On Singularity
Kenneth A. Taylor
Stanford University
§1. Preliminaries
Two questions about singular or de re thought are seldom as sharply
distinguished as they deserve to be. The first concerns singularity of form. The second
concerns singularity of content. Though much has been written in recent years about
singularity of content, less attention has been given to questions about singularity of
form.i This was not always so. The question why our thought and talk should take the
form of thought and talk about objects at all once occupied center stage for philosophers
as diverse as Kant, Frege, and Quine.ii Though the Kant-Frege-Quine question has been
largely absent from the stage in recent philosophy, if we are to see both what is right and
what is wrong about certain prominent views about the nature of singular thought, it is
time to shine the klieg lights once again on the form-content distinction. The prominent
views are the widely endorsed acquaintance condition on singular thought and the less
widely endorsed but nonetheless tempting view that Robin Jeshion has recently called
semantic instrumentalism. iii Semantic instrumentalism is the view that singular thoughts
about an object can be had on the cognitive cheap merely by manipulating the apparatus
of singular reference. Most theorists of singular thought endorse some more or less
demanding acquaintance condition on singular thought.iv As such, they mostly reject
semantic instrumentalism. Indeed, most theorists accept some acquaintance condition
because they think that semantic instrumentalism could not possibly be true. But one
thing that I shall try to show in this essay is that when semantic instrumentalism is
restricted to its proper scope, it captures a deep, though only partial truth about the nature
of singular thought. And I shall also argue that acquaintance has been oversold as a
constraint on the possibility of the de re thinkability of objects. And the key to seeing
this all is keeping proper track of the form-content distinction for singular thought.
§2. Objective vs. Objectual
I begin by introducing a distinction inspired by Kant between what I call (merely)
objectual representations and what I call (fully) objective representations.v An objective
representation is one that refers to a real existent (or expresses a real property). A
representation is objectual, on the other hand, if it is “fit” or “ready” for the job of
standing for a real existent. I will also say that objectual representations are referentially
fit and that objective representations are referentially successful.
Now a representation can be simultaneously both objectual and objective, both
referentially fit and referentially successful. But some representations are merely
referentially fit, without being referentially successful. The class of merely fit
representations is the class of empty or non-referring singular terms. On the view that I
shall outline here, it is crucial that merely fit singular representations are still, in one
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sense, fully singular. They are fully singular in the sense that they still enjoy, in virtue of
their form, singular referential purport. It is just that they purport to refer without
succeeding in so doing.
There is a complex relationship between the factors that render a representation
objectual, or referentially fit, and the factors that render a representation fully objective,
or referentially successful. Elsewhere, I argue that referential fitness is a pre-condition
for referential success.vi More crucially, I argue that the factors that render a
representation referentially fit are fundamentally different in kind from the factors that
render a representation referentially successful. Objectuality is constituted by factors
lying entirely on the side of the cognizing subject.vii These factors, I claim, are syntactic,
role-oriented and internal. To a first approximation, expressions are fit for the job of
standing for an object, when they can well-formedly flank the identity sign, can wellformedly occupy the argument places of verbs, can well-formedly serve as links of
various sorts in anaphoric chains of various sorts, and can well formedly figure as
premises in substitution inferences of various kinds. Referential success, on the other
hand, requires something more, something not lying entirely on the side of the subject.
Success requires that already fit expressions be, as it were, bound down to outer objects.
This happens, I claim, via the interaction of already referentially fit expressions with
certain extra-representational causal and informational factors lying by and large outside
of the thinking subject.
Both the internal, fitness-making factors and the extra-representational causal and
informational factors are necessary for successful singular reference. But neither
suffices, on its own, for full-blown singularity of content. In the absence of extrarepresentational, causal/informational connections to objects and events in the world, the
fitness-making factors would still yield the form of thought as of objects, but our thoughts
would be devoid of semantic contact with any real existents and therefore devoid of
singular propositional content. On the other hand, absent the internal fitness making
factors, causal connections to objects and events in the world would be nothing but
semantically inert to’ing and fro’ing. The world is awash in information, flowing every
which way. But only in very special corners of the universe does the flow of information
give rise to reference and to singular thought. Successful singular reference is the work
of a distinctive kind of thing – representations, linguistic and mental, that enjoy
antecedent referential purport.viii Reference happens only when the extrarepresentational flow of information encounters such representations.
