Abstract
We argue that Recanati (2012) burdens his otherwise salutary “Mental File” account of singular thought with an “Actualist” assumption that he has inherited from the discussion of singular thought since at least Evans (1982), according to which singular thoughts can only be about actual objects: apparent singular thoughts involving “empty” (referenceless) terms lack truth-valuable content. This assumption flies in the face of manifestly singular thoughts involving not only fictional and mistakenly postulated entities, such as Zeus and the planet Vulcan, but also “perceptual inexistents,” e.g., Kanizsa figures, rainbows, words and phonemes, as well as hosts of at best metaphysically problematic “objects,” such as properties, numbers, ceremonies, contracts, symphonies, “the sky,” “the rain.” Indeed, reflection on what seems to be the boundless diversity of “things” about which we seem to be able to have singular thoughts strongly suggests that there may be no general metaphysics of objects, much less (what Recanati calls) “acquaintance” and “epistemically rewarding” relations that would distinguish singular from non-singular thought. We recommend that Recanati and other mental file theorists confine the theory to a metaphysically neutral account of singular thought as specific kind of internally “focused” computational state, and not seek any general account of the relation of thought to reality.
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Notes
It was first defended quite vigorously by Evans (1982), although the idea first appears in McDowell (1977). It has (to our mind) been surprisingly tenacious since then: Robin Jeshion in her (2010) book on singular thought sees the assumption shared by Donnellan (1966a, b), McDowell (1984, 1986), Boer and Lycan (1986), Bach (1987), Salmon (1987), Kaplan (1989, 2005), Soames (2002, 2003), and Reimer (2004). (Donnellan 1966a, b; Burge 1977, and Devitt 1985, are striking exceptions; see fns 21–22 below.) To keep this short paper short, we consider only Recanati’s discussion, but suspect that much of what we will say would apply equally to these other views.
We say “virtually all,” since the only “internal object” Recanati considers is the self (2012:60–70). There presumably are of course singular thoughts about other “internal objects” -sensations and thoughts themselves, but Recanati prudently doesn’t complicate his discussion with them, and so we won’t either.
We’ll discuss in §5 Recanati’s qualifications that allow for some cases in which a thinker merely “anticipates being acquainted” with an object.
These neutralist positions are subject to the qualification of “Weak Externalism,” which we’ll discuss shortly.
Notice our neutralist views, unlike Recanati’s, therefore do not entail any substantial metaphysical commitments. We can remain happily agnostic on the question that we suspect primarily concerned Quine (and occasionally Russell) of whether the world itself (described by science) actually contains individuals in addition to qualitative properties. In the view of at least (and at most) one of us (GR), it could turn out to be an important psychosemantic fact that humans think singular thoughts without there actually existing any individual objects that satisfy them. Sure, all such (atomic) beliefs would be false; but animals all the time survive with false beliefs that are “true enough.”
We might add that we are also sympathetic to Recanati’s use of mental files as a strategy for solving Fregean puzzles about identity statements, especially his discussion of the distinction between a file and its contents at 2012:38–41. But we think that, here too, our moderate internalist proposals would fare actually even better than his Actualist ones (see the end of §5 below).
See Rey (2006, 2012). For example, psychological explanation may standardly involve construing a system’s states as being generally responsive to features of its environment that it needs to notice to satisfy various wants and needs (cf. Burge 1977:319ff); but this responsiveness might sometimes be quite indirectly related to those features, as a result, for example, of idealization, or representations of the world that are on the whole accurate enough that those wants and needs are sufficiently satisfied for the system to hobble on (see fn5 above, and Recanati’s 1993, passing mention of “holistic externalism,” although we’d resist any suggestion of semantic holism).
It’s important to notice that Bach’s distinction is, as Recanati points out, inspired by Burge’s (1977) paper “De re Thoughts,” but that it’s by no means clear that de re thoughts need, constitutively, involve acquaintance or the existence of their objects; see fn22 below.
What Pylyshyn calls “FINSTs,” that track simple “FINGS,” or moving dots in his “multiple tracking experiments.”
