named Sally. Her dissertation was on the same sort of topic as Carnap’s lectures: physical objects and their identity over time. This presented a problem when it came to applying for jobs, for one invariably speaks in this area about persistence through gain or loss of properties. And Sally didn’t want to take a position on the metaphysics of properties, or even on whether such things existed. She would explain at her interviews that when she spoke, for instance, of a tomato “losing the property of being green and gaining the property of being red,” this was not meant to express any sort of ontological commitment to redness as an entity in its own right. The issue was really to do with the tomato and its changing color. One of the interviewers took issue with this approach. Properties are not real, he said. To speak of “them” as gained or lost is just false; it is advisable at a job interview to stick to the truth.

I will leave the rest of the story to a footnote,⁴ because the aspect that matters to us is this: Sally made a statement implying the existence of properties, a statement that she knew to be false if properties didn’t exist. But she was absolutely unbothered by the possibility that properties didn’t exist. Her excuse for this insouciance was that her topic was material objects and how they persist through change—not the properties, if such there be, of those objects.

But, how is it an excuse for asserting falsehoods (or potential false-hoods) to explain that one was talking about such and such? How is misrepresenting the facts in the course of addressing a certain topic any better than misrepresenting them with topic unspecified?

An answer is suggested by my third story. The third story is due to Nelson Goodman and Joseph Ullian, in a paper called “Truth about Jones” (Ullian and Goodman 1977). Jones is on trial for murder and Falstaff is chief witness for the defense. Jones’s attorney concedes there is a problem with Falstaff’s testimony: It is false. That would seem to make the testimony worthless, but the attorney (Lupoli, he’s called) thinks he sees a way out. The testimony was indeed about his client Jones—no getting around that. And it was false—no getting around that, either. But, Lupoli insists, the testimony was not false about Jones. The judge calls this nonsense and declares a recess, threatening Lupoli with contempt unless he can explain how the very same sentences can be (i) false, and (ii) about Jones, yet not (iii) false about Jones.

I hope you see a connection with the earlier stories. Just as Zina and Sally were not concerned if their statements were strictly speaking false, Lupoli does not care if Falstaff’s testimony was false. It is enough for Lupoli if the testimony was partly true—true in what it said about Jones. Maybe that should be Zina’s excuse, too. “You never take me to Friendly’s” may not have been true overall, but it was true about what usually happens, birthdays aside. And maybe it should be Sally’s excuse; it is enough for her if “The tomato lost one property and gained another” was true in what it said about the tomato. Maybe it is enough, in some contexts, if a statement is partly true—true in what it says about the subject matter under discussion.

1.2 PURITANISM

This idea of being partly true is apt to arouse suspicion. It is hard not to share the judge’s frustration when he threatens Lupoli with contempt. The phrase “partly true” is perfectly good English, of course. Apparently it was decent Greek too; the creation myth in the Phaedrus is described by Socrates as “partly true and tolerably credible.” When Cratylus tells Socrates it would be “nonsensical” to address him using somebody else’s name, Socrates responds, “Well, but [it] will be quite enough for me, if you will tell me whether the nonsense would be true or false, or partly true and partly false:—which is all that I want to know.” That is actually not a bad statement of one theme of these lectures: sometimes whether a statement is partly true is all that we want to know.

Why, then, do I say that it doesn’t come naturally to us to settle for partial truth? Consider a fourth story, this one due to the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. (She didn’t consider it just a story, of course.) Newborns, in Klein’s view, face an enormous cognitive challenge—they have to put the things that gratify them together with the things that frustrate them into a single world. They must take it on board, as Klein put it, that the good breast, which turns up when they’re hungry, and the bad breast, which is withheld, are the very same breast. This hurdle is usually cleared at around four months, she thinks, at which point the infant moves from the paranoid-schizoid position to the apparently far preferable depressive position.

