Aboutness

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Aboutness is a concept used in library and information science, linguistics, and philosophy. It means that a text, spoken statement, image, or action is about something or relates to a subject. In library science, aboutness is often treated as the same as a document’s topic. In the philosophy of mind, it is linked to intentionality—the mind’s direction toward objects—an idea associated with John Searle. In logic and the philosophy of language, aboutness describes how a piece of writing connects to its subject matter.

The term was first named “aboutness” by R. A. Fairthorne in 1969 and became popular in library science in the late 1970s. William Hutchins argued that aboutness is a better concept than “subject” because it avoids certain epistemological problems. Birger Hjørland later argued that aboutness and subject raise the same kinds of problems, so they should be treated as synonyms.

Different fields focus on different kinds of aboutness: information scientists study literary aboutness (the topic of a document), philosophers of mind and psychologists study psychological or intentional aboutness (the mind’s relation to things), and semantic externalists look at the external state of affairs the text refers to. These views echo older ideas about contexts and world viewpoints proposed by Ogden & Richards and Karl Popper.