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On the Cognitive Role of Singular Thoughts

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Abstract

This paper offers a critical review of the notion of a “singular cognitive role”, which is central to some recent theories of singular thought. According to those theories, whether a thought is singular depends on the role it plays in the subject’s cognitive activity. We compare the two most developed accounts of this type: Crane’s (Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 85(1):21–43 2011, The Objects of Thought 2013) and Jeshion’s (New Essays on Singular Thought, 105–141, 2010). Both theories aim to capture the notion of a singular cognitive role in terms of mental files. We argue that Jeshion’s theory is much more promising as it provides a more detailed and non-circular characterization of the mental files responsible for singular thinking. We examine the prospects for enhancing that account in light of three major concerns about it present in the literature. First, we discuss whether the weakest aspect of the whole proposal, i.e. the condition for the initiation of mental files, can be replaced without debilitating the rest of the theory. Second, we examine Goodman’s (Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 7(2): 437–461 2014, The Philosophical Quarterly 2015) argument against mental file theories of singular thought and show that it does not affect Jeshion’s account. Third, we argue against Sawyer (Mind and Language, 27(3):264–283 2012) that Jeshion’s notion of a singular cognitive role is in strong opposition to acquaintance-based theories of singular thought and cannot be incorporated into any of them. Thus, the paper concludes that Jeshion’s proposal, despite its shortcomings, is currently the most promising account of a singular cognitive role.

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Notes

  1. For discussion of singular thinking about group of individuals see: (Sainsbury 2005), (Crane 2011) and (Azzouni 2011).

  2. For detailed discussion on causal or epistemic readings of acquaintance see Hawthorne and Manley (2012).

  3. See e.g. Daly (2007), Hawthorne and Manley (2012) for negative responses.

  4. Different authors use different terms, thus as well as “cognitive role” (Crane 2011; Azzouni 2011) we can also encounter e.g. “psychological role” (Crane 2011), “cognitive function” (Sawyer 2012, p. 268), and “Singular-function” (Jeshion 2010, p. 132). We agree with Crane (2011) that a similar phenomenon is also captured by Taylor (2010) and Recanati (2010), but we will not discuss the degree of similarity here.

  5. Depending on the theory, the same role is sometimes also said to be played by thoughts that are not singular, but similar to singular thoughts in some respects (see our discussion of (Sawyer 2012) below).

  6. We will come back to both of these examples later.

  7. This classification follows that in Hawthorne and Manley (2012).

  8. In (Crane 2013), he adjusts his view, claiming that a thought is also singular when a thinker purports to refer to a specific group of objects. See the discussion below.

  9. “[I]f I talk about a thought that I had yesterday, then I am talking about an episode, since only they (rather than their contents) can have temporal location” (2011, p. 22). This understanding of thought belongs to the second strategy of the two described by Hawthorne and Manley, and presented above.

  10. Nevertheless, Crane appeals to singular propositions as the contents of singular thoughts in canonical cases of success. Thus, according to a conditional definition, a singular thought is a “psychological episode … of a kind that could have been described by a singular proposition, if the object in question had existed” (2011, p. 35).

  11. Due to arguments given in Azzouni’s critique (2011) of (Crane 2011).

  12. Azzouni’s term of choice is “object-directed” (2011, p. 51).

  13. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pushing us to make this point more concise and clear.

  14. Many authors appeal to mental files in their attempts to explain or outline different aspects of the cognitive organization of information, as the following examples illustrate. Grice (1969) introduced the notion of a “dossier” (which contains various definite descriptions) to account for the pragmatic phenomenon of what a speaker has in mind when using a definite description in a referential way. Heim (1982) introduced the idea of “file-change semantics” in linguistics to provide a semantic theory of definite and indefinite noun phrases. Perry (1993) sketches his understanding of files, which is intended to account for the identity of a subject’s belief in time. Crimmins (1992) appeals to the metaphor of files to elucidate his idea of “notions”: private mental items that represent a single object within a subject’s cognition, and which are intended by Crimmins to explain puzzles concerning belief ascriptions. Recently, Recanati (2012) has offered a detailed theory of mental files as a contribution to the debate on the requirements for singular thoughts. In Section 1.3 we present yet another use of the idea of mental files which is intended primarily to explain the phenomenon of singular thought (Jeshion 2010).

