The subject matter fallacy

Abstract

The subject matter fallacy is the fallacy of supposing that the content of a statement or a belief consists in the conditions the truth of the statement or belief puts on its subject matter: the objects the statement or belief is about. Consider my belief that Hillary Clinton is a resident of New York. The subject matter of this belief are the things and conditions (properties, relations) it is about: Hillary Clinton, the state of New York, and the relation of being a resident of. For the belief to be true, these objects have to meet certain conditions; the first two must bear the third to one another; that is, Hillary Clinton must be a resident of New York. It is quite natural, then, to take the proposition that Hillary Clinton is a resident of New York to be to be the content of the belief. But in fact it is only one of a number of contents of the belief; it is the content given the facts about reference; it is what else the world has to be like, once we take those facts as fixed. We need to appreciate that these contents, the subject matter or referential contents, are only one of a range of contents that are systematically related: the contents of a statement or belief given various facts. Of particular importance in the case of recognition are what I call reflexive contents, in which not all of the facts about the subject matter of a statement or belief are given. I call these reflexive, because conditions are put on the statement or belief itself. In this paper I argue that if we commit the subject matter fallacy, we cannot provide suitable contents for statement of identity and beliefs about identity, including the very common sort of belief that one acquires when one recognizes another person, place or thing. I provide a case of recognition for contemplation in Section 2, introduce reflexive contents in Section 3. In Sections 4 and 5 I try to explain the importance of reflexive contents, and their relation with subject matter contents. I discuss what I call “the subject matter fallacy”, which misleads us in such cases, in Section 6.