Well, I have the key in my hands: all I have to find is the lock.
From Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 film To be or not to be.
Abstract
Yablo gives us an account of subject-matter - a characterization of what declarative sentences are about. I argue that this account can be seen as a way of adjusting Frege’s theory of meaning, so as it no longer carries the implausible commitment that declarative sentences refer to their truth-values. I also point out that Yablo’s approach faces an unpleasant choice: give up a uniform compositional semantics for interrogative sentences or abandon the idea that ordinary characterizations of subject matter are literally and unambiguously true.
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Notes
‘Reference’ was chosen by Max Black in his translation of Bedeutung, and it is certainly less misleading than J. L. Austin’s choice, ‘meaning.’ But, given the ordinary meaning of ‘reference’, sentences trivially lack reference, and given the technical meaning of ‘reference’, sentences refer to whatever a semantic theory assigns to them. To appreciate that the issue whether sentences refer is a substantial one for Frege, we must keep in mind that in his view “if words are used in the ordinary way, what one intends to speak of is their reference.” Frege (1891: 565). The Bedeutung of a linguistic expression is what it is about.
Frege (1891: 568).
Those who deny this tend to give up on aboutness altogether: “… we ought to question the popular assumption that sentences, or their spoken tokens, or sentence-like entities or configurations in our brains, can properly be called ‘representations’, since there is nothing for them to represent. If we give up facts as entities that make sentences true, we ought to give up representations at the same time, for the legitimacy of each depends on the legitimacy of the other.” Davidson (1990: 304).
Frege thinks the sentence is not about anything if Odysseus does not exist. But even he would agree that if Odysseus does exist but never arrives at Ithaca the sentence is just false, and hence, is not devoid of reference.
Claiming that the Bedeutung of definite descriptions are the objects they refer to is arguably what led Frege down the path of identifying the Bedeutung of a sentence with its truth-value. Alonzo Church and Kurt Gödel have claimed to have identified in Frege an argument—the slingshot—that needs not much more than this premise to reach this conclusion. For detailed discussion, see Neale (2001).
‘Question’ is three-ways ambiguous in English: it can mean an interrogative sentence, the content of such a sentence, or the speech-act normally performed in uttering such a sentence. I use the word in the second of these senses.
Yablo also conjectures that, in the end, subject matters don’t have to be divisions, but some less constrained set of propositions (6, 37). This too suggests that it is best to see subject matters as questions.
This is essentially the proposal in Lewis (1988).
Following tradition, Yablo calls ways for S to be true S’s truthmakers and ways for S to be false S’s falsemakers. Yablo sketches two conceptions of truthmaking: the metaphysical and the semantic. He is wedded to the semantic conception, which takes truth-making to be a relation between representations (not between items in the world and their representations), and which construes the necessitation by a truthmaker as logical (not metaphysical). To my ears ‘truthmaker’ and ‘falsemaker’ carry strong metaphysical connotations, so I will stick with ‘ways of being true’ and ‘ways of being false.’
Or at least, they partition part of logical space. A possible world where there is no party at all needn’t be a member of any strongly exhaustive answer to ‘Who is coming to the party tonight?’
The one that identifies all the members of the extension of the abstract is called the weakly exhaustive answer. It is not to be confused with the true strongly exhaustive answer, which is not a mention-some answer.
Knowing this may not be enough. George (2013) argues that it is also required that she should not falsely believe any mention-some answer.
This sort of thing has ample precedent in semantics. A familiar example is Russell’s theory of descriptions, which rules that ‘The present king of France does not exist’ has a false reading: if the negation takes narrow scope we get a contradiction. The fact that such a reading is not attested is explained by assuming that hearers’ choice among alternative readings is driven by charity.
Thanks to Ben George and Steve Yablo for comments.
References
Davidson, D. (1990). The structure and content of truth. Journal of Philosophy, 87, 279–328.
Frege, G. (1891). Über Sinn und Bedeutung. In Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik Vol. 100, (pp. 25–50). (Translated by Max Black; reprinted in P. Ludlow ed., Readings in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997, pp. 563–583. Page references to the reprinted version).
George, B. (2013). Knowing-‘wh’, mention-some readings, and non-reducibility. Thought, 2, 166–177.
Hamblin, C. (1958). Questions. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 36, 159–168.
Lewis, D. (1988) ‘Statements partly about observation.’ In Philosophical Papers Vol. 17, (pp. 1–31). (Reprinted in Lewis 1998, pp. 125–155. Page references to the reprinted version).
Lewis, D. (1998). Papers in Philosophical Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Neale, S. (2001). Facing Facts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Yablo, S. (2014). Aboutness. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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Szabó, Z.G. Finding the question. Philos Stud 174, 779–786 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0756-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0756-6