Notion Of Aboutness Research Articles

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.

Aboutness and negative truths: a modest strategy for truthmaker theorists

A central problem for any truthmaker theory is the problem of negative truths(P-NEG). In this paper, I develop a novel, piecemeal strategy for solving this problem. The strategy puts central focus on a truth-relevant notion of aboutness within a metaphysically modest version of truthmaker theory and uses key conceptual tools gained by taking a deeper look at the best attempts to solve the problem of intentionality. I begin this task by critically discussing past proposed solutions to P-NEG in light of Russell’s debate with Demos. This reveals a central difficulty with addressing the problem, specifically that one cannot be committed to incompatibility facts in one’s account of negation and of the truth of negative truths. I then present an aboutness-based version of truthmaker theory. Utilising what I call the strict and full account of aboutness, I extract aboutness-based theories of truth and falsity. I use this machinery to present a promising new strategy for solving P-NEG which does not have the problems of alternative approaches. Finally, I present and respond to some potential objections.

Triggering verbal presuppositions

This paper offers a predictive mechanism to derive the presuppositions of verbs. The starting point is the intuition, dating back at least to Stalnaker (1974), that the information conveyed by a sentence that is in some sense independent from its main point is presupposed. The contribution of this paper is to spell out a mechanism for deciding what will become the main point of the sentence and how to calculate independence. It is proposed that this can be calculated by making reference to event times. As a very rough approximation, the main point of an utterance is what (in a sense to be defined) has to be about the event time of the matrix predicate and the information that the sentence conveys but is not (or does not have to be) about the event time of the matrix predicate is presupposed. The notion of aboutness used to calculate independence is based on Demolombe and Farinas del Cerro (2000).

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Recent Work on Structured Meaning and Propositional Unity

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: <i>Recent Work on Structured Meaning and Propositional Unity</i>

Predicting the presuppositions of soft triggers

The central idea behind this paper is that presuppositions of soft triggers arise from the way our attention structures the informational content of a sentence. Some aspects of the information conveyed are such that we pay attention to them by default, even in the absence of contextual information. On the other hand, contextual cues or conversational goals can divert attention to types of information that we would not pay attention to by default. Either way, whatever we do not pay attention to, be it by default, or in context, is what ends up presupposed by soft triggers. This paper attempts to predict what information in the sentence is likely to end up being the main point (i.e. what we pay attention to) and what information is independent from this, and therefore likely presupposed. It is proposed that this can be calculated by making reference to event times. The notion of aboutness used to calculate independence is based on that of Demolombe and Fariñas del Cerro (In: Holdobler S (ed) Intellectics and computational logic: papers in honor of Wolfgang Bibel, 2000).

Triggering verbal presuppositions

This paper offers a predictive mechanism to derive the presuppositions of verbs. The starting point is the intuition, dating back at least to Stalnaker (1974), that the information conveyed by a sentence that is in some sense independent from its main point is presupposed. The contribution of this paper is to spell out a mechanism for deciding what will become the main point of the sentence and how to calculate independence. It is proposed that this can be calculated by making reference to event times. As a very rough approximation, the main point of an utterance is what (in a sense to be defined) has to be about the event time of the matrix predicate and the information that the sentence conveys but is not (or does not have to be) about the event time of the matrix predicate is presupposed. The notion of aboutness used to calculate independence is based on Demolombe and Farinas del Cerro (2000).

Information About a Given Entity: From Semantics Towards Automated Deduction

The standard method to retrieve information can be formally defined as follows. To ask a query, one gives the properties of the entities to be retrieved, and the answer is the set of all the entities that satisfy the query. Another method, is to ask the overall information about a given entity, and the answer is the corresponding information. An example of the first kind of query is: ‘who are the persons who have had a car accident?’, an example of the second kind is: ‘what is the overall information about a given person?’. This latter method has deserved very few researches though it has great potential practical applications. However, it raises many non-trivial issues that are investigated here. The first one is to find a precise definition of the fact that a piece of information ‘is about’ a given entity. We propose a new formal definition of this notion of aboutness for query languages in first-order logic with function symbols, and the main properties that follow from this definition are presented. The second one is to define a bridge between this abstract semantic definition and automated deduction methods based on Resolution Principle. Deduction strategies are defined in this direction and it is proved that they are complete.

