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This chapter argues that singular thought about an object involves nondescriptive or de re ways of thinking of that object, that is, modes of presentation resting on contextual relations of ‘acquaintance’ to the object. Such modes of presentation are analysed as mental files in which the subject can store information gained through the acquaintance relations in question. The paper shows that the mental‐file approach provides an answer to the objection from ‘acquaintanceless de re thought’ (to the effect that tokening a singular thought does not require being actually acquainted with the object the thought is about), as well as a solution to a vexing problem regarding the communication of singular thoughts: if singular thoughts depend upon contextual relations to the objects of thought, how can they be communicated across contexts ? What makes communication possible when the speaker and the addressee do not stand in the same contextual relations to the objects the speaker's thought is about?

What are the conditions on singular thought and what are the mechanisms of singular thought generation? The reigning view is that singular thinking is limited to objects of acquaintance. The alternative position, Semantic Instrumentalism, is that singular thoughts can be manufactured at will by manipulating semantics, that is, by introducing, and fixing the reference of a referential term with a description that the object uniquely satisfies. This chapter presents arguements that neither account will do, and offers a new theory, Cognitivism, that remedies certain problems. Like acquaintance views, Cognitivism limits singular thought, but the limitations are not strictly epistemic, but rather, cognitive, associated with the goals, interests, plans, and affective states of the thinker. Like Semantic Instrumentalism, it accounts for how semantics affects the origination of singular thought, while denying that agents control singular thought production. This chapter draws on findings in vision science and object perception to explain how Cognitvism supports a mental file analysis of singular thought, one that is rooted in the interplay between our evolutionarily develped cognitive goals, object perception, and the liguistic and cognitive functions of directly referential terms.

The first part of the paper proposes a positive account of de se intentional content. De se content is individuated by the condition that it refers de jure to the owner of the mental state or event in whose content it features. There is a corresponding account of the distinctive way in which de se information is updated as time passes. Three degrees of involvement of self-representation in a subject’s conception of the world are distinguished. The second part gives an account of the ontology of subjects, as metaphysically interdependent with conscious mental states and events. Subjects of consciousness are individuated by the identity of the apparatus that integrates information to produce unified conscious states. The theory is applied in critical discussion of the classical views of Hume, Kant, and the early Wittgenstein on the self.

The communication of singular thoughts is said to proceed through a general mechanism: the linguistic evocation of mental files via elements of their content. The issue arises whether that mechanism is semantic or pragmatic. In dealing with this issue, the two standard approaches to the referential use of definite descriptions are discussed, and a new, Millian approach put forward.

Modes of presentation are needed to deal with ‘Frege cases’. A descriptivist construal of modes of presentation is known to be unsatisfactory in three types of case: cases of reference through perception, through communicative chains, and through indexicals. In all such cases, what is needed are non-descriptive ways of thinking of an object, resting on contextual relations to the object. Such modes of presentation can be construed as mental files in which the subject stores information gained through the contextual relations in question. The reference of the file is the entity which stands in the appropriate contextual relation to the thought (or to the thinker), and the nature of the contextual relation determines the type of file it is.

Objections to the account of slow switching presented in Chapter 10 are discussed. It is conceded that, in certain cases, reference shifts are possible even though a single file is deployed twice. But, it is argued, such failures of epistemic transparency do not threaten the subject's rationality.

Many philosophers believe that there is a kind of thought about an object that is in some sense particularly directly about the object. The chapter will use the terms de re or singular thought for thoughts of this sort. It outlines a broadly Russellian approach to singular thought on which to have a singular thought about an object o is to have a thought whose content is a singular proposition having o as a constituent. It then explores some of the consequences of this view. It also critically discusses recent attempts by Francois Recanati and Robin Jeshion to explicate the notion of singular thought by means of the notion of a mental file.

The chapter is devoted to discussing an objection which Angel Pinillos raised to the mental file account of de jure co-reference. According to the objection, it is possible for A and B, and for B and C, to be co-referential de jure, even though A and C are not. But if the relation of de jure co-reference rested on the identity of the mental files respectively associated with each of the terms, it should be transitive, since identity is a transitive relation.

In a series of papers, Robin Jeshion has developed an ‘acquaintanceless' account of singular thoughts. Her account of singular thoughts is a psychological one, rejecting any epistemic constraint. Having singular thoughts is a matter of deploying ‘mental files' or ‘dossiers' that play a significant role in the cognitive life of the individual. This chapter elaborates an alternative account that preserves acquaintance, and focuses on aspects of the semantics of fictional reference and discourse. It addresses the behaviour of intuitively empty referential expressions, proper names, indexicals, and referentially used descriptions, mostly in two specific and related sorts of cases: the use of those expressions in speech acts by the creator of the fiction and critical discourse of fictions aimed at getting its content right. The chapter concludes that a certain epistemic, acquaintance‐based account of singular thoughts provides an intuitively satisfactory analysis of those two types of cases.

