Why Aboutness Matters: Meta-Fictionalism as a Case Study
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Why Aboutness Matters: Meta-Fictionalism as a Case Study Matteo Plebani 1 Received: 11 October 2019 / Revised: 3 September 2020 / Accepted: 10 September 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract 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. Keywords Fictionalism . Aboutness . Stephen Yablo
1 Introduction The notion of aboutness has recently attracted the attention of philosophers of language and logic (see Berto 2018; Lewis 1988; Fine 2017a, b; Hawke 2017;
* Matteo Plebani [email protected]
1
Dipartimento di Filosofia e Scienze dell’Educazione, Università degli Studi di Torino, 10124 Turin, Italy
Philosophia
Moltmann 2018; Yablo 2014). It is natural to wonder why these philosophers believe that characterizing the elusive notion of aboutness is an important project. Stephen Yablo has offered an interesting answer: focusing on what a sentence is about, i.e. on the subject matter of that sentence, rather than merely on its truth conditions, could open up the door to a new style of criticism of certain philosophical doctrines. In the words of Yablo: How many times have you heard a philosopher reject the analysis of P as φ on the grounds that their truth-conditions differ; P can be true when φ is false, or vice versa? (Plato on justice, Gettier on knowledge, Frankfurt on freedom and responsibility,...) Broadening the focus from truth conditions gives us another way to challenge proposed philosophical analyses. P and φ may be true in the same cases, but φ gets the subject matter wrong; P is about one thing, φ is about something else. How many times have you heard a philosopher argue like that? (Yablo 2014, pp. 15-6) This paper tests Yablo’s idea of criticizing a philosophical analysis not because it gets the truth-conditions of certain sentences wrong, but because it gets the subject matter of those sentences wro
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