Freeing Talk of Nothing from the Cognitive Illusion of Aboutness

1. Preliminaries1.1 Quine's criterionIn explicit opposition to Quine's (1948) view of the quantifiers, a number of philosophers have recently denied that ontological commitment is expressed via the quantificational structure of our language. Negating Quine's criterion, strictly speaking, only yields the neutral interpretation of quantifiers-both of natural language quantifiers and of formal ones.1 Such quantifiers intrinsically only encode inferential relations (by virtue of die specific quantifiers they are). The neutral interpretation of the quantifiers, however, allows that (all) quantifiers, regardless of the semantics they are endowed with, are open to being additionally supplemented with various metaphysical conditions.2Quine's criterion has played an extremely significant role in metaphysics for the last sixty years or so (and, implicitly, for eons earlier). It still does for many metaphysicians. For them, to indispensably say something prefixed by "There are As," or something similar in natural language that's best transliterated into a formula prefixed by "(3x)Ax," is to inherit a commitment to As unless one can paraphrase away that prefix-usage. The neutral-quantifier option levels the argumentative playing field: the form of one's language-expressions can't-all by itself-force an ontological commitment of any sort. Quantifiers have only an inferential role-one that (all by itself) introduces no ontological content into the statements they appear within.1.2 Aboutness considerationsThe majority tradition in metaphysics, in contrast to quantifier neutralists, has fully accepted Quine's criterion. A minority tradition, however, one predating Quine and his explicit criterion, is Meinongianism.3 As a metaphysical stance, Meinongianism is hard to analyze because there are a number of differing ontological (and language-based) moves that have historically been adopted by its many protagonists. One of these delineates different ontological statuses: being is distinguished from existence, for example. But more subtilized Meinongianisms are possible: the Meinongian can deny that the nonexistent items she is committed to exist (or have being) in any sense at all. In attributing properties to such nonbeings, furthermore, the Meinongian can describe them as only possessing representation-dependent properties.4 Still, on this view, expressions of language are about these nonbeings, and quantifiers range over them-just as with existing beings. Indeed, these nonbeings are what we think about. Mickey Mouse (to choose a relatively uncontroversial example) is the nonbeing that our thought is about (is directed towards) when we think: Mickey Mouse is cute.Quantifier neutralism allows into logical space, however, a position that describes our use of quantifiers (and our accompanying thought) as operating in a more pure metaphysically-deflated way. This is that, despite appearances, there is nothing that terms and the quantifiers linked to those terms are about. The Meinongianism of the last paragraph and this pure metaphysical deflationism disagree over aboutness.In this paper, I explore the knife-edge differences over aboutness between the version of Aboutness Meinongianism just described, one that retains aboutness assumptions about thought and language with respect to nonexistent beings and the-metaphysically thinner-Pure Metaphysical Deflationism that rejects aboutness assumptions about thought and language with respect to nonexistent beings. The latter position is held by deflationary nominalists5 who claim that certain terms in our language, and certain quantifier expressions, refer to things that don't exist in the strongest sense, that there is nothing that these terms and quantifier expressions are about. Aboutness phenomena-and what they reveal about our cognitive faculties-are crucial to understanding the differences between these metaphysical positions.2. Aboutness2. …