Aboutness
Stephen Yablo
Princeton University Press
<p>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.</p> <p> But it has played no real role in philosophical semantics. This is surprising; sentences have aboutness-properties if anything does. <i>Aboutness</i> is the first book to examine through a philosophical lens the role of subject matter in meaning.</p> <p> 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.</p> <p> 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.</p> <p> Written by one of today's leading philosophers, <i>Aboutness</i> represents a major advance in semantics and the philosophy of language.</p>