Predicative Subject Matter

Session chaired by : Maryam Ebrahimi Dinani (Collège de France)

Abstract

Philosophers and logicians have recently devoted considerable effort to trying to elucidate the elusive notion of subject matter (Fine 2016, 2020, Yablo 2014, Hawke 2017, Berto 2018, Moltmann 2018). Current theories of subject matter take sentences to be the primary bearers of subject matter: "sentences have aboutness properties if anything has" (Yablo 2014, 1). In this paper, we argue that a theory of subject matter should assign a subject matter also to the sub-sentential components of a sentence, in particular to the predicates it contains. Moreover, the theory should account for the connection between the subject matter of a sentence and the subject matter of its sub-sentential components. We present an account that satisfies both desiderata.

Matteo Plebani

Matteo Plebani is Assistant Professor at the University of Turin. He works on topics at the intersection between the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mathematics.