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This chapter focuses on Investigations, §§36-64. It treats a problem raised by Russell in c. 1918: How can a human thinker ever think a singular thought? This discussion of naming individuals (of singular thought) makes two main ideas emerge. The first is that there is a way of thinking of an individual (or, equally, of a way for things to be), which distinguishes between identification, so re-identification, tasks of an occasion and a general, occasion-independent, question as to when it would be such-and-such, or so-and-so, that (who) was in question. The second is that it may be an occasion-sensitive matter as to whether a certain status is enjoyed; a question not answered merely by the ‘enjoyer’ of that status being as he is.

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?

This chapter presents an overview of four outstanding problems about singular thought, together with an account of their development from theories of reference, perception, and representation. The first focuses on how to characterize singular (de re) thought, demarcating it from descriptive (de dicto) thought, and how this relates to singular propositions and general propositions. The second concerns the conditions on having singular thought, in particular whether acquaintance with the object of thought is necessary and sufficient, or whether singular thought may be generated from descriptive reference‐fixing of directly referential terms, in accordance with semantic instrumentalism. The third deals with the nature and scope of direct perceptual acquaintance and communication‐based acquaintance and their bearings on reference and reference‐preservation. The last addresses questions about the relationship between singular thought and fictional reference, mythical reference, and empty reference.

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.

Our singular thinking about numbers (using numerals) is examined, and Tyler Burge’s attempt to read ontological commitments from those uses are rebuffed. It’s shown how our numerical thinking involves the involuntary thinking of numbers as objects; but it’s also shown that such involuntary object-directed thinking is compatible with our simultaneously recognizing that there are no actual objects involved. An important distinction is drawn between a word referring^r to something and its referring^e to something, where in the first case, reference^r is a relation between the word and what it refers to; but in the second case, no such relation is involved. The aboutness intuitions are explored as a possible motivation for Meinongianism. In the light of the foregoing, the notion of empty singular thought is introduced and justified.

The discovery of the twin categories of reference and singular thought is widely felt to be one of the landmark achievements of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. On the one hand there is the distinction between bona fide referential expressions of natural language and those that are about objects only in some looser sense. On the other hand there is a corresponding distinction between a thought that is loosely about an object, and one whose bond with an object is robust enough for it to count as genuinely ‘singular’ or ‘de re’. This chapter tries to shed light on these two ideas by focusing on semantic ideas connected with Russell’s category of logically proper names that have been widely brought to bear on their successors.

This chapter offers an account of both the inner syntactic form of our thoughts about objects and the way in which those thoughts manage to make semantic content with and reference to outer objects. The central aim is to argue that without an account of the inner form of singular thoughts we will be at a loss to understand how singular thought manages to achieve semantic contact with objects. Questions about the “inner” form of thought about objects have occupied center stage in philosophers as diverse as Kant, Frege, Quine, and Brandom. But such questions have largely fallen off the radar screen in much contemporary theorizing about singular thought. This chapter sets out to refocus our energies and to show that by doing so, we can gain a new understanding of cognizing subjects manage to make semantic contact with a world of objects that are largely independent of thought.

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.

This chapter surveys various approaches to the analysis of singular thought, including those of Russell and Frege, evaluating them by reference to their capacity to solve what has been called the puzzle about experience. According to this puzzle, we need an account of thought according to which we can explain how a particular perceptual experience is about the very particular object we perceive as opposed to a qualitatively identical object that merely could have been in its place. That is, we need an account of how thoughts are about their objects. This chapter advances a view of singular thought that solves the puzzle of experience and according to which the objects of thought must be determined relationally, derived ultimately from a percept of the object, but allowing for the retention of singular thought by memory and communication chains.

Actual acquaintance is not necessary to open a mental file: expected acquaintance is sufficient. Yet, in contrast to radical forms of Instrumentalism, it is argued that opening a mental file itself is not sufficient to entertain a singular thought (in the sense of thought-content, not thought-vehicle). The acquaintance conditions on singular thought are discussed. It is argued that mental files may also acquire and serve derived functions whose fulfilment does not require acquaintance.

This chapter aims to clarify the implications of the causal‐historical theory of reference for questions about singular thought. It addresses the following questions: exactly what is the nature of the tension between an externalist approach to reference and Frege's constraint? Do certain varieties of externalism entail a transgression of Frege's constraint or does externalism merely suggest qualifications to Frege's constraint? In particular, does externalism entail that, say, hearing someone use the name “Feynman” referentially is sufficient to enable one to entertain a singular thought about Feynman, regardless of how little one knows about Feynman? Would that constitute a reductio of the relevant brand of externalism, or is this rather an enlightened consequence of the causal‐historical theory? The primary specific goal of this chapter is to identify and investigate some arguments for various answers to these questions.

This chapter questions the cogency of another semantic externalist anti-sceptical strategy, that of John McDowell. When I think a thought via the sentence ‘This cat is black’ while in the presence of my cat Marco, my thought is object-dependent in the sense that Marco himself is a constituent in the Russellian singular proposition that constitutes the content of my singular thought, on McDowell's view. When I seem to, but do not, see Marco while tripping on LSD, my sentence ‘This cat is black’ fails to express a singular proposition involving my cat. This ‘object-dependence’ brand of semantic externalism is committed to disjunctivism about thought-content: there is no common content present in the good case in which I see Marco and think ‘This cat is black’ and the experientially indistinguishable bad case in which I merely hallucinate (this is Timothy Williamson's terminology). It is argued that contrary to his suggestion, McDowell cannot parley this disjunctivist thesis into a viable answer to the sceptic.

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 Afterword re-evaluates the central questions of the book. It begins by examining the possibility (suggested by Paul Pietroski) that no expressions of natural language are paradigmatically referential, and that the only dedicated vehicles of reference are cognitive object representations of a special kind. It also reconsiders philosophical orthodoxy about reference and singular thought in light of the emerging semantic picture of the expressions we use to talk about particular individuals. They argue that, for those who have abandoned acquaintance-theoretic constraints, there is a more natural way of carving the semantic and cognitive joints.

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.

No account of intentionality can be complete unless it explains how thought about specific things (‘specific thought’) is possible: how we can think about one specific thing rather than another. Specific thoughts can be about a particular thing (singular thought) or particular groups of things (plural thought). Contemporary approaches to singular thought tend to explain it in epistemological or metaphysical terms. This chapter offers an alternative which explains specific thought (plural or singular) in psychological terms: in terms of the cognitive role of the thought. Thinkers can have specific thoughts in this sense about non-existent objects, and the chapter explains how to make sense of claims of identity about non-existent objects.