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This chapter explores various innovative uses of sequential verbal and nonverbal imagery. For this use to have its measure of aboutness and full point and to take a ‘propositional object’, it needs to be a manifestation from a holistic disposition base array. Previous chapters should be seen as attempts to clarify that theoretical framework.

This chapter first examines the factors that render moved A′‐elements in the vicinity of C inert for further movement operations. Topic and Focus heads in the Complementiser Field are reconceived as criterial positions and a Criterion is formulated as a requirement for these heads to probe the derivation for a suitable goal in order to establish a Spec‐Head relation with it. In such a configuration, the goal is frozen into place once it has entered into a Spec‐Head relation with the criterial head. Extending the above to subjects, an independent Subject ‘criterial’ category with nominal properties, which expresses aboutness is posited. Although the constituent that satisfies the criterion, freezes into place and cannot undergo further movement, subconstituents from within may be subextracted, such as complements or adjuncts from within a subject.

This chapter investigates Chomsky's (2008) phase‐based analysis of CED effects, which capitalizes on an opacity created by phasal specifiers (so‐called ‘edges’). After reviewing different pieces of evidence, it is argued that an Agree/Activity Condition approach to islandhood phenomena is theoretically and empirically superior, a conclusion that is pushed to A‐over‐A situations where sub‐extraction takes place from dependents displaced to the CP edge.

Our thinking and speech about what doesn’t exist involves use/mention errors. When we recognize that “Pegasus doesn’t exist” can’t be about Pegasus (because there is no such object), we warp what the sentence is about to something else, concepts, words, and so on—items that it’s clear the sentence isn’t about. This aboutness intuition, when coupled with our apparent ability to say what is true and false about what doesn’t exist clashes with the otherwise natural view that what doesn’t exist has no properties. This chapter makes clear why it’s the aboutness intuition that must be modifed in order to understand how we talk and think about what doesn’t exist. This chapter also summarizes the contents of the rest of the book. There is also an appendix to the chapter that lays out important background metaphysical assumptions about what exists and what doesn’t, including the mind- and language-independence criterion for what exists.

Our singular thinking about numbers (using numerals) is examined, and Tyler Burge’s attempt to read ontological commitments from those uses are rebuffed. It’s shown how our numerical thinking involves the involuntary thinking of numbers as objects; but it’s also shown that such involuntary object-directed thinking is compatible with our simultaneously recognizing that there are no actual objects involved. An important distinction is drawn between a word referring^r to something and its referring^e to something, where in the first case, reference^r is a relation between the word and what it refers to; but in the second case, no such relation is involved. The aboutness intuitions are explored as a possible motivation for Meinongianism. In the light of the foregoing, the notion of empty singular thought is introduced and justified.

This chapter offers a general explanation for why there is empty singular thought and speech. Indispensability is the key: our need, for example, to describe what things are like from another’s point of view—regardless of whether she is seeing what is actually there or not. What is indispensable is that such descriptions, therefore, must be (sometimes) of what isn’t there, and yet they must always be truth apt. There is more discussion of aboutness intuitions, and the drawbacks of pretence approaches and Meinongianism.

Ontology is difficult. If we read what we take to exist directly off of the way we speak, we’ll find that we are “committed” to all manner of strange things. By means of case studies—numbers, hallucinations, and fictions—a more nuanced relation between what there is and what is true has been indicated in the preceding chapters of this book. This includes a more careful understanding of what we mean when we say, for example, “No Disney characters that are talking yaks exist.” What is meant isn’t the simple denial of the existence of talking yaks that are Disney characters—this is clear by the fact that someone can say in the next breath that there are, however, plenty of talking sheep that are Disney characters. The role of intuitions in philosophical methodology is also discussed in this chapter.

This chapter examines different kinds of referential or quasi-referential relations compatible with fiction (fictive utterance, the fictive stance). While acknowledging that such referential relations do obtain, thereby rejecting non-reference and anti-reference views, the chapter resists the stronger claim that reference is somehow indispensable to literary fiction or is an indicator of literary value. A modest pro-reference position does nothing to support traditional conceptions of ‘literary truth’. Of far greater significance for literary fiction than reference is ‘aboutness’. To speak of what a work is about is not equivalent to speaking of its references. The discussion of ‘aboutness’ in the literary context shows that what a work is about not only helps to determine its value but is connected with its very status as a work of literature.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book makes subject matter an independent factor in meaning, constrained but not determined by truth-conditions. A sentence's meaning is to do with its truth-value in various possible scenarios, and the factors responsible for that truth-value. No new machinery is required to accommodate this. The proposition that S is made up of the scenarios where S is true; S's reasons for, or ways of, being true are just additional propositions. When Frost writes, The world will end in fire or in ice, the truth-conditional meaning of his statement is an undifferentiated set of scenarios. Its “enhanced” meaning is the same set, subdivided into fiery-end worlds and icy-end worlds.

