Abstract
What I will come up in this chapter is a representational account of the mental states which underlie referential communication, that is of those mental states which have been described so far by appeal to the notion of “having a thing in mind”. According to the proposed account there will be certain representations for objects, called ideas, which are distinctive of those underlying mental states. More precisely, in performing a referring act a speaker is entertaining a certain idea which he aims to “reproduce” in some way in the hearer, and in understanding the referring act the hearer must come to entertain an idea as well, namely one which is related in a certain way to the speaker’s idea. In the first section of this chapter this representational account of referring acts will be motivated and introduced. The purpose of the remaining two sections then is to make the nature of the proposed representational characterization of referring acts in terms ideas more precise. In this regard I will first point out what I take to be the central synchronic features of ideas, and in particular explore the widely held conception of ideas as being associated with a certain sort of object-files. Then in the last section their diachronic features will be discussed in more detail. In this context a distinction between two kinds of ideas will be proposed which will throw some new light on Donnellan’s referential/ attributive distinction.
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Reference
For more details regarding those different views of mental representations see for instance Cummin’s (1989) useful book “Meaning and Mental Representations”.
See for instance Crimmins (1992) or Fodor and LePore (1992) for these terms.
See Brandom (1994, p. 70 ff.) for this important distinction between purporting to represent and successfully representing.
Regarding more details on argument places of concepts in our mental representations see Crimmins (1992), in particular chapter 4. Instead of calling them “concepts” he refers to them as “ideas”.
Kamp’s theory of discourse representation structures provides a nice account of those more complex representations; see Kamp (1990) for instance.
Clearly, what one might object here is that unless one has some natural language expression in mind one does not really think of an object or property. In the following I will remain neutral with regard to the issue whether ideas and concepts are always given by tokens of natural language expressions. What will be assumed is that they are commonly associated with such expressions.
Within the framework of DRT Kamp (1990) represents this communication inducing success relation by ordered pairs of the following kind ‘<x, x′>’ where x and x′ are discourse referents entertained by two communicating agents respectively; see p. 80 ff. It should be noted that while he ends up with a similar representational description of referential communication he does not really account for it, that is, he does not spell out the conditions under which discourse referents stand in this relation. Nevertheless his description points in the direction in which it might be spelled out, namely in terms of certain properties of the entertained discourse referents which have been called ideas here.
See Bach (1987), Recanati (1993), Grice (1969), Perry (1980), Forbes (1989) or Evans (1982) for different versions of this file notion.
Note that this difference might be overstated since Recanati (1993) also uses the notion of a representation when he states his account of those object-files, see for instance p. 104. He speaks also of tokens of those files which clearly indicates that he has their concrete realizations in mind.
Within artificial intelligence and cognitive science representations have been conceived quite generally as files or file-like structures. For a critical discussion of this view see Woodfield’s (1991) recent article “Conceptions”.
See Recanati (1993), p. 117.
I have chosen here the name satisfaction set because such a set provides a kind of satisfaction condition for an object being the referent of an idea. Whether the satisfaction set of an idea really determines its referent will be discussed in chapter 4.
The notion of a mode of presentation of an object clearly derives from Frege (1892). In chapter 5 more will be said about this notion when its role in accounting for success in referring acts will be explored.
It is an interesting question to what extent ideas are identity-dependent on their associated object-files. It seems plausible to assume that there is some sort of dependence. For if an idea’s object-file completely changes then it will also not be the same idea any more in the sense of purporting to represent the same object. On the other hand an idea’s object file can certainly change to a certain extent while the idea remains the same. In the following 1 will ignore this question and assume that the object-files associated with our ideas are more or less stable over time.
Besides the ideas that have been introduced in such ways there might also be innate ones, that is ideas which agents do not acquire but which are somehow build-in or hard-wired. For instance one might think that the idea one has of oneself is not acquired but innate. In order to simplify the discussion in the following it will be assumed that all our ideas are acquired in some way, yet not much rests on this assumption.
It should be noted that an idea can be a grounded idea without actually being derived from an object. For instance the perceptual contact might not have been veridical, as in the case of hallucination.
This term derives from Recanati (1993) who proposes a very similar distinction between two kinds of object-files, those that contain reference-fixing representations and those where the representations are merely taken to be informative of the putative referent. This latter term will he discussed later on.
See chapter L section 3, for a more detailed statement of Russell’s analysis of definite descriptions.
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Paul, M. (1999). Mental States in Referential Communication. In: Success in Referential Communication. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 80. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3181-2_2
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