Abstract
Francois Recanati presents the basic features of the *indexical model* of mental files, and defends it against several interrelated objections. According to this model, mental files refer to objects in a way that is analogous to that of indexicals in language: a file refers to an object in virtue of a contextual relation between them. For instance, perception and attention provide the basis for demonstrative files. Several objections, some of them from David Papineau, concern the possibility of files to preserve and add information about objects across contexts. How is it possible to think about the same object when the subject no longer is in the original context? How is it possible to think of a perceived object as already known? Can this be done without an explicit identity judgment? Recanati answers these questions by invoking mental files of non-basic kinds and by describing the cognitive dynamics in which they take part.
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Notes
Not only can an indexical file be converted into another type of indexical file, as in this particular case; two distinct indexical files can also be ‘linked’. This is what happens when, for example, the subject recognizes a certain object which he perceives as being a certain object which he has perceived before and still remembers. Linking also enables information to be saved through transfer into another file.
This shows that the type/token distinction is not sufficient and that we need a threefold distinction between type, token, and occurrence (Recanati 2006, pp. 24–25). We need to distinguish the file token, which (in principle) comes into existence as soon as the subject stands in the relevant ER relation to the referent and goes out of existence when the relation no longer holds, and a particular occurrence (or ‘exercise’ or ‘activation’) of the file token in a given thought. The reference of the file (token) remains stable across occurrences, contrary to what Papineau suggests.
It is not an incidental feature of demonstrative concepts that they can persist through time in this manner, thereby making accumulation of information possible. It has often been pointed out that demonstrative thinking rests on an ability to keep track of objects, an ability that can only be exercised over time. Thus, according to Evans,
We have to regard the static notion of ‘having hold of an object at \(t\)’ as essentially an abstraction from the dynamic notion of ‘keeping track of an object from \(t\) to \(t\)’.’ And the grasp, at \(t\), of a thought of the kind suggested (...) requires a subject to possess at \(t\) an ability to keep track of a particular object over time. It is not precluded that one should have only a momentary grasp of [the] thought, for it is not precluded that, after an object has engaged with one’s capacity to keep track of objects of that kind, one should lose track of it, and with it, the thought. Indeed it is an aspect of the capacity that the subject will, in general, know when this has happened. (Evans 1985, p. 311)
Campbell and Burge make the same point, though for different reasons. According to Campbell (1987, p. 287), being able to keep track of things over time is intrinsic to the capacity to use perceptual identifications of particular things in the context of observational judgments:
One might be inclined to suppose that demonstratives should be thought of as instantaneous ‘snapshots’ of objects, because one can after all make such a judgment as ‘that table is round’ on the strength of a momentary glimpse of it. It may therefore be promising to suppose that someone could come to understand observational concepts without having the capacity to keep track of the things around him. The problem is that such a person would not be able to operate with the inferential structure that we use in marking the distinction between something’s seeming to fall under an observational concept and its really doing so. (Campbell 1987, p. 287)
Similarly, Burge claims that
A certain sort of tracking is crucial in an individual’s ability to perceive and have perceptual beliefs as of bodies. A sound basis for this requirement is that some such capacity is necessary for an individual to be representing bodies instead of events. (...) Bodies are perceptually distinguishable partly and fundamentally through their continuity of boundary integrity over time. An ability to track by way of such continuity is a basic differentiating ability. Tracking the movement of bodies is one common realization of such an ability. Tracking a single unmoving object over some lapse of time is another. (Burge 2010, pp. 198–199)
Despite their stability, recognitional files still fit the indexical model. First, they depend for their very existence upon the existence of a contextual relation to the object, namely the relation of familiarity. Second, the reference of a recognitional file itself depends upon the context: it is that object (if any) multiple exposure to which has created and maintained in the subject the recognitional disposition which underlies the file. Which object that is depends upon the context. (In a different environment, the very same recognitional device in place in the subject would have had the function of detecting another object than what it actually has the function of detecting in the actual environment.)
This answers the question asked by one referee: ‘one might wonder what advantage there is to this fine-grained view of mental files with its accompanying transfers of information, over Papineau’s more coarse-grained picture where there is just one file and no transfer. (...) It would be helpful to have some explicit statement of the explanatory gains delivered by the fine-grained files.’ Here is the statement: In order to play the mode of presentation role and account for cognitive significance phenomena, files must be fine-grained. But this fine-grainedness requirement does not prevent us from acknowledging the existence of coarse-grained files à la Papineau. As I will argue in sect. 4, coarse-grained files can themselves be construed as a special sort of fine-grained file, based on composite ER relations.
See also Fine (2007, p. 68): ‘According to the [suggestion]... what it is to think that the individual Cicero is a Roman and then to have the coordinated thought that he is an orator is to think the additional thought that the one individual is the same as the other. But if the new thought is to have the desired effect, then it must be supposed that the individuals in the new thought are represented as the same as the respective individuals in the original thoughts; and so the account is circular.’ And Schroeter (2008, p. 115n): ‘To insist that the subject must make an explicit identity judgment before she can recognize that two thoughts are about the same thing would be to invite a vicious regress—for even the simplest inference from ‘P’ to ‘P’ would then require infinitely many explicit identity judgments to establish the co-reference of premise and conclusion. The moral here is much the same as the one Lewis Carroll drew in the case of modus ponens: we must have some basic way of taking two thoughts to be co-referential which does not require an explicit identity judgment.’
What if the object seen is not actually the same as the object touched? According to a referee for this journal, that type of situation raises a dilemma: ‘does this mean that there is one file with two objects of reference...? Or that there are two files and that I am mistakenly operating on the assumption that there is one? If the latter, in what sense can files be said to play the role of ‘modes of presentation’, of capturing the subject’s point of view?’ But there is a third option: there is a single file, playing the mode of presentation role, but that file rests on a false presupposition of identity, so it fails to refer (rather than referring to two objects simultaneously, as per the first horn of the dilemma).
See for example Perry (2002, pp. 195–196): ‘I see my friend Al limping toward me but cannot yet recognize him; I form a notion of this person. At that moment I have two unlinked notions of Al. Certain of my beliefs about Al I have twice over, such as that he is a man. Others I have in one file but not in the other, such as that he has a limp. I accumulate information about him as he gets nearer; finally I recognize him as Al. At that point the notions become linked; the newly acquired perceptual information combines with the old information, and I say Why are you limping, Al?’
Prosser (2005, p. 373ff) uses the Campbell criterion to argue for a coarse-grained (‘dynamic’) individuation of modes of presentation.
On the distinction between the two types of recognition, see Wright (2012, pp. 7–8).
The distinction arguably sheds light on alleged counterexamples to the claim that self-ascriptions of bodily properties directly based upon a first-person experience should be immune to error through misidentification (Recanati 2012). In the so-called ‘rubber hand illusion’, one wrongly identifies the hand one sees as one’s own, yet the self-ascription of ownership is directly based on a first-person experience. Here, I would say, the faulty ‘identification’ is built into the composite ER relation at stake, so it is not an error through misidentification in the usual sense, that is, one that involves a mistaken judgment of identity.
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Acknowledgments
The research leading to this paper has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007–2013 under grant agreement \(\text{ n}^{\circ }\) 238128 and especially ERC grant agreement \(\text{ n}^{\circ }\) 229441–CCC. I am indebted to the participants in the first PLM conference in Stockholm, and to two referees for Synthese, for their comments and suggestions.
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Recanati, F. Perceptual concepts: in defence of the indexical model. Synthese 190, 1841–1855 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0264-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0264-6