Referential fitness, or objectuality, is the work of an interlocking system of
representations. It is not a property that accrues to representations taken one-by-one. No
isolated representation, all on its own and independently of its connection to other
representations, can be “fit” for the job of standing for an object. No expression has
standing as a name, for example, except in virtue of playing the right kind of structural
role in a system of interlocking linguistic representations. Moreover, if it is right that
referential fitness is a precondition of referential success, then no object can be
successfully designated except by an expression that already occupies a role in a system
of interlocking representations. This fact captures the sole, but important grain of truth
in the otherwise misbegotten doctrine of holism and in Wittgenstein’s pithy but opaque
remark that nothing has so far been done when a thing has merely been named.ix
2
Now the class of referentially fit expressions contains a variety of different kinds
of expressions, with a variety of different formal properties.x Failure to attend to certain
merely formal, role-oriented properties of the class of referentially fit expressions has led
to much premature and misbegotten semantic theorizing. Consider the category NAME.
From a formal or structural point of view, names are a peculiar sort of anaphoric device.
If N is a name, then any two tokens of N are guaranteed, in virtue of the principles of the
language, to be co-referential. Co-typical name tokens may be said to be explicitly coreferential. Explicit co-reference must be sharply distinguished from coincidental coreference. Two name tokens that are not co-typical can refer to the same object, and thus
be co-referential, without being explicitly co-referential. Tokens of ‘Hesperus’ and
tokens of ‘Phosphorus’ one and all co-refer. But ‘Hesperus’ is not explicitly coreferential with ‘Phosphorus’. In other words, the fact that tokens of ‘Hesperus’ one
and all refer to Venus is linguistically independent of the fact that tokens of ‘Phosphorus’
one and all refer to Venus. xi
This last fact points to a correlative truth about names, a truth that is also partly
definitive of the lexical-syntactic character of names. When m and n are distinct names,
they are referentially independent in the sense that no structural or lexical relation
between m and n can guarantee that if m refers to o then n refers to o as well.
Referentially independent names may co-refer. Indeed, we can directly show that
referentially independent names are co-referential via true identity statements. But when
referentially independent names do co-refer, their co-reference will be a mere
coincidence of usage.
The lexical-syntactic character of the linguistic category NAME is partially
defined by the referential independence of distinct names and the explicit coreferentiality of tokens of the same name type partially defines. To be a name is, in part,
to be an expression type such that tokens of that type are explicitly co-referential with
one another and referentially independent of the tokens of any distinct type. If one knows
of e only that it belongs to the category NAME, then one knows that, whatever e refers
to, if it refers to anything at all, then tokens of e are guaranteed to be co-referential one
with another and referentially independent of any distinct name e’, whatever e’ refers to.
A name (type) is, in effect, a set of (actual and possible) name tokens such that all tokens
in the set are guaranteed, in virtue of their linguistic character, to co-refer one with
another and to be referentially independent of, and thus at most coincidentally coreferential with, any name not in that set. Call such a set a chain of explicit coreference. It is a linguistically universal fact about the lexical category NAME that
numerically distinct tokens of the same name will share membership in a chain of explicit
co-reference and numerically distinct tokens of two type distinct names will be members
of disjoint chains of explicit co-reference.xii
Mental names -- names in the language of thought -- are also devices of explicit
co-reference. As such, they play a number of important and distinctive cognitive roles in
episodes of singular thought. And they play those roles even when they are merely
referentially fit and not referentially successful. At present, I highlight only one such
role. Our ability to deploy in thought names and other devices of explicit co-reference is
a central source of our capacity for what I call same-purporting thought. I can think of
Kiyoshi today and think of Kiyoshi again tomorrow with a kind of inner assurance that I
at least purport to think of the same person twice. I do so merely by deploying the (fully
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disambiguated) name ‘Kiyoshi’ across distinct thought episodes. If one had no devices
of explicit co-reference in one’s mental lexicon, it would always be an open question
whether, in purporting to think now of a particular o and now of a particular o’, one has
thought of two distinct objects or has thought of the same object twice. It may
sometimes, perhaps even often, be an open question for a cognizer whether two of her
thought episodes share a (putative) subject matter, but it is surely not always so. I
conjecture that this is so precisely because there is a distinguished class of representations
that function in thought as devices of explicit co-reference. For such devices, to think
with or via them again is ipso facto to purport to think of the same thing again.
I digress briefly from our focus on mental names to make clear that mental names
do not stand alone in our inner thoughts and so should not be expected to carry the entire
burden of explaining the inner dynamics of singular thought. Mentalese names are
recurring inner representations that can be tokened again in distinct thought episodes.
