scholarly journals Why Aboutness Matters: Meta-Fictionalism as a Case Study

Philosophia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Plebani

Abstract Recent work in the philosophy of language attempts to elucidate the elusive notion of aboutness (Berto 2018; Lewis 1988; Fine 2017a, b; Hawke 2017; Moltmann 2018; Yablo 2014). A natural question concerning such a project has to do with its motivation: why is the notion of aboutness important? Stephen Yablo (2014) offers an interesting answer: taking into consideration not only the conditions under which a sentence is true, but also what a sentence is about opens the door to a new style of criticism of certain philosophical analyses. We might criticize the analysis of a given notion not because it fails to assign the right truth conditions to a class of sentences, but because it characterizes those sentences as being about something they are not about. In this paper, I apply Yablo’s suggestion to a case study. I consider meta-fictionalism, the view that the content of a mathematical claim S is ‘according to standard mathematics, S’. I argue, following Woodward (2013), that, on certain assumptions, meta-fictionalism assigns the right truth-conditions to typical assertoric utterances of mathematical statements. However, I also argue that meta-fictionalism assigns the wrong aboutness conditions to typical assertoric utterances of mathematical statements.

Author(s):  
Charles Fefferman

This chapter illustrates the continuing powerful influence of Eli Stein's ideas. It starts by recalling his ideas on Littlewood–Paley theory, as well as several major developments in pure and applied mathematics, to which those ideas gave rise. Before Eli, Littlewood–Paley theory was one of the deepest parts of the classical study of Fourier series in one variable. Stein, however, found the right viewpoint to develop Littlewood–Paley theory and went on to develop Littlewood–Paley theory on any compact Lie group, and then in any setting in which there is a reasonable heat kernel. Afterward, the chapter discusses the remarkable recent work of Gressman and Strain on the Boltzmann equation, and explains in particular its connection to Stein's work.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-53
Author(s):  
Maheswaree Kissoon Curumsing ◽  
Antonio Lopez-Lorca ◽  
Timothy Miller ◽  
Leon Sterling ◽  
Rajesh Vasa

In modern software development, considering the viewpoints of stakeholders is an important step in building the right system. Over the past decade, several authors have proposed solutions to capture and model these viewpoints. While these solutions have been successful, one viewpoint they have largely ignored is the emotional viewpoint of stakeholders. Considering the emotional needs of stakeholders is important, because users' perceptions of a product are influenced by emotion as much as cognition. Building on their recent work in modelling the emotional goals of stakeholders, the authors extend an existing viewpoint framework to capture emotional viewpoints, and to carry these from early-phase requirements to detailed software design. They demonstrate this with a case study of an emergency alarm system for older people, presenting the entire suite of models for this case study.


Author(s):  
Stephen Yablo

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. However, it has played no real role in philosophical semantics, which is surprising. This 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. This book 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. The book represents a major advance in semantics and the philosophy of language.


Author(s):  
Claire Voisin

This book provides an introduction to algebraic cycles on complex algebraic varieties, to the major conjectures relating them to cohomology, and even more precisely to Hodge structures on cohomology. The book is intended for both students and researchers, and not only presents a survey of the geometric methods developed in the last thirty years to understand the famous Bloch-Beilinson conjectures, but also examines recent work by the author. It focuses on two central objects: the diagonal of a variety—and the partial Bloch-Srinivas type decompositions it may have depending on the size of Chow groups—as well as its small diagonal, which is the right object to consider in order to understand the ring structure on Chow groups and cohomology. An exploration of a sampling of recent works by the author looks at the relation, conjectured in general by Bloch and Beilinson, between the coniveau of general complete intersections and their Chow groups and a very particular property satisfied by the Chow ring of K3 surfaces and conjecturally by hyper-Kähler manifolds. In particular, the book delves into arguments originating in Nori's work that have been further developed by others.


2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (11) ◽  
pp. 3903-3907
Author(s):  
Galina Marusic ◽  
Valeriu Panaitescu

The paper deals with the issues related to the pollution of aquatic ecosystems. The influence of turbulence on the transport and dispersion of pollutants in the mentioned systems, as well as the calculation of the turbulent diffusion coefficients are studied. A case study on the determination of turbulent diffusion coefficients for some sectors of the Prut River is presented. A new method is proposed for the determination of the turbulent diffusion coefficients in the pollutant transport equation for specific sectors of a river, according to the associated number of P�clet, calculated for each specific area: the left bank, the right bank and the middle of the river.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Varun Sharma ◽  
Narpat Singh

In the recent research work, the handwritten signature is a suitable field to detection of valid signature from different environment such online signature and offline signature. In early research work, a lot of unauthorized person put the signature and theft the data in illegal manner from organization or industries. So we have to need identify, the right person on the basis of various parameters that can be detected. In this paper, we have proposed two methods namely LDA and Neural Network for the offline signature from the scan signature image. For efficient research, we have focused the comparative analysis in terms of FRR, SSIM, MSE, and PSNR. These parameters are compared with the early work and the recent work. Our proposed work is more effective and provides the suitable result through our method which leads to existing work. Our method will help to find legal signature of authorized use for security and avoid illegal work.


1967 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 509-524 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. J. O. Dudley

In the debate on the Native Authority (Amendment) Law of 1955, the late Premier of the North, Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto, replying to the demand that ‘it is high time in the development of local government systems in this Region that obsolete and undemocratic ways of appointing Emirs’ Councils should close’, commented that ‘the right traditions that we have gone away from are the cutting off of the hands of thieves, and that has caused a lot of thieving in this country. Why should we not be cutting (off) the hands of thieves in order to reduce thieving? That is logical and it is lawful in our tradition and custom here.’ This could be read as a defence against social change, a recrudescence of ‘barbarism’ after the inroads of pax Britannica, and a plea for the retention of the status quo and the entrenched privilege of the political elite.


Archaeologia ◽  
1844 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 138-143
Author(s):  
Evan Nepean

The public curiosity has been much roused by Stevens's recent work on Central America, as well as by the late visit of Mr. Walker and Captain Caddy of the Artillery, to Palenque, and other ancient cities in that quarter.I have the honour to acquaint your Lordship, as President of the Society of Antiquaries, that, having been lately on service in the gulph of Mexico, whilst laying off the island of Sacrificios, I caused several excavations to be made there, and succeeded in digging up various articles of pottery, idols, and musical instruments; amongst other specimens, are three or four types, or signets, with hieroglyphics, which may perhaps throw some light on the origin of the Mexicans, or the still more ancient race that preceded them.


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