Abstract
I follow Giordani in distinguishing between a situational and informational conception of subject-matter and consider some of the different ways in which it might be explained within both an intensional and an hyperintensional account of propositional identity.
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Notes
- 1.
There are some issues, that I shall not pursue, as to how the functional and relational notions should be connected in this case.
- 2.
- 3.
I would also not wish to rule out the possibility that for different kinds of question different closure conditions might also be appropriate (for ‘mention some’ questions, for example, we might not want to have upward closure under conjunction).
- 4.
Let me briefly note a couple of minor defects in Perry’s original formulation of the argument, which are carried over by Giordani:
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(i)
Principle (P1) that if φ mentions the individual a then it is about a is not required and induces a specificity into the notion of subject-matter which is irrelevant to the general form of the argument.
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(ii)
(P4) appears to be incorrectly stated. As it stands, it is equivalent to the principle that φ ∧ ψ is about s if φ is about s and ψ is about something (and similarly for the right conjunct). This means that the inference from (3) to (4) above is not actually justified since we need the additional assumption that ψ is about something. I take it that ∧↑ is the principle Perry should have adopted.
Curiously, the assumptions that Perry actually uses do not imply the conclusion! For let there be two sentence letters p and q and one subject-matter m; and take φ to be about that subject-matter iff φ is truth-functionally equivalent to p, ¬p, ⊤ or ⊥. Then the assumptions are satisfied, while p is about m and q is about nothing.
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(i)
- 5.
We might not want P ∨ ¬P or P ∧ ¬P to count as answers to the question. In this case, we could establish that the associated field is {P, ¬P} under the assumption that any field of propositions was closed under negation. Note, also, that we are implicitly assuming a view on propositional identity under which our BP is already closed under negation, conjunction and disjunction.
- 6.
This also means that G’s own dual-aspect account of subject matter in Sect. 7.2 may be off base in so far as the second component of his account is meant to identify the informational subject matter of a sentence, since it is not in general bipartite under his account. He says that it ‘corresponds to the most specific question that admits φ as an appropriate answer’, whereas I would have thought that it should correspond to the least specific question which admits φ as an appropriate answer.
- 7.
We might, alternatively, suppose that our language contains a primitive ≡+ of positive equivalence, which is to hold between two propositions when their positive content is the same. Unilateral propositions can then, in effect, be identified with equivalence classes of positively equivalent propositions.
- 8.
As in Sect. 4 of the response to Mark Jago. Cf. Giordani’s definition of a propositional state space in Sect. 5, though the closure condition 2a. has been mis-stated.
- 9.
Part of Giordani’s distrust towards impossible states may arise from his thinking that he has been provided with ‘no clue as to what impossible states are’ (Sect. 6.2.2 fn. 27). The recent (though much delayed) publication of Fine (2020a; b) may perhaps go some way towards allaying his doubts on this score.
References
Fine, K. (2017). A theory of truthmaker content II: Subject-matter, common content, remainder and ground. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 46(1).
Fine, K. (2020a). Constructing the impossible. In L. Walters & J. Hawthorne (Eds.), Conditionals, paradox, and probability: Themes from the philosophy of Dorothy Edgington (pp. 141–163). Oxford University Press.
Fine, K. (2020b). Yablo on subject matter. Philosophical Studies, 177(1), 129–171.
Perry, J. (1989). Possible worlds and subject-matter’, in ‘possible worlds in humanities, arts and sciences’. In Proceedings of the Nobel Symposium, Vol. 65, pp. 173–191.
Yablo, S. (2014). Aboutness. Princeton University Press.
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Fine, K. (2023). ‘Situational and Informational Aboutness’: Response to Giordani’s “On the Notion of Aboutness in Logical Semantics”. In: Faroldi, F.L.G., Van De Putte, F. (eds) Kit Fine on Truthmakers, Relevance, and Non-classical Logic. Outstanding Contributions to Logic, vol 26. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29415-0_20
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