Recurrent representations are constituents of beliefs. They are the things out of which
structured beliefs are “built.” The tokening of a recurring representation in a thought
episode amounts to the deployment of a concept in a thought episode. (I do not mean to
identify concepts with such recurring inner representations, but for the space of the
current discussion no great harm will come from glossing over the distinction between
concepts and the inner representations, tokenings of which constitute the deployment of a
concept in a thought episode.) In addition to the recurring inner representations out of
which thought episodes are built, there are also standing inner representational structures
that persist across thought episodes. These standing representational structures are not
constituents of thought episodes. Rather, they supervene on standing “structures” of
belief. We may analogize such representations to labeled, perhaps highly structured, and
updateable databases of information about the extensions of associated concepts.xiii They
are best identified with conceptions rather than concepts.
Though distinct, both episodically deployed concepts and standing conceptions
are intimately related and each plays an important role in our cognitive lives. Each
thinker who can deploy and redeploy the concept <cat> across a variety of thoughtepisodes is likely to have stored in her head a standing database of information (and
misinformation) about cats. In English speaking deployers of the concept <cat> such a
database might be labeled ‘CAT’. Such a database may contain a variety of different
kinds of information (and possibly misinformation ) about cats. It may contain a list of
properties that some, many, most, all or typical cats are taken to satisfy. It may contain
information that determines the categorial basis of the concept <cat> -- that is, whether
<cat> is a natural kind concept, a functional concept, an artifactual concept. It may
contain an image of an exemplary cat, a list of atypical cats, and pointers to sources
where more can be found out about cats. Each time I learn (or think I learn) more about
cats, more goes into my standing, but ever-evolving database of information about cats.
This ever-developing labeled database of information (and misinformation) about cats
may play a decisive role in both my reasoning about cats and my behavior toward cats.
Just as we have conceptions of kinds of things, so too do we have conceptions of
individual things. Conceptions of individual things play a distinctive cognitive role in
mediating the deployment of recurring singular representations in episodes of singular
thought. So here too we must distinguish concept and conception. That is, we must
distinguish the recurrent representations out of which thought episodes are, in a sense,
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built from the standing conceptions that supervene on structures of singular beliefs. I
have, for example, a relatively rich and ever developing conception of John Perry. That
conception is constituted by information “stored” in a standing database labeled with the
name ‘John Perry’. That label serves as an access point to all the information in my
conception of John Perry. When I hear and process utterances of sentences containing
the name ‘John Perry’, I “activate” my conception of John. I thereby make that
information available for further processing in episodes of thinking and reasoning about
John.
Though standing conceptions clearly play quite important roles in organizing our
knowledge and beliefs and in mediating the deployment of recurring representations of in
thought episodes, it is important not to conflate concepts and conceptions. It is via
concepts, not conceptions, that the objects of our thought are made thinkable. Concepts
and conceptions relate to their extensions – the things they are concepts or conceptions of
– in fundamentally different ways. Concepts are intrinsically related to their extensions.
A concept is, but its very nature, true of all and only that which falls within its extension.
Indeed, for an object to fall within the extension of a concept just is for the concept to be
true of the object. Conceptions, on the other hand, relate to their extensions only
extrinsically, via the concepts the deployments of which they mediate. Conceptions may
contain as much misinformation as they contain information. A conception may be of an
object or collection of objects of which it is not true and may fail to be of things of which
it is true. That is, a conception may bear the “of” relation to an object while failing to be
the “true of” relation to an object. One may misconceive of cats as that needy sort of pet
that loves to jump in their owners laps and slobber all over them when they finally return
home. That it is dogs and not cats of which this conception is true, does not suffice to
make it dogs rather than cats of which one has this conception.
Because our conceptions of things can be, it seems, arbitrarily confused, it seems
clear that without the concepts deployments of which they serve to mediate, conceptions
would be powerless to reach out to the world. On the other hand, I have argued
elsewhere that it is equally true that without conceptions to mediate their deployments,
concepts would be largely powerless to move the mind. That is because possessing a
concept does not require that one have any particular beliefs about the object or any
particular recognitional capacities with respect to object. Here is a slogan. Concepts
without conceptions are inert; conceptions without concepts are empty.xiv
In general, concepts are deployed in thought episodes through the tokening of
recurring representations. What we might call Individual concepts -- which figure as
constituents in episodes of singular thought -- are deployed in thought episodes through
tokenings of name-like and other singular mental representations. A distinctive structural
or syntactic feature of the recurring representations by which we deploy individual
concepts is that they function in thought as devices explicit co-reference. It is important
to stress again the point that explicit co-reference is a relational property of
representations that is structurally or syntactically marked. This relational property
guarantees that two token representations at least purport to share reference and/or
content. But two representations may share content without it being marked at the
structural or syntactic level. That is, two representations can co-refer without purporting
to co-refer.