One, moreover, in which he relies on a discussion by Lewis that was not in the service of capturing singular thought, much less mental files. Lewis (1999) is concerned with a problem he shares with Hintikka, about “cross-identification” of “counterparts” across possible worlds as a way of dealing with, e.g., Macbeth’s hallucinated dagger, an issue that we earnestly hope is orthogonal to issues about singular thoughts.
It seems to us extremely odd of both Lewis and Recanati to speak of “acquaintance” in these latter cases, but we presume that all that’s really important for Recanati are the (ER) relations that are grounded in (someone or other’s) instances of more literal perceptual acquaintance. Here he might exploit his distinction between files and “proto-files,” which involve binding of information “sub-personally” (2012:98), and so distinguish “derived” from “direct,” acquaintance.
We’ll discuss some exceptions in §3 -but they will be exceptions about which someone would seem nonetheless to be able to have perfectly good singular thoughts! It’s worth noting that the suggestion that all of a creature’s thoughts must be grounded in causal/perceptual conditions is a theme of Fodor and Pylyshyn (2015), although we doubt very much that they would claim that thinkers are “acquainted” with all of the objects so grounded --but they’re also not concerned with only singular thought. But, actually, we think even this weaker claim is likely to be false in light of some of the cases, particularly “perceptual inexistents,” that we discuss (see §4.4), and the possibility of our perceptual representations being only roughly true (see fns 8 and 10 above).
If Recanati were to rely on “a causal theory of reference,” he would, of course, have to address the standard problems that have been raised for such a theory by, e.g., Evans (1977) and Devitt and Sterelny (1987). Particularly worrisome is the “qua” problem: don’t the links of suitable causal chains, e.g., demonstrations, dubbings, communications of names, need to involve people seeing or hearing these links as referring to things qua, e.g., object, (temporal or spatial) part of an object, or qua any of the innumerable kinds in which an ostended object can belong, the worry here being that some sort of Descriptivism may be needed after all.
Recanati (2012:158) actually provides for some acquaintanceless singular thoughts: we postpone discussing this (for us) further problematic provision to §5.
We should stress that we are not endorsing any special metaphysics of such objects: if they are inexistent, then they do not, in our view, exist: nowhere, nohow. To a first approximation, we regard them as what seems to be merely a standard, if oblique way of talking about the intentional contents of specific intentional states, the “things” these states are “about,” even when those “things” patently don’t exist. See Cartwright (1960/87), Rey (2012) and Crane (2013) for discussion.
An interesting set of examples is pointed out by another famous French philosopher: Sartre (1943/56) calls attention to how he “sees the absence of Pierre” in a café. Maybe he doesn’t actually “see” the absence; but he certainly seems to be able to think about and “keep track of it” singularly, as when he stares impatiently at the spot where Pierre was supposed to appear. See Sorensen (2008) for discussion of other cases.
Recanati’s proposal thus differs from “Radical Instrumentalism,“ which holds that ”simply by coining a mental name, opening a file, or using a demonstrative, one can think a singular thought” (2012:163), and even accepts the de jure condition, but doesn’t spell it out in terms of anticipation (2012:155–6,163-4).
Recanati allows that “imagined acquaintance, just like expected acquaintance, justifies opening a file and tokening a singular term in thought” (2012:168). But, golly, can’t imaginative people imagine acquaintance with most anything? So long as one subsequently (or counterfactually?, p165fn7) actually enters into (ER) relations with the thing, et voilà!, one has a singular thought! –But maybe it’s also too substantive: as we’ve mentioned, and speaking maybe only for ourselves, we really don’t anticipate getting acquainted with the specific rainbows we nevertheless singularly admire, even in imagination.
In a footnote Recanati raises the possibility of counterfactuals for cases where an astronomer dies before exploiting the (ER) relations. But, of course, unless some restriction is placed on the admissible counterfactuals, then, as we already worried in the case of the Lewisian extensions of (ER) relations generally, everyone would be acquainted with most everything!
