Online Papers - Brian Weatherson

Morality, Fiction and Possibility 39
Fixing a Hole
DQ and his buddy SP leave DQ’s apartment at midday Tuesday, leaving a
well-arranged lounge suite and home theatre unit, featuring DQ’s prized
oval television. They travel back in time to Monday, where DQ has
some rather strange and unexpected adventures. He intended to correct
something that happened yesterday, that had gone all wrong the first
time around, and by the time the buddies reunite and leave for Tuesday
(by sleeping and waking up in the future) he’s sure it’s all been sorted.
When DQ and his buddy SP get back to his apartment midday Tuesday,
it looks for all the world like there’s nothing there except an ordinary
knife and fork.
Now this situation would not strike us, were we to see it, as one where there is a
lounge suite and home theatre unit in DQ’s apartment midday Tuesday, for it looks as
if there’s an ordinary knife and fork there. But still, the author gets to say that what’s
in DQ’s apartment as the story opens includes an oval television. And this despite
the fact that the two concepts, TELEVISION and OVAL, are grokking. Perhaps
some epicycles could be added to Yablo’s theory to solve this problem, but for now
the solution is incomplete.
6 Virtue
The content cases may remind us of one of Fodor’s most famous lines about meaning.
I suppose that sooner or later the physicists will complete the catalogue
they’ve been compiling of the ultimate and irreducible properties of
things. When they do, the likes of spin, charm, and charge will perhaps
appear on the list. But aboutness surely won’t; intentionality doesn’t go
that deep . . . If the semantic and the intentional are real properties of
things, it must be in virtue of their identity with (or maybe their supervenience
on?) properties that are themselves neither intentional nor
semantic. If aboutness is real, it must really be something else. (Fodor,
1987, 97)
If meaning doesn’t go that deep, but there are meaning facts, then those facts must
hold in virtue of more fundamental facts. “Molino de viento” means windmill in
Spanish in virtue of a pattern of usage of those words by Spanish speakers, for instance.
It seems that many of the stories above involve facts that hold, if they hold at all,
in virtue of other facts. Had Fodor other interests than intentionality, he may have
written instead that beauty doesn’t go that deep, and neither does television. If an
event is to be beautiful, this is a fact that must obtain in virtue of other facts about
it, perhaps its integrity, wholeness, symmetry and radiance as Aquinas says (Joyce,
1944/1963, 212), and that event being a monster truck death match of doom probably