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Our capacity to deploy devices of explicit co-reference is central to the
objectuality and referential fitness of our thought. If there were no explicitly coreferential representations, then no two thoughts would ever inwardly purport to be about
the same object. But if no two thoughts ever inwardly purported to be about the same
object again, then for any new thought episode, even when the thinker was, in fact,
thinking of the same object again, it would always be inwardly as if she was thinking
about an object never previously cognized. The cognizing subject would have, at best, a
fleeting cognitive hold on the objects. She could not, for example, remember today what
she believed yesterday.xv She could not anticipate in thought future encounters with a
currently perceptually salient object, as least not as encounters with that very object
again. More strongly, a mind in which no two thoughts same-purported would seem to
altogether lack the capacity for thought as of objects at all. For thoughts as of objects are
thoughts as of enduring particulars that may be encountered and cognized again from
different perspectives, while being the same again and while being at least on occasion
cognized as the same again. This is precisely what would be lost if no two thoughts ever
inwardly purported to be thoughts as of the same object again.xvi
§3. Kantian-Fregean Roots
The distinction between merely objectual and fully objective representations has
an ancient and venerable pedigree. Kant was perhaps the first to grasp, albeit through a
glass darkly, something like our distinction. Consider Kant’s distinction between bona
fide judgments and merely subjectively valid associations. Kant took the former to
purport to be about objects and how things are by such objects. He took the latter to
concern, roughly, only our own psychology. In judging that bodies are heavy, we purport
to represent how things are by the objects themselves, Kant held. Representing how
things are by the objects is different from reporting on the merely subjective regularity
that when we lift a body, we feel a pressure of weight. Now Kant believed there to be
certain purely formal conditions, arising solely from the side of the understanding, on the
possibility of mental states enjoying this sort of objective representational purport. It is
in his account of those conditions that Kant gets gropingly at something like the notion of
an objectual representation.
I will not attempt to reiterate Kant’s account of the merely formal conditions on
the “objective validity” of our judgments here. What bears stressing for our current
purposes is that that account is not intended by Kant as an account of how judgments
actually succeed in reaching actually existent objects. That is because he thought that in
order that our judgments actually achieve full-blooded objective validity, as he called it,
we need something more than these merely formal conditions from the side of the
understanding. We need, in addition, a “given manifold” of sensory intuition, a
manifold that must be “brought under” the necessary synthetic unity of apperception. It
is precisely because the understanding contains no manifold of its own, but only the
formal grounds of the synthetic unity of an, as it were, alien manifold, that the formal
conditions on objective validity which arise on the side of the understanding can suffice
only for something like the objectuality of judgments and not for their full-blooded
objectivity. Relevant here is Kant’s distinction between merely thinking an object and
cognizing an object. In full-blown cognition of an object, there must be both a given
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intuitive element and a formal conceptual element. In bare thought, devoid of intuitive
content, we have, he claims, merely “empty concepts of objects, through which we
cannot even judge whether the latter are possible or not -- mere forms of thought without
objective validity.”
Kant rightly took there to be a constitutive connection between the objective
character of our thought and our objectual-making capacity for thinking with purport of
sameness. Kant takes the given of sensation to be a punctate manifold of disunited
qualities that are not yet anything to thought and consciousness. Only by conceptualizing
the world, that is, by taking the deliverances of sensibility up into a unified consciousness
-- and that by “running through” and “synthesizing” them in accordance with the
categories of the understanding -- do we achieve cognition of an objective order. Kant’s
dark, but suggestive notion of synthesis is central to his views about same-purport.
Synthesis is precisely, for Kant, that combinatorial power of the understanding by which
it gives rise to representations that same-purport with one another. On this picture, the
understanding takes as input disconnected elements of a punctate sensory stream and
“unites” them via synthesis under categorially grounded conceptual representations in
such a way that they are marked as belonging together. It is precisely by deploying
synthetically unified conceptual representations that we are able to think in samepurporting ways about substances and their properties.