An anonymous referree has pointed out the stress that, elsewhere, Recanati (2012) places on the “evolutionary basic function of storing information gained through acquaintance,” presumably with, e.g., ordinary, “Spelke” objects. But it’s precisely in anticipation of such a view that we’ve drawn attention to the pervasiveness of the problem of non-Spelke objects even in elementary perception. If present theories of vision and phonology are on the right track, it’s a serious possibility that the basic “function” of these systems is served by the representation of nonexistent phonemes and Euclidean forms. See fn5 above for an extreme possibility in this regard.
Thus, unlike “Radical Instrumentalism,” serious singular thoughts can’t be produced merely by “coining a mental name, opening a file, or using a mental demonstrative” (2012:163), say, as a result of a blow to the head. But instead of requiring an actual object, what would be required would be the right sort of (weak) internalist psychology, precisely as one would have pre-theoretically thought about characterizing a thought, no?
In his excellent review of Evans (1982), Devitt (1985) points to the strategy we have in mind:
A speakers’ demonstrative utterance that purports to refer to a person but is caused by a shadow can be understood by someone who has a thought which is also based on the shadow. So the only difference between the empty and the non-empty cases is that in the latter the source also qualifies as the referent. –(p220)
Jonathan Berg has pointed out to us that Donnellan (1966a:296) allows for a similar distinction.
Burge (1977/2007) also provides a worked-out example of a “non-descriptivist” alternative to Recanati’s conception of a singular thought, which is compatible with the problematic cases we have pointed to. His theoretical framework is one which rejects descriptivism, but at the same time insists that truth-evaluable content does not depend on the existence of a referent: there are cases in which demonstrative or indexical elements are applied, but unsuccessfully. They too have truth-evaluable content, and are singular insofar as they purport (but fail) to be about a particular, contextually determined, object. Genuine de re attitudes are ones whose contents do contain successfully applied demonstrative or indexical elements.
Precisely along the lines of distinguishing a file from its contents that we find salutary in his treatment of Frege puzzles (cf. fn6 above).
Recall Kripke’s (1972/80) denial that he’s proposing a causal theory of reference:
You may suspect me of proposing another theory in its place; but I hope not, because I’m sure it’s wrong too if it is a theory… Philosophical analyses of some concept like reference, in completely different terms which make no mention of reference, are very apt to fail.... I want to present a better picture without giving a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. -(Kripke 1972/60:64,94).
We’re not sure we agree with him that all theories of intentionality are hopeless, but, when the cases are as variegated and context dependent as mind-world relations appear to be, that is certainly an occasion to think they might be in that case. (See Eaker (2014) for an excellent discussion of how “two-dimensionalist” efforts to express Kripke’s claims about reference have fallen afoul of his denial.)
We don’t mean to rule out a theory of the metaphysics of serious, explanatory sciences. But that project seems to us to have a point in a way that doing the metaphysics of, e.g., “the sky,” “Theseus’ ship,” does not. (Much of the scepticism we’re raising here has, of course, been a persistent theme of Chomsky’s, 2000, unhappiness with much contemporary philosophy of language, to which we're of course indebted).
We want to be careful about saying precisely what the “somethings” might be: Gallistel (1990) assumes they are actual paths in space/time to which the animal’s vector representations are isomorphic; Burge (1977):499–501) argues that, at least in the case of the desert ant, the computations are over simply proximal stimuli, and so don’t genuinely represent anything at all. All that’s important here is that this a scientifically possible example.
Which is why we’re sceptical of Devitt’s (2014) presumption that there must be theoretically interesting causal accounts of reference. He writes:
whatever the size [of the classes of causally explained referential expressions], the causally-explained kind is theoretically interesting, at least as interesting as the indexically-explained kind. For, the kind is picked out by an ultimate explanation” (p480).
But, although there may (have to) be an ultimate causal explanations grounding reference in every particular case of causally explained referential expressions, it doesn't of course follow that there is one kind, or even a manageable few, that includes all, or even most of the wide diversity of cases which we take ourselves to have more or less randomly sampled. Does a theory of reference rest on a quantifier-order mistake?
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Hansen, C., Rey, G. Files and Singular Thoughts Without Objects or Acquaintance: The Prospects of Recanati’s (and Others’) “Actualism”. Rev.Phil.Psych. 7, 421–436 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-015-0246-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-015-0246-3