Aboutness has been studied from any number of angles. Brentano
made it the defining feature of the mental. Phenomenologists try to
pin down the aboutness-features of particular mental states.
Materialists sometimes claim to have grounded aboutness in natural
regularities. Attempts have even been made, in library science and
information theory, to operationalize the notion.
But it has played no real role in philosophical semantics. This
is surprising; sentences have aboutness-properties if anything
does. "Aboutness" is the first book to examine through a
philosophical lens the role of subject matter in meaning.
A long-standing tradition sees meaning as truth-conditions, to
be specified by listing the scenarios in which a sentence is true.
Nothing is said about the principle of selection--about what in a
scenario gets it onto the list. Subject matter is the missing link
here. A sentence is true because of how matters stand where its
subject matter is concerned.
Stephen Yablo maintains that this is not just a feature of
subject matter, but its essence. One indicates what a sentence is
about by mapping out logical space according to its changing ways
of being true or false. The notion of content that
results--directed content--is brought to bear on a range of
philosophical topics, including ontology, verisimilitude,
knowledge, loose talk, assertive content, and philosophical
methodology.
Written by one of today's leading philosophers, "Aboutness"
represents a major advance in semantics and the philosophy of
language.
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