That, anyway, is the normal case. Occasionally, the integration challenge proves too great, and the individual never really wraps their mind around the fact that a thing can have good and bad in it. The result is the cognitive style known as “black/white thinking” or “polarized thinking.” A black/white thinker is the type of person who loves you or hates you, according to how recently you’ve disappointed them. They’re the type of person, more generally, who insists on dividing the world up into good, full stop, and bad, full stop.

This kind of attitude is familiar with kids, of course, and forgivable there. I recall my son Isaac squirming around in his seat at the movie Shrek, unable to settle down until he knew whether Donkey (the Eddie Murphy character) was a good donkey or a bad donkey.

But imagine you’re watching the news with full-grown neighbors, and all they want to talk about is: Is this Hugo Chávez fellow a good man or a bad man? When you try to suggest it’s more complicated than that, they reject this as spineless evasion. Answer the question, they say. That is black/white thinking, and it surely deserves its reputation as pathological.

Our assessment changes, though, when the focus shifts from goodness to truth. Demanding to know whether a statement is true, full stop, or false, full stop, is considered forthright and healthy minded, not pathological in the least. It is almost as if, having lost our Kleinian paranoia about goodness, there was no energy left to outgrow the analogous attitude about truth. A second theme of these lectures is that this is nevertheless worth doing, or insofar as we’ve already done it, owning up to doing. Let us put the paranoid-schizoid position on truth behind us, and go boldly forth to the depressive position. (I admit it’s not the best rallying cry.)

1.3 PARTIAL TRUTH AS TRUTH OF A PART

There are two questions at this point: What is partial truth? And why would we be willing settle for it? The second question I want to leave until later. The quick answer is that there are areas where if it wasn’t for partial truth, we wouldn’t, or might not, have any truth at all.⁵

But that, as I say, I want to leave aside the time being, to focus on the other question. What is it for a hypothesis to be partly true?⁶ Here is the naivest possible idea about this:

1 A hypothesis is partly true iff it has parts that are wholly true.

Now we must ask what is meant by part of a hypothesis. The naivest possible idea about part/whole as a relation on hypotheses is

2 One hypothesis is part of another iff it is implied by the other.⁷

A includes B, in other words, just if it implies B.

The naivest possible idea about partial truth is on the right track, I think; something is partly true to the extent it has (nontrivial) parts that are wholly true.⁸ But the naivest possible idea about what it takes for A to include B is questionable.

A paradigm of inclusion, I take it, is the relation that simple conjunctions bear to their conjuncts—the relation Snow is white and expensive bears, for example, to Snow is white. A paradigm of noninclusion is the relation disjuncts bear to disjunctions; Snow is white does not have Snow is white or expensive as a part. This is not predicted by (2). Disjuncts imply their disjunctions every bit as much as conjunctions imply their conjuncts. There is more to inclusion than implication, apparently.

You might say that paradigm case intuitions are a poor basis for theory. But the intuitions here are systematic. A number of things suggest that parthood has an explanatory role to play that requires it to be more than mere implication.

Saying: Someone who says that snow is white and expensive has said, among other things, that snow is white. This is not all they’ve said, but they have said it. To describe snow as white, however, is not to say inter alia that it is white or expensive. Why, when there is implication in both cases? Saying-that transmits down to the parts of what is said more easily than to “mere consequences,” meaning by this consequences that are not also parts.⁹

Agreement: If I describe snow as w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• How to Read This Book
• Introduction
• 1 I Wasn’t Talking about That
• 2 Varieties of Aboutness
• 3 Inclusion in Metaphysics and Semantics
• 4 A Semantic Conception of Truthmaking
• 5 The Truth and Something But the Truth
• 6 Confirmation and Verisimilitude
• 7 Knowing That and Knowing About
• 8 Extrapolation and Its Limits
• 9 Going On in the Same Way
• 10 Pretense and Presupposition
• 11 The Missing Premise
• 12 What Is Said
• Appendix. Nomenclature
• Bibliography
• Index