  15. Crane himself is well aware of this (2013, pp. 139, 160).

  16. It was pointed out to us by an anonymous reviewer that it is a particularly unfortunate example. To be a moon is to be a natural satellite of any planet. There are at least 166 confirmed moons in our Solar System alone.

    The reviewer has a point here. However, Crane speaks about the unique, actual satellite of Earth thus he wants to use a proper noun. The obvious source of this confusion is the fact that it is notoriously unsettled whether in English we should refer to the unique, actual satellite of Earth as “Moon”, “the Moon” or “the moon". Nonetheless, “the moon” is the most ambiguous of these entries (for the reason presented above), thus the disclaimer suggested by the reviewer seems indispensable.

  17. One may try to defend Crane with an adjustment: Crane’s definition of singular mental files is presented as an opposite to the definition of general file:

    What is relevant to generality is not that as a matter of fact the information is true of many things, but the fact that a thinker can make sense of it being true of many things, taken one by one (or of different things in different possible situations). Conversely [emphasis added, (B.C., J.P.G.)], what is relevant to singularity is not the fact that the information in one’s file is true of just one thing, but that one cannot make sense of it as being true of many things. (2013, p. 159)

    Thus, one may argue that the correct version of SF should be the following:

    ᅟ:

    (SF*) What is required for having a singular file “...is not the fact that the information in one’s file is true of just one thing, but that one cannot make sense of it as being true of many things”, or of different things in different possible situations.

    Apparently, SF* blocks cases like Newman1. Of course, one may think about many different objects being “the first person born in the next century” in different possible situations. It could, for example, be someone of European, American, or Asian origin; it could be a boy or a girl; etc. However, since Crane says that the file on the moon is singular, we might ask which information in this file is such that it cannot be made sense of as being true of different things in different possible scenarios. Crane gives no answer to this question and—by avoiding the topic in his text—does not seem to have one at his fingertips.

  18. We are very grateful to Manuel García-Carpintero for helpful discussion and suggestions here.

  19. Again, we thank an anonymous reviewer for pushing us to express this idea more perspicuously.

  20. Recanati speaks of many types of mental files. This remark concerns the so-called proto-files, i.e. ones which contain only information gained via some epistemically rewarding relation to the object, e.g. perception. However, Recanati’s solution to the circularity objection raised against other types of files (such as concept files) results from the postulated connection of concept files with, in a sense cognitively prior, proto-files (Recanati 2012, p. 100).

  21. According to Pylyshyn (2001), the role of visual indexes is to “individuate and … keep track of … individual objects in the visual field” (p. 130). Assignment of indexes to objects is “primarily stimulus-driven” (p. 146), and the individuating role is satisfied because, thanks to visual indexes, “visual objects can be indexed without appealing to their properties … and once indexed, they can be individually examined either in series or in parallel” (p. 141). Keeping track of an object, in contrast, is explained in terms of a mental symbol being bound to an individual visual object “such that the representation can continue to refer to a visual object, treating it as the same individual despite changes in its location or any other property” (p. 140); i.e. the visual index represents an object despite the properties of that object changing over time. The existence of such binding allows the respective object file to be updated accordingly. Hence, the singularity of visual indexes is based upon these two functions. According to Jeshion, mental names and demonstratives—and thus, consequently, mental files—share these two features of visual indexes (Jeshion 2010, pp. 134-135).

  22. Genone (2014) argues that cognitivism collapses to semantic instrumentalism because Jeshion fails to define cognitive significance in a way that makes it will independent (pp. 12-13). He also argues that cognitivism is threatened by circularity: a singular representation of an object is needed for an object to be qualified as significant, which in turn is a necessary condition for having a singular thought about it (p. 14). Meanwhile, Sawyer (2012) argues that cognitive significance has many degrees, while the distinction between general and singular thoughts is a binary opposition; it is therefore unclear how we can define a threshold of significance that suffices for singular thinking (p. 274). Azzouni (2011) makes a bolder interpretation by assimilating “cognitive significance” and “emotional significance”, pointing out that cognitivism offers no explanation of why thinking in “an emotionally rich imaginative way” shifts a subject’s thought from being general to being object directed (p. 57).

