I Wasn’t Talking about That

Aboutness ◽  
2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Yablo
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Epistemic Modals ◽  
Empirical Adequacy ◽  
Independent Factor ◽  
Van Fraassen ◽  
Partial Truth ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
Ways Of Being

This chapter argues that partial truth is apt to strike us as sneaky, unclean, the last refuge of a scoundrel. But, whether a statement is partly true, or true in what it says about BLAH, may be all that we want to know. A statement S is partly true insofar as it has wholly true parts: wholly true implications whose subject matter is included in that of S. An account of subject matter will thus be needed, and of the relation (“aboutness”) that sentences bear to their subject matters, if we want to understand partial truth. Aboutness has been somewhat neglected in philosophy. But not entirely; think of Frege on identity, Kripke on counterparts, van Fraassen on empirical adequacy, Yalcin on epistemic modals, and Hempel on confirmation. Subject matter will be treated here as an independent factor in meaning, over and above truth-conditional content. Not completely independent, though, for what a sentence is about is tied up with its ways of being true and false.

Introduction

Aboutness ◽  
2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Yablo
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Independent Factor ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
The World ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
In Fire ◽  
Ways Of Being

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book makes subject matter an independent factor in meaning, constrained but not determined by truth-conditions. A sentence's meaning is to do with its truth-value in various possible scenarios, and the factors responsible for that truth-value. No new machinery is required to accommodate this. The proposition that S is made up of the scenarios where S is true; S's reasons for, or ways of, being true are just additional propositions. When Frost writes, The world will end in fire or in ice, the truth-conditional meaning of his statement is an undifferentiated set of scenarios. Its “enhanced” meaning is the same set, subdivided into fiery-end worlds and icy-end worlds.

Aboutness

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Yablo
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Library Science ◽  
Philosophical Methodology ◽  
Major Advance ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Made In

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.

Varieties of Aboutness

Aboutness ◽  
2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Yablo
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
David Lewis ◽  
Equivalence Relations ◽  
Logical Space ◽  
Nelson Goodman ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
The One ◽  
Ways Of Being

A few philosophers have tried to think systematically about subject matter. Gilbert Ryle thought a sentence was about the items mentioned in it. Nelson Goodman thought it was about the items mentioned in certain consequences. David Lewis was the first to consider subject matters as entities in their own right, and the first to link a sentence's subject matter to what it says, as opposed to what it mentions. Lewisian subject matters are equivalence relations on, or partitions of, logical space. A sentence S is wholly about m if its truth-value in a world w is fixed by how matters stand m-wise in w. But he never identified anything as the subject matter of sentence S—the one it is exactly about. This chapter defines it as the m that distinguishes worlds according to S's changing ways of being true in them. Subject anti-matter is defined analogously, and S's overall subject matter is the two together. Aboutness comes out independent of truth-value, as we would hope. A sentence is not about anything different from its negation.

Generalized Update Semantics

Mind ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 128 (511) ◽  
pp. 795-835
Author(s):  
Simon Goldstein
Keyword(s):  
Modal Logic ◽  
Dynamic Semantics ◽  
Epistemic Modals ◽  
Kripke Semantics ◽  
Dynamic Update ◽  
Update Semantics ◽  
Construction Procedure ◽  
Special Cases ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This paper explores the relationship between dynamic and truth conditional semantics for epistemic modals. It provides a generalization of a standard dynamic update semantics for modals. This new semantics derives a Kripke semantics for modals and a standard dynamic semantics for modals as special cases. The semantics allows for new characterizations of a variety of principles in modal logic, including the inconsistency of ‘p and might not p’. Finally, the semantics provides a construction procedure for transforming any truth conditional semantics for modals into a dynamic semantics for modals with similar properties.

Inclusion in Metaphysics and Semantics

Aboutness ◽  
2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Yablo
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
The Given ◽  
Ways Of Being

This chapter argues that parts are subject to a principle of upward difference transmission: tweaking them makes for variation in their containing wholes. The principle is highly schematic; different differences are passed along according to the sort of entity involved. If x and y are material objects, intrinsic variation in x makes for intrinsic variation in y. If they are properties, it is changes in how they are exemplified that percolate up. If they are statements, it is variation in how they are true. This provides a second route to our conception of content-parts as consequences whose ways of being true “change less quickly.” Sometimes A and B are given, and we can apply the definition directly. Other times only A is given, and our task is to construct the part of A that concerns the given subject matter.

Epistemic modals and probability operators

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Moss
Keyword(s):  
Epistemic Modals ◽  
Full Belief ◽  
Probabilistic Semantics ◽  
Probability Operators ◽  
Probability Spaces ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
Simple Sentences ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Semantic Values

This chapter defends a semantics for epistemic modals and probability operators. This semantics is probabilistic—that is, sentences containing these expressions have sets of probability spaces as their semantic values relative to a context. Existing non-truth-conditional semantic theories of epistemic modals face serious problems when it comes to interpreting nested modal constructions such as ‘it must be possible that Jones smokes’. The semantics in this chapter solves these problems, accounting for several significant features of nested epistemic vocabulary. The chapter ends by defending a probabilistic semantics for simple sentences that do not contain any epistemic vocabulary, and by using this semantics to illuminate the relationship between credence and full belief.

scholarly journals Epistemic modals

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 422-436
Author(s):  
Zoltán Vecsey
Keyword(s):  
Epistemic Modals ◽  
Standard Account ◽  
Epistemic Modal ◽  
Truth Values ◽  
The Core ◽  
Truth Conditional

In recent years, the standard account of epistemic modal discourse has been criticized from two directions. Expressivists and dynamic semanticists argue that simple epistemic modal sentences should be understood as non-truth-conditional. Relativists hold that the truth values of epistemic modal sentences are determined by the features of their contexts of assessment. I argue below that one can integrate the core insights of these critical stances without falling into contradiction.

Words

PMLA ◽  
1935 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 1320-1327
Author(s):  
Colbert Searles
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Assistant Professor ◽  
The Subject

THE germ of that which follows came into being many years ago in the days of my youth as a university instructor and assistant professor. It was generated by the then quite outspoken attitude of colleagues in the “exact sciences”; the sciences of which the subject-matter can be exactly weighed and measured and the force of its movements mathematically demonstrated. They assured us that the study of languages and literature had little or nothing scientific about it because: “It had no domain of concrete fact in which to work.” Ergo, the scientific spirit was theirs by a stroke of “efficacious grace” as it were. Ours was at best only a kind of “sufficient grace,” pleasant and even necessary to have, but which could, by no means ensure a reception among the elected.

Influence of subject matter expert personality on job analysis ratings

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shonna D. Waters ◽  
Richard N. Landers ◽  
Nicholas Brenckman
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Job Analysis ◽  
Subject Matter Expert
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document