Abstract
Yablo’s Aboutness introduces powerful new set of tools for analyzing meaning. I compare his account of subject matter to the related ideas employed in the semantics literature on questions and focus. I then discuss two applications of subject matter: to presupposition triggering and to ascriptions of shared content.
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Notes
Some, like me, even talk about discourse referents, context change potentials, and so on, but these innovations are largely orthogonal to Yablo’s.
The appendix, incidentally is not in the book, but at http://www.mit.edu/~yablo/home/Papers_files/aboutness%20theory.
For Lewis it was an equivalence relation, Yablo gives convincing arguments why this is too restrictive a structure for his purposes.
The closest thing to a Yablovian subject matter for a single sentence is its focus value (see, e.g., Rooth 1985). So, for example, the sentence ‘LUCINDA ate the cheese’ has a focus value equivalent to the question ‘Who ate the cheese?’ Comparing focus values with Yablo’s subject matters would take us too far afield, but suffice it to say that neither reduces to the other though there are some overlaps.
In my view this is not because trivalence itself is suspect, but rather because it might be difficult to use trivalence too much in explaining different linguistic phenomena. It turns out that many uses of trivalence found in the literature are mutually incompatible (Soames 1989; Rothschild 2014; Spector 2015; Križ 2015).
Of course, the divisibility of the content is itself a matter of considerable debate in epistemology. However, at the least, we can all accept that the factive entailment (that p is true) can be true without John bearing any epistemic relation to p. Any further division would be rejected by those who follow Williamson (2000) in thinking that knowledge is unanalysable.
This strategy can be generalized beyond ‘know’: the king of France is bald’ both asserts the existence of a king of France and says that he is bald, ‘John stopped smoking’ both says that John used to smoke and that he doesn’t now....
Well, to be fair, you can’t divide a proposition it into more partitions than there are worlds in it. I leave as an exercise to the reader the calculation of the number of partitions.
Again note that there is no requirement that the conjuncts be logically independent: so this view is tenable for those who argue for the unanalyzability of knowledge.
For more examples see pp. 12–14.
To take this argument the opposite direction: Yablo’s program has much potential to explain these sorts of recalcitrant idiosyncrasies of natural language (see also, Fine 2012).
Yablo tells me that Timothy Williamson made a similar point during the Locke Lectures.
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Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Kit Fine and Stephen Yablo for discussion.
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Rothschild, D. Yablo’s semantic machinery. Philos Stud 174, 787–796 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0759-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0759-3