aboutnessn.

1906 H. H. Joachim Nature of Truth iv. 174 Knowledge, so far as that is judgement and inference, is primarily and explicitly thinking ‘about’ an Other. And even though discursive thought may find its concentrated fulfilment in immediate or intuitive knowledge, its character of ‘Aboutness’ is not thereby eliminated.

1928 Catholic Bull. (Dublin) 861 What this one, or that one..have said ‘about’ it—i.e., about the back—and the ‘aboutness’ of it very often about the only thing to be seen about it, or found in it!

1945 Mind 54 208 The act or activity which inheres in any kind of awareness, that kind of aboutness or intentionality that seems to be given.

1979 N.Y. Times Bk. Rev. 1 Apr. 32/4 A fiction that foregrounds language and form, displacing the ordinary notion of content, of ‘aboutness’.

2001 T. Honderich Philosopher (2002) xviii. 382 The aboutness of conscious events and states, for mediaeval reasons called their intentionality... It had to be allowed that this relation of intentionality could hold or exist when in fact there was no relevant object in existence.

2006 Believer Mar. 27/2 What the lyric essay gives you—what fiction doesn't, usually—is the freedom to emphasize its aboutness, its metaphysical meaningfulness.