Questions, subject matters, and truthmakers

Ivano Ciardelli

Since Yablo’s seminal book “Aboutness”, much attention has been paid to the idea that propositions are about semantic objects called subject matters (e.g., the proposition "the ball is red" is about the subject matter “color of the ball”).   In the first part of the talk, I will discuss the connections between subject matters and questions. On the one hand, subject matters naturally correspond to questions (e.g., “color of the ball” corresponds to “what color is the ball?”). On the other hand, just like propositions, questions are about subject matters (e.g., the question “is the ball green?” is about “color of the ball”). This makes for an interesting interplay between these notions. I will discuss some upshots of this interplay, and suggest that reference to the subject matters of questions can be useful in explaining some intuitions about discourse coherence.   In the second part of the talk, I will turn to the connections with truthmakers. A prominent approach defines the subject matters of propositions in terms of their truthmakers and falsemakers. This approach is not directly applicable to questions, since questions are not true or false. I will discuss how one can, nevertheless, give a natural truthmaker-based account of the subject matters of questions, and how a standard definition of the subject matters of propositions in fact follows from this account under very natural assumptions.