Why Aboutness Matters: Meta-Fictionalism as a Case Study

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.

Sosein as Subject Matter

(Neo)Meinongians in general, and Routley in particular, subscribe to the principle of the independence of Sosein from Sein (Routley 1980). In this paper, I put forward an interpretation of the independence principle that philosophers working outside the Meinongian tradition can accept. Drawing on recent work by Stephen Yablo and others on the notion of subject matter, I offer a new account of the notion of Sosein (Being-so) as a subject matter (or topic) and argue that in some cases Sosein might be independent from Sein (Being, Existence). The question whether numbers exist, for instance, is not part of the question of how numbers are, which is the topic mathematicians are interested in.

Closet Dualism and Mental Causation

Serious doubts about nonreductive materialism — the orthodoxy of the past two decades in philosophy of mind — have been long overdue. Jaegwon Kim has done perhaps the most to articulate the metaphysical problems that the new breed of materialists must confront in reconciling their physicalism with their commitment to the autonomy of the mental. Although the difficulties confronting supervenience, multiple-realizability, and mental causation have been recurring themes in his work, only mental causation — in particular, the specter of epiphenomenalism — has really captured the interest of philosophers in general in recent years.This growing attention has spawned a large body of literature, which it is not our aim here to explore or assess. Rather, we want to call attention to what we believe is a new and quite different argumentative strategy against epiphenomenalism voiced in some recent articles by Tyler Burge and Stephen Yablo. Each has challenged two central assumptions of the existing mental causation debate.