How To Get About.

The 'Only connect!' that serves as epigraph to Forster's Howards End tolerates a variety of interpretations; but the very idea of a connection , or a relating of one thing with another, is conceptually deep. One form of connection is when something is about a thing, representing or symbolizing that thing. When we think of someone, or discuss something, we connect to them, or to it. In his Philosophical Investigations , Wittgenstein asks, 'What makes my image of him into an image of him ? [...] Isn't my question like this : "What makes this sentence a sentence that has to do with him ?"' Wittgenstein thus notes the ramifications of his question: what makes her name hers? In virtue of what is this thought about them a thought about them? The issue he highlights has been with us since Plato's Cratylus and its history is unified by a presupposition: whatever makes it that (i) a bit of language (like a name or a sentence or any linguistic symbol) is about something is, fundamentally, also what makes it that (ii) a thought (or idea or image) is about a thing. The story of aboutness will be uniform , simplex, or so the presupposition has it. But the history of the issue has been one of failure: we still don't adequately understand the nature of representation. I will propose and develop a perspective that rejects the presupposition and explains the failure: there is more than one way for a thing to be about something. Representation comes, ultimately, in varieties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]