This chapter argues that partial truth is apt to strike us as sneaky, unclean, the last refuge of a scoundrel. But, whether a statement is partly true, or true in what it says about BLAH, may be all that we want to know. A statement S is partly true insofar as it has wholly true parts: wholly true implications whose subject matter is included in that of S. An account of subject matter will thus be needed, and of the relation (“aboutness”) that sentences bear to their subject matters, if we want to understand partial truth. Aboutness has been somewhat neglected in philosophy. But not entirely; think of Frege on identity, Kripke on counterparts, van Fraassen on empirical adequacy, Yalcin on epistemic modals, and Hempel on confirmation. Subject matter will be treated here as an independent factor in meaning, over and above truth-conditional content. Not completely independent, though, for what a sentence is about is tied up with its ways of being true and false.

A few philosophers have tried to think systematically about subject matter. Gilbert Ryle thought a sentence was about the items mentioned in it. Nelson Goodman thought it was about the items mentioned in certain consequences. David Lewis was the first to consider subject matters as entities in their own right, and the first to link a sentence's subject matter to what it says, as opposed to what it mentions. Lewisian subject matters are equivalence relations on, or partitions of, logical space. A sentence S is wholly about m if its truth-value in a world w is fixed by how matters stand m-wise in w. But he never identified anything as the subject matter of sentence S—the one it is exactly about. This chapter defines it as the m that distinguishes worlds according to S's changing ways of being true in them. Subject anti-matter is defined analogously, and S's overall subject matter is the two together. Aboutness comes out independent of truth-value, as we would hope. A sentence is not about anything different from its negation.

This chapter argues that parts are subject to a principle of upward difference transmission: tweaking them makes for variation in their containing wholes. The principle is highly schematic; different differences are passed along according to the sort of entity involved. If x and y are material objects, intrinsic variation in x makes for intrinsic variation in y. If they are properties, it is changes in how they are exemplified that percolate up. If they are statements, it is variation in how they are true. This provides a second route to our conception of content-parts as consequences whose ways of being true “change less quickly.” Sometimes A and B are given, and we can apply the definition directly. Other times only A is given, and our task is to construct the part of A that concerns the given subject matter.

Truth for Aristotle was a metaphysical notion. Alfred Tarski showed how to conceive truth semantically, that is, in such a way that it could play a foundational role in semantics. David Armstrong, the Aristotle of truthmaking, conceives it metaphysically, as the a posteriori necessitation of truths by “things in the world.” This chapter, in a Tarskian spirit, seeks a semantic conception of truthmakers. It suggests two formal models, the recursive and the reductive. They represent tendencies in truthmaker assignment that pull, at times, in different directions. Where one can be indulged at no cost to the other, as in the case of quantifiers, that is the way to go. Otherwise a compromise has to be struck. How the tendencies trade off depends on the application. To a first approximation, though, semantic truthmakers are facts that imply truths and proportionally explain them.

This chapter argues that logical subtraction has a role to play in confirmation theory via the notion of surplus content. Subject matter does, too, via the notion of content-part. Content-part lets us define a new type of evidential relation; E pervasively probabilifies H if it probabilifies “all of it,” meaning H and its parts. This helps with the tacking and raven paradoxes. Equivalent generalizations can be about different things, which affect their evidential relations. Inductive skeptics do not care about confirmation, but they derive some benefit too, for they care about verisimilitude—one theory having more truth in it than another—and the truth in a theory is made up of its wholly true parts.

This chapter discusses how seeming closure violations have been met with three main responses: counterfactualism (Nozick), contextualism (Cohen, DeRose, Lewis), and Carnap's idea that There are numbers is harder to know because it addresses a trickier sort of question. Our picture has some contextualism in it, since the subject matter of I am sitting changes in skeptical contexts, thereby “destroying our knowledge.” It has some counterfactualism in it, insofar as being on top a counterpossibility is being such that one would have noticed, had that counterpossibility obtained. It has some Carnap in it, too, for when the doubters come round, one takes refuge in the ordinary, “internal,” part of I am sitting, the part that concerns its old, nonskeptical, subject matter.

If A implies B, then is there always something that we can point to as what A adds to B? The logician, or logical engineer, says yes. The mysterian says no. To get a bead on the issue, this chapter distinguished four types of extrapolation: inductive, as in Hume, projective, as in Goodman, alethic, as in Kripkenstein, and type 4, as in Wittgenstein's “conceptual problem of other minds” and his example of 5 o'clock on the sun. Logical subtraction is understood, to begin with, as type 4 extrapolation. A–B is the result of extrapolating A beyond the bounds imposed by B. The question is whether this can always be done.