Yablo - Aboutness

Aboutness

Carl G. Hempel Lecture Series

Aboutness

Stephen Yablo

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2014 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

press.princeton.edu

Jacket illustration: Birds of a Feather Oleg Shuplyak

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Yablo, Stephen.

Aboutness / Stephen Yablo.

pages cm. (Carl G. Hempel lecture series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-14495-5 (hardcover)

1. Semantics (Philosophy) 2. Definition (Philosophy) 3. Meaning (Philosophy) I. Title.

B840.Y33 2014
110dc23

2013049375

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Sabon Next LT Pro

Printed on acid-free paper.

Typeset by S R Nova Pvt Ltd, Bangalore, India
Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Contents

Preface

This book is based on my 2008 Hempel Lectures. , on truthmakers, is the newest and, may I say, the least fun. How a few hours of spoken word turned into so many pages of text, I dont know. Either the lectures were incomprehensibly dense, or the book overexplains things, I suppose; maybe both. For their comments and kindness on that occasion, I would like to thank Sarah McGrath, Bas van Fraassen, John Burgess, Tom Kelly, Elizabeth Harman, Dan Garber, Tori McGeer, Phillip Pettit, Paul Benacerraf, and Harry Frankfurt. Michael Smith interpreted Princeton for me from Australia. Conversations with Gideon Rosen on truthmaking were a huge influence. I have benefited as much from Gideons input as anyones.

The Hempel ideas were reworked (in one case, preworked) for presentation at the University of Michigan (Nelson Lectures, 2007), Barcelona University (a minicourse in fall 2008), Stanford (Kant Lectures, 2011), and Oxford (Locke Lectures, 2012). I owe thanks, at Michigan, to Jim Joyce, Thony Gillies, Eric Swanson, Allan Gibbard, Andy Egan, Sarah Buss, Richmond Thomason, and Peter Railton; at Barcelona, to Miquel Miralbs del Pino, Manuel Garcia-Carpintero, Jos Diez, Gemma Celestino, Dan Lpez da Sa, Max Klbel, Pablo Rychter, Therese Marques, Genoveva Marti, Sven Rosenkranz, and Manolo Martnez; at Stanford, to Mark Crimmins, Debra Satz, Alexis Burgess, Krista Lawlor, Tamar Schapiro, Ken Taylor, Solomon Feferman, David Hills, Wes Holliday, and Johan van Benthem; and at Oxford, to Cian Dorr, Daniel Rothschild, Anandi Hattiangadi, Ofra Magidor, Scott Sturgeon, Maya Spener, John Broome, Jessica Moss, Jeremy Goodman, Jennifer Nagel, Alan Code, and Ian Rumfitt. Cian and Daniel were particularly generous with ideas and time.

Kit Fine assigned the manuscript in his spring 2013 semantics seminar at NYU, and invited me down for discussion. There were questionsmore like polite advisories, in some casesfrom Yu Gao, Martin Zavaleta, Vera Flocke, Martin Glazier, Erica Schumener, and Joshua Armstrong, some of which led to changes in the text, others of which should have but didnt.

I first encountered Kits work in this area at the Because II conference on noncausal explanation (Humboldt University, 2010). His paper was Truthmaker Semantics, mine A Semantic Conception of Truthmakers. Having a topic in common with Kit is one of the better fates that can befall a philosopher. I highly recommend it. Any number of points and examples trace back in some way to Kit. I tried to hold the line at six acknowledgments; it could have been dozens.

I arrived at MIT a fictionalist, or figuralist, about various matters. One makes as if to assert that A, on this view, in order to really assert that RR being the real-world condition that authorizes the feigned assertion. The linguistics colleagues who did not succeed in avoiding me found this fanciful, and I resolved to put the project on a more respectable footing. A paper of Kai von Fintels on (what I call) noncatastrophic presupposition failure pointed the way (von Fintel 2004). Ideas about presupposition and implicature were batted around with, and occasionally down by, Danny Fox. I benefitted as well from a stint as head of P when Irene Heim was head of L. (Ours is the department of L&PLinguistics and Philosophy.)

I owe thanks, on the philosophy side, to Robert Stalnaker, for the stimulus of his work and his openness to ideas of which he does not necessarily approve. I am grateful to Agustn Rayo for manifold interlocutory contributions and comments on an early draft. Richard Holton worked through, and taught, some of this material, and threw a number of ideas my way, like the idea of subject-matter-directed attitudes: wondering about, knowing about, being deceived about, and so on. Brad Skow, Sally Haslanger, Vann McGee, Rae Langton, Roger White, Alex Byrne, and Caspar Hare all made comments that changed the book in some way.

In the category of seminar exchanges, miniconferences, work in progress sessions, and drunken misunderstandings, the thankees are Brian Hedden, Rae Langton, Dan Greco, Ekaterina Vavova, Frank Arntzenius, Melissa Schumacher, David Liebesman, Mark Richard, Andrew Graham, Rebecca Millsap, Eric Swanson, Ruth Chang, Andy Egan, Benjamin Schnieder, Shamik Dasgupta, Seth Yalcin, Alejandro Prez-Carballo, Ephraim Glick, Elizabeth Barnes, Mahrad Almotohari, Bernhard Salow, Anne Bezuidenhout, Susanna Rinard, Ross Cameron, Paolo Santorio, and Sarah Moss. Thanks, all.

For correspondence and discussion, I am grateful to Hartry Field, Matti Eklund, L. A. Paul, Jonathan Schaffer, Timothy Williamson, Louise Antony, Carlotta Pavese, Stew Cohen, Jonathan Vogel, Levi Spectre, Delia Graff Fara, David Kaplan, Jim Pryor, Gerhard Nuffer, Ted Sider, David Lewis, Frank Jackson, Francois Reanati, Zoltan Szabo, Lloyd Humberstone, Brian Weatherson, Chris Peacocke, Jason Stanley, Karen Bennett, Keith DeRose, Bob Hale, Charles Parsons, Amie Thomasson, Crispin Wright, Mark Colyvan, and John MacFarlane.

Johan van Benthem read the whole manuscript and sent comments from China. This was unexpected and wonderful.

I owe thanks to two anonymous referees for Princeton University Press for their ideas and advice. One asked, reasonably enough, what subjectmatters are of, on my account. I think the answer is sentences in context, as suggested originally by Kaplan. Another asked how the views expressed here relate to my earlier fictionalism/figuralism. I chose to interpret this as a question not about myself, but figuralism and presuppositionalism as such. The answer is found in the last few chapters: figuralism wins on power, presuppositionalism on plausibility. Both referees thought the book was too complicated. I wish I could have fixed that.

A different sort of debt is owed to Ken Gemes and Lloyd Humberstone, for creating, with their work on content-parts (Gemes 1994, Gemes 1997, Gemes 2007a, Gemes 2007b, among many others), subject matter (Humberstone 2000), partial truth (Humberstone 2003), and logical subtraction (Humberstone 1981, Humberstone 2011, 657687), the present area of study.

This work was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. My thanks to the people who made that possible. Rob Tempio, Karen Carter, and Ryan Mulligan, at Princeton University Press, were terrific throughout.

As explained on the first page, it all ultimately goes back to Zina. I thank her for the things she wasnt talking about, and the things she was. Schooling me on aboutness went better than teaching me how to Dougie, but thank you, Zina, for both, and the concerts and long drives and stories. My son is no longer a boy, but thank you, Isaac, for your boyish ways, and grasp of situations, and for coming home on holidays. Sally knows how I feel.