TRUTH AND FUNDAMENTALITY: ON MERRICKS'S TRUTH AND ONTOLOGY

Truth and Ontology is a lively book, brimming with arguments, and drawing the reader towards the radical conclusion that what is true does not depend on what there is. If there is a central line of argument, it is that the best account of truthmaking requires truths to be about their truthmakers, but negative existentials, modals, and claims about the past and future are not about what is, but rather about what is not, what might be, and what was and will be. In §1 I will discuss this central line of argument, and invite Merricks to clarify his notion of aboutness. In §2 I will try to (re-)motivate truthmaking, and sketch a positive account that takes dependence seriously. Whether this account succeeds or fails, Merricks deserves credit for pushing us all to reconsider truthmaking and its motivations.

Influence of 'aboutness' on pronominal coreference

Previous work examining the role of antecedent accessibility in pronominal coreference has often linked coreference to prominent structural positions that in turn are linked to information structure statuses such as topic. Three experiments examine the influence of topichood independently of structural prominence by exploring the influence of the pragmatic notion of aboutness on the written production of pronominal coreferring expressions. The results show that being mentioned in an about-phrase increases the likelihood that a referent will be selected as the future topic of a following sentence as well as increasing the proportion of responses with early, pronominal coreference to that referent, at the expense of coreference with the subject. These results suggest that coreference is sensitive to the status of other, structurally non-prominent referents in discourse, and that the pragmatic notion of aboutness influences pronominal coreference.&#x0D;

A study of aboutness in information retrieval

This paper addresses the notion of aboutness in information retrieval. First, an exposition is given on how aboutness relates to relevance—a fundamental notion in information retrieval. A short summary is given on how aboutness is defined in more prominent information retrieval models. A model-theoretic definition of aboutness is then analyzed in an abstract setting using so called information fields. These allows properties of aboutness to be expressed independent of any given information retrieval model. As a consequence, information retrieval models can be theoretically compared according to what aboutness postulates they support. The Boolean and Coordinate retrieval models are compared in this fashion. In addition to model-theoretic aboutness, preferential entailment and conditional probabilities are employed to define aboutness between primitive information carriers. The preferential entailment approach is based on a preference semantics derived from nonmonotonic logics. The nonmonotonic behaviour of aboutness under information composition is highlighted. Rules describing how aboutness may be preserved under composition are proposed. Finally, a term aboutness definition drawn from a network-based probabilistic framework is analyzed. Conclusions regarding the implied retrieval effectiveness are drawn.

Sources and Leapfrogging: Reply to Pickles

Failure to meet the condition results in a situation in which we have more readings than the Russellian account can represent. I argued that the knows which criterion does not meet the condition, and hence cannot serve as the quantifying-in criterion. I proposed instead that we develop a criterion exploiting the idea of source. David Pickles complains that the source criterion fares no better. He argues that it too fails the no leapfrogging condition, since, to go back to my original example, Hoover's belief that the Berrigans believed their accomplices would kidnap a high official could have its source in an official, whilst at the same time Hoover could believe that the Berrigans' belief did not have its source in that official. Why should we believe this is possible? Pickles describes circumstances in which he claims it would be true: he asks us to imagine circumstances in which the Berrigans order their accomplices to kidnap an official without specifying which one; and in which Hoover comes to discover who it is they plan to kidnap. But those are not circumstances in which Hoover's belief about the Berrigans' belief has its source in the official. They are simply circumstances in which Hoover has further beliefs that have their source in the official; for instance, a belief that he is the person the Berrigans' accomplices plan to kidnap. If the circumstances Pickles describes do not serve to refute the proposal, might there not be others that do? Originally I thought not; but now I am less sure. Certainly it seems that we can get a grip on a notion of aboutness that obeys the no leapfrogging condition: if I don't believe that

Constructive Empiricism and the Problem of Aboutness

Van Fraassen's (1980) constructive empiricism asserts that it is not for science to reach a verdict on whether a theory is true or false, if the theory is about unobservable entities; science's only interest here, says Van Fraassen, is to discover whether the theory is ‘empirically adequate’. However, if a theory is soley about observables, empirical adequacy and truth are said to ‘coincide’, here discovering the theory's truth value is an appropriate scientific goal. Constructive empiricism thus rests an epistemological thesis on a semantical distinction. This paper critically examines the notion of aboutness and its epistemological significance.