New Essays on Singular Thought

New Essays on Singular Thought

Robin Jeshion

Language: English

Pages: 256

ISBN: 0199567883

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


New Essays on Singular Thought presents ten new, specially written essays on an issue central to philosophy of mind, language, and perception: the nature of our thought about the external world.
Is our thought about objects in the world always descriptive, mediated by our conceptions of those objects? Or is some of our thought somehow more direct, singular, associated more intimately with our perceptual, linguistic, and socially mediated relations to them? Leading experts in the field contributing to this volume make the case for the singularity of thought and debate a broad spectrum of issues it raises, including the structure of singular thought, the role of acquaintance in perception- and communication-based reference, the semantics of fictional and mythical terms, and the merits of epistemic, cognitive, and linguistic conditions on singular thought. Their essays explore new directions for future research and will be an important resource for anyone working at the interface of semantics and mental representation.

The School of History: Athens in the Age of Socrates

La transmission des textes philosophiques et scientifiques au Moyen Âge (Variorum Collected Studies, Volume 463)

Nietzsche's Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of His Thought

Social Reality (Problems of Philosophy)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

these descriptive contents that are intended to be grasped by the consumers of the fiction. García-Carpintero argues, further, that not only do these descriptive contents serve to individuate Doyle and Chandler’s statements; they serve as well to regiment co-reference and co-identification, allowing that different consumers of, say, Doyle can identify—can think and talk about the same thing—even though there is no abstract object that is Sherlock Holmes. Sainsbury’s chapter ‘‘Intentionality without

footprint.’’ In those cases, the person does not seem to be perceptually present, even if the footprint or the shadow is. The person is, of course, causally relevant to the experience, by causing the footprint or the shadow and, indeed, is informationally relevant, but our knowledge of the person, at least in virtue of this visual experience, is only by description. Similarly, if we saw an ink-stained shirt pocket, our knowledge of the leaky pen that caused it would be only by description. But

not acquainted with ordinary objects like grapes and roses because for him standards on acquaintance were exacting, requiring unmediated and complete awareness of objects of acquaintance, immune to errors of identification, and perceptual experience never reaches that standard.²¹ In addition, the arguments from illusion or hallucination offered an independent line for doubting our direct acquaintance with external world objects and inspiration for his alternative positive view. Very roughly, the

[1966]: 48) Here the speaker uses the description ‘the man drinking a martini’. Had the description been used attributively, its reference (if any) would be determined ‘satisfactionally’ as whoever uniquely possesses the property of being a man drinking a martini. But the description has been used referentially: the speaker has a certain object in mind, that is, he stands in some ER relation to some object he wants to say something about. Despite the speaker’s choice of the description to pick

thoughts involve mental files based on some acquaintance relation to what the thought is about. But, as I am now going to argue, it is not. 7. Acquaintanceless Singular Thought for the Acquaintance Lover The mental-file framework rests on two principles: 1. The subject cannot entertain a singular thought about an object a without possessing, and exercising, a mental file whose referent is a. 2. To possess a mental file whose referent is a the subject must stand in some acquaintance relation to a.

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