Stephen Yablo, “Aboutness” (Princeton UP, 2014 )
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Why does Yablo use the ice‑cream complaint to illustrate “aboutness” in language?
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Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, and I'm co host of the channel along with Robert Talise, Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books across a broad range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Stephen Yablo, professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His new book about Miss is just out from Princeton University Press. A day after Yablo bought his daughter Zina ice cream for her birthday, Zina complained You never take me for ice cream anymore.
Yablo, like most of us, initially responded that this was obviously false but But he also thought that Zina said something true about their regular activity of going for ice cream, and that she expressed this truth by saying something false. This phenomenon is common in ordinary conversation, but it's quite strange from a standard view of semantics, according to which Zina's statement would have a truth condition, and if the truth condition isn't met, the sentence is false, and that's the end of it. Yablo argues instead that this sort of example reveals an aspect of semantics that standard views are inadequate to capture. The fact that sentences Are about subject matters, and that their subject matters may be constrained by, but are not determined by their truth conditions.
Moreover, it may be that there is no other way to say some truths than by using falsehoods to say them. In About Miss, Diablo explores this linguistic phenomenon and defends the idea that we often go beyond what we want to say and then subtract from the whole of what is said to the part that we really care about, its subject matter. Let's tune in to the interview. Stephen Yablo, are you there? Yes, I am. Hi, welcome to New Books in Philosophy. Thanks for inviting me, Carrie. Uh I am really happy to be talking to you about your new book, Aboutness. And this is, as you note in the introduction, a study in philosophical semantics regarding what sentences are about, which is not their truth conditions, but what you call their subject matter.
And so it's a it's a it's a n unconventional look at how we think about uh meaning and semantics, um, in which, as you put it, tr we will often say truths that come wrapped up in falsehoods. Um So let me to to s kind of get us started, maybe you can say something about how uh how you came to this subject, um maybe in general if coming to philosophy of language, um, and then how you came to uh the topic of this book in particular.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why does Yablo use the ice‑cream complaint to illustrate “aboutness” in language?
0:00–11:16
2
How does Yablo distinguish a sentence’s truth‑conditions from its subject‑matter?
11:16–20:19
3
What is “partial truth” and why is it needed for sentences that wrap truth in falsehood?
20:19–28:51
4
How does the book define “content parts” and the upward‑difference principle?
28:51–37:30
5
What role does the subtraction relation play in isolating a sentence’s subject‑matter?
37:30–45:44
6
How does the aboutness framework apply to epistemic cases like knowledge and Gettier problems?
45:44–52:44
7
What insights does the theory give for non‑epistemic notions such as desire, obligation, and permission?
52:44–1:01:19
8
What is Yablo’s next research direction after *Aboutness*?
1:01:19–1:08:32
Speakers
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