Abstract
A reply to Fine’s critique of Aboutness. Fine contrasts two notions of truthmaker, and more generally two notions of “state.” One is algebraic; states are sui generis entities grasped primarily through the conditions they satisfy. The other uses set theory; states are sets of worlds, or, perhaps, collections of such sets. I try to defend the second notion and question some seeming advantages of the first.
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Notes
Yablo (2014).
van Fraassen was dividing his time in those days between Los Angeles and Toronto, where Kit and I respectively lived. Surely this is how we got the idea of fact semantics. But, Kit had already had the idea, and Bas was teaching me basic logic.
Humberstone (1981).
Kratzer (2010).
Kratzer (2002).
This is a plural analogue of the requirement that each A-verifier includes a B-verifier.
The clumsiness can to some extent be avoided by adopting Fine’s way of talking, while treating “\({{{\mathbf {\mathtt{{a}}}}}}\) \(\wedge\) \({{{\mathbf {\mathtt{{b}}}}}}\) includes \({{{\mathbf {\mathtt{{c}}}}}}\)” as code for “\({{{\mathbf {\mathtt{{a}}}}}}\) and \({{{\mathbf {\mathtt{{b}}}}}}\) include \({{{\mathbf {\mathtt{{c}}}}}}\) between them.”
Quine had it backwards, on this view, when he said that ontology recapitulates philology.
(T) is in the spirit of Tarski and Davidson; (T\(^\prime\)) is perhaps more like Frege.
“Necessitation for the world theorist is nothing more than the subset relation, and that relation is too coarse-grained to distinguish parts from mere consequences.” But it is the special relata that are supposed to carry this burden, not a special relation. “How are we supposed to pick out the special relata? States of Fine’s sort (unlike sets of worlds) are non-disjunctive by nature.” True, but this just pushes the problem back a step, for how are the genuine Finean states to be distinguished from the pretenders?
This all goes by very quickly in Aboutness; van Fraassen-type states are definitely not the focus.
Fine sketches this construction himself, he points out, in Fine (2016).
Or, a pair of sets of coarse-grained states, one specifying what it takes for \({{{\mathbf {\mathtt{{s}}}}}}\) to obtain, the other what it takes for \({{{\mathbf {\mathtt{{s}}}}}}\) to fail.
Fine distinguishes three standards by which subject matter identity might be judged (these are given below). He takes them all seriously, but expresses in the end a preference for the third and laxest standard. This is the standard I foist on him in the main text. His true position is more ecumenical.
Fine does not see the point of this: “For although we might reasonably insist that it should be necessary for P to contain Q that the subject matter of Q be included in that of P, it is not clear why containment should not amount, in the presence of the forward condition, to something more than subject matter preservation.” Perhaps. But subject matter preservation ought to carry this load, arguably. At least this has been a recurrent theme in relevance logic; Fine mentions Parry (1989).
Similarly There are twin primes (primes differing by 2) threatens to agree in subject matter with There are primes.
Better, not between “general propositions,” propositions to which every part of the grid is potentially relevant.
No such defense can be given of It is and isn’t, which is a much stranger thing to say.
Further reducible, perhaps, to \({{{\mathbf {\mathtt{{q}}}}}}\)–\({{{\mathbf {\mathtt{{p}}}}}}\).
See Yablo (2016).
References
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Fine, K. (2012). Counterfactuals without possible worlds. The Journal of Philosophy, 109(3), 221–246.
Fine, K. (2013). Truth-maker semantics for intuitionistic logic. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 43, 1–29.
Fine, K. (2016). Constructing the impossible. In L. Walters, & J. Hawthorne (Eds.), Conditionals, probability, and paradox: Themes from the philosophy of Dorothy Edgington. Oxford: OUP.
Humberstone, I. L. (1981). From worlds to possibilities. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 10:313–340, Ag 81 1981. English.
Kratzer, A. (2002). Facts: Particulars or information units. Linguistics and Philosophy, 25(5–6), 655–670.
Kratzer, A. (2010). Situations in natural language semantics. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Stanford, CA: CSLI, Stanford University.
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Parry, W. T. (1989). Analytic implication; its history, justification and varieties. In Directions in relevant logic (pp. 101–118). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Van Fraassen, B. C. (1969). Facts and tautological entailment. The Journal of Philosophy, 66(15), 477–487.
Yablo, S. (2014). Aboutness. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Yablo, S. (2016). Ifs, ands, and buts: An incremental truthmaker semantics for indicative conditionals. Analytic Philosophy, 57(3), 175–213.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the participants in a workshop on the book held in the Summer of 2015 at the University of Hamburg—especially Ken Gemes, Mark Jago, Daniel Rothschild, Katharina Felka, Stephan Kraemer, Benjamin Schnieder, Robert Schwartzkopff, and Kit Fine. Enormous additional thanks to Kit for his hospitality to a sometimes straggling fellow traveler.
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Yablo, S. Reply to Fine on Aboutness . Philos Stud 175, 1495–1512 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0922-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0922-5