The chapter outlines and evaluates the most ambitious version of the mental files theory of singular thought, according to which mental files are a wide-ranging psychological natural kind, including psychologists’ object-files as a representative subspecies, and underlying all and only singular thinking. It argues that such a theory is unsupported by the available psychological data, and that its defenders may have overestimated the similarities between different notions of “file” used in philosophy and cognitive science. Nevertheless, critical examination of the theory from a psychological perspective opens up promising avenues for research, especially concerning the relationship between our perceptual capacity to individuate and track basic individuals and our higher-level capacities for singular thought.

This introduction outlines some central challenges to a clear understanding of singular (or de re) thought, and illustrates why the literature has recently turned to the notion of a mental file as a way to theorize it. It sketches three central motivations behind the claim that singular thought is file-based thought. First, file-theorists have stressed that the descriptive information contained in a file does not determine its identity conditions or semantic content. Second, it is sometimes assumed that singular thoughts are devices of de jure coreference in thought and claimed that mental files are the cognitive reality of de jure coreference in thought. Finally, the file-theoretic approach to singular thought may seem to lend empirical respectability to the notion of singular thought. The chapter ends by?introducing some basic questions proponents of this approach must address if it is to fulfill its explanatory aims.

The chapter introduces the phenomenon of de jure anti-coreference. Roughly, two representation occurrences are de jure anti-coreferential when they must refer to distinct objects in virtue of meaning. It argues that in contrast to its opposing notion, de jure coreference, it is rarely found in human representational systems. It explains how the Fregean can hope to explain this asymmetry by appealing to senses or mental files. It argues, however, that such approaches, in order to account for dynamic coordination, must ultimately appeal to semantic relationism. This is surprising since semantic relationism is often thought of as an alternative to Fregean semantics.

In the recent literature, the relation of coreference de jure (the CDJ relation, for short) is characterized roughly as follows: that relation holds between two singular terms (tokens) in a discourse just in case whoever understands the discourse knows that the two terms corefer if they refer at all. In the mental file framework, adopted here, this is cashed out by saying that the two terms are associated with the same mental file. This chapter discusses various alleged properties of the CDJ relation: factivity, transparency, and transitivity. It is argued that (i) the CDJ relation can be both factive and transparent, while (ii) we need to distinguish between two sorts of coreference de jure, only one of which is a transitive relation.

First person or de se content features in the nonconceptual content of perception, memory and action-awareness. This de se component is individuated by the rule that it refers, de jure, to the subject of any mental event or state in which it occurs. Possession of de se content involves the possession of a subject’s mental file on itself, and an integrating apparatus that operates to generate representations in the subject’s file on itself. The subject’s file on itself has a distinctive updating mechanism as time passes. Three degrees of self-representation are distinguished: subjects who do not self-represent at all; those that employ only the nonconceptual de se; and those that employ the first person concept.

The communication of de se attitudes poses a problem for “participant-neutral” analyses of communication in terms of propositions expressed or proposed updates to the common ground: when you tell me “I am an idiot”, you express a first person de se attitude, but as a result I form a different, second person attitude, viz. that you are an idiot. When we take seriously the asymmetry between speaker and hearer in semantics this problem disappears. This chapter proposes a concrete model of communication as the transmission of information from the speaker’s mental state to the hearer’s. The analysis is couched in Discourse Representation Theory, a formal semantic framework that linguists use for modeling conversational common ground updates, but that can also be applied to describe the individual speech participants’ dynamically changing mental states.

This chapter offers an elaboration and defense of the mental-file approach to singular thought. Mental files are supposed to account for both cognitive significance and coreference de jure. But these two roles generate conflicting constraints: files must be fine-grained to play the first role and coarse-grained to play the second role. To reconcile the constraints, we need to distinguish two sorts of file (static files and dynamic files), and two forms of coreference de jure (strong and weak). Dynamic files are sequences of file-stages united by the weak coreference de jure relation. It is at the synchronic level, that of file-stages, that the stronger coreference de jure is to be found. The resulting view is compared to that of Papineau, according to whom only dynamic files are needed, and to that of Ninan, according to whom there are proper dynamic files that exhibit strong coreference de jure.

The first part of the chapter motivates a unifying alternative to causal theories and description theories of reference and aboutness. The alternative account is built around a claim which the chapter argues brings out the significance for theories of reference and aboutness of the fact that justification is truth conducive: the claim that an aboutness-fixing relation is one which secures what the chapter calls “cognitive focus” on an object of thought. The second part of the chapter argues that a “singular thought” just is a thought made available by a cognitive focus relation, and uses the cognitive focus framework to advance the discussion of descriptive names. An Appendix explains why, though the proposal is a “mental files” proposal, it is better stated without use of this term.

This chapter builds on insights derived from the work of Perry, Lewis, and Stalnaker. It offers a characterization of indexical or ‘de se’ thoughts, focusing on their limited accessibility and positing two levels of content for them. Limited accessibility means that indexical thoughts can only be entertained by thinkers who are located in the right context and bear the right relations to the entities talked about. This raises the communication problem: how do we communicate such thoughts across contexts? A solution is offered, in the mental file framework. In the second part of the chapter, the solution is compared to those recently offered in the centred content literature.