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.

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.

Things is a collection of twelve metaphysical essays by Stephen Yablo. The essays address a range of first-order topics, including identity, coincidence, essence, existence, causation, and properties. Some first-order debates are not worth pursuing, Yablo maintains; there is nothing at issue in them. Several of the papers explore the metaontology of abstract objects, and more generally of objects that are 'preconceived', their principal features being settled already by their job-descriptions. Yablo rejects standard forms of fictionalism, opting ultimately for a view that puts presupposition in the role normally played by pretense. Almost all of Yablo's published work on these topics is collected here, along with the previously unpublished 'Carving Content at the Joints'.

Things is a collection of twelve metaphysical essays by Stephen Yablo. The essays address a range of first-order topics, including identity, coincidence, essence, existence, causation, and properties. Some first-order debates are not worth pursuing, Yablo maintains; there is nothing at issue in them. Several of the papers explore the metaontology of abstract objects, and more generally of objects that are 'preconceived', their principal features being settled already by their job-descriptions. Yablo rejects standard forms of fictionalism, opting ultimately for a view that puts presupposition in the role normally played by pretense. Almost all of Yablo's published work on these topics is collected here, along with the previously unpublished 'Carving Content at the Joints'.

Thoughts is a collection of twelve essays by Stephen Yablo which together constitute a modern-day examination of Cartesian themes in the metaphysics of mind. Yablo offers penetrating discussions of such topics as the relation between the mental and the physical, mental causation, the possibility of disembodied existence, the relation between conceivability and possibility, varieties of necessity, and issues in the theory of content arising out of the foregoing. The collection represents almost all of Yablo's work on these topics, and features one previously unpublished piece.