  23. For a detailed consideration of whether characterizing this dependency as biconditional is not in fact too strong, see Goodman (2015) footnotes 16 and 23. The matter is not central to our discussion here.

  24. In fact, Jeshion is quite explicit about this: “On the view I am proposing, thinking of individuals from mental files is constitutive of singular thought. We think singular thoughts about individuals if and only if we think of them through a mental file. This claim should not be understood as marking new terminology (i.e., my claim is not “what I mean by ‘mental file’ is an organizational structure from which singular thought is achieved”). The claim should rather be construed as a theoretical conjecture or stance on the nature of mental files and singular thought.” (Jeshion 2010, p. 130)

  25. It has to be noted that this move makes the success of Jeshion’s theoretical enterprise almost entirely dependent on the success of Pylyshyn’s theory of visual tracking; which is not universally accepted among psychologists.

  26. We ourselves refrain in the current paper from assessing Jeshion’s characterization of mental files and their genesis. Since our primary interest is the role it plays in a wider theory of singular thoughts, we treat Jeshion’s construction of mental files conditionally, claiming that if what she says about mental files is correct then the Significance Condition fails and thus her theory of singular thoughts in its current shape fails as well. Clearly, development of Jeshion’s account should consist both of finding a substitute for the Significance Condition and of further elaboration and strengthening of the cognitive theory of mental files. Nevertheless, we think that Jeshion should be given credit for her efforts at finding a place for the philosophically useful concept of the mental file within the landscape of psychological phenomena. This is a task that many recognize the need for, yet very few undertake.

  27. Thanks to Robin Jeshion for her help in formulating this point.

  28. It was pointed out to us by an anonymous reviewer that arguably the main bone of contention between Jeshion and Sawyer is not acquaintance, but the question of singular truth conditions. As the reviewer rightly observes, these two issues are separate and require individual treatment. What is definitional to traditional notions of singular thoughts is that they have singular truth conditions and not that they are based on the subject’s acquaintance with the object of thought. Kaplan’s semantic instrumentalism is the best example of a view according to which acquaintance and singular truth conditions part ways, since a thought “dthat((the ϕ) is ψ)” has singular truth conditions even if the subject is not acquainted with the ϕ. Therefore, the reviewer muses, maybe Sawyer’s claim about the terminological nature of the difference between her and Jeshion’s classifications of singular thoughts should be evaluated independently of any specific settlements concerning the role of acquaintance.

    Even though the division into acquaintance-based and non-acquaintance-based thoughts is orthogonal to the division into singular truth conditions and non-singular truth conditions according to some views within the debate on singular thoughts (e.g. Kaplan’s), it is not so on the ground of acquaintance theories. The central claim of classical acquaintance theories is precisely that a thought has singular truth conditions when it is acquaintance-based and thus, as Sawyer recognizes, in these accounts “acquaintance performs the function of distinguishing singular from descriptive thought” (2012, p. 276). The novelty of Sawyer’s New Theory of Acquaintance is that there are two distinctions: between descriptive thoughts and thoughts of singular form; and between thoughts of merely singular form and successful singular thoughts. Nonetheless, Sawyer explicitly takes the second distinction to be grounded in acquaintance (2012, p. 276), therefore subscribing to the general contention of acquaintance theorists that acquaintance and singular truth conditions go hand in hand.

  29. It is not the case if one wants to follow Jeshion in providing an unorthodox theory of mental files. However, at this point we know all too well the complications it brings with it.

  30. An initial sketch of such a view is given by Palmira (ms).

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Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to Manuel García-Carpintero, James Genone, Robin Jeshion, Sebastian Tomasz Kołodziejczyk, Michele Palmira, Krzysztof Posłajko, BłaŻej Skrzypulec, as well as to the editor Paul Egré and the two anonymous reviewers, for their outstandingly useful comments. Financial support was provided by Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, Project Number DI2012 020342 (“Diamond Grant” 2013-2015).

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Czajka, B., Grodniewicz, J.P. On the Cognitive Role of Singular Thoughts. Rev.Phil.Psych. 8, 573–594 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-016-0327-y

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