Kant was surely correct to maintain that the capacity to think in same-purporting
ways is a sine qua non of the objective validity, as he called it, of our thought. But to
accept this claim is not to accept either Kant’s peculiar account of the nature of samepurporting thought or his peculiar story about how thought manages to achieve contact
with a world of objects. Indeed, Kant’s dark doctrine of synthesis introduces nearly as
many problems as it purports to solve. Kant plausibly believed, for example, that samepurporting is inextricably tied up with the deployment of concepts. At the same time, he
held that concepts are always general and never singular. This bundle of views promises
to deliver an explanation of the possibility of judgments to the effect that one is presented
with an instance of horse again, say, but it does not obviously promise an explanation of
our capacity to think with same-purport about individuals. Indeed, since singular
representations are one and all sensible and/or intuitive and, therefore, by his lights, nonconceptual and non-discursive, it would seem to follow that singularity is the business of
perception and experience not of judgment and thought. If that is right, it is at least
puzzling how, on Kant’s view, singular thoughts are even possible.xvii
Moreover, Kant seemed to believe that once synthesis is carried out thoughts that
same-purport are guaranteed to be about the same object. Such a view seems a nearly
inevitable outgrowth of Kant’s misguided transcendental idealism, according to which
the objects of our (empirical) cognition lack any mind-independent existence. It would
not be too far a stretch to say that transcendental idealism just is, or at least strongly
entails, the view that objects as such are nothing but either constructions out of or
projections from relations of same-purport among some privileged class of judgments -roughly those judgments we would arrive at upon the completion, were it possible, of
the ideal system of nature.
But for merely finite cognizers like ourselves who lack omniscience, the view
that thoughts that same-purport with one another are guaranteed to be about the same
object cannot be entirely and unambiguously correct. For one thing, same-purporting
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thoughts need not be about any object at all. Santa Claus-thoughts, as we might call
them, one and all same-purport with one another, but they are about no object.xviii
Though the capacity for same-purport is a precondition of the full-blown objectivity of
thought, no object is yet given through the mere exercise of that capacity. More
importantly, inner relations of same-purport may fail to match external relations of
identity and difference. A cognizer may, for example, encounter a particular object but
mistake it for another. I may, for example, encounter Joelle but mistake her for her twin
sister Marie. In such a context, I may deploy an inner token of ‘Marie’ in thinking about
the young woman I encounter. In that case, my thought will same-purport with many
earlier thoughts about Marie. But there is also a sense in which my thought can be said to
be about Joelle -- even if it is and purports to be about Marie as well. Despite the fact
that there is a sense in which my thought is about Joelle, it clearly does not same-purport
with my earlier thoughts about Joelle. Rather, I am in what we might call a divided
mental state. I am confusedly thinking, via a tokening of an inner ‘Marie,’ with respect
to that very person now in front of me, who happens to be Joelle, that she is a promising
young tennis player. I am, in effect, thinking of Joelle as Marie, thinking of Joelle with
Marie-purport. My confused thought has, I think, at least as much claim to be thought
about Joelle as it does to be a thought about Marie. It follows, therefore, that it is not
necessarily and unambiguously the case that inwardly same-purporting thoughts succeed
in being purely and simply about one and the same external object. That inwardly samepurporting thoughts are not guaranteed to be about the same object is a sort of minimal
anti-Fregean point.
Like Kant before him, Frege (1960, 1977) also believed that the capacity to think
in same-purporting ways is central to our capacity to make cognitive contact with objects.
He offered two different theories of same-purport – one in the Foundations of Arithmetic
in the course of trying to spell out what the epistemic givenness of number consists in;
the other in “On Sense and Reference.” In the former work, he says:
If we are to use the sign a to signify an object, we must have a criterion for
deciding in all cases whether b is the same as a, even if it is not always in our
power to apply this criterion.
The central thought seems to be that an identity statement expresses what is contained in
a recognition judgment -- a judgment to the effect that one has been given the same
object again. Frege’s further thought is apparently that we have succeeded in using a sign
to designate a determinate object just in case we have fixed a significance for each
identity statement in which a given singular term may occur. We thereby specify,
according to Frege, what it is for any two terms to (correctly) purport to stand for the
same object. This approach promises to allow for the epistemic givenness of numbers,
despite the fact that we have, as Frege says, neither “ideas” nor (sensory) “intuitions”
of them. Numbers are given to us through the use of singular terms. Indeed, Frege seems
to endorse the perfectly general claim that the concept of an object in general, as Kant
might have put it, is nothing but the concept of that which is given through the use of a
singular term. Just as Kant believed that objects are nothing but constructions out of or
projections from relations of same-purport among our thoughts, so Frege seems to
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believe that objects are nothing but the shadows cast by the uses of singular terms,
paradigmatically in identity statements.
Strikingly, Frege seems not yet to have grasped the need to distinguish the mere
purport of sameness from success at referring to the same again. He denied even the
possibility of same-purporting singular representations that entirely lack any reference.
He claims that a (complex) singular term formed from an “empty” phrase by adjoining
the definite article -- as in, ‘the largest proper fraction’ -- is “without content” and
“senseless.” But terms that are “senseless” and “without content” would seem to be
entirely devoid of referential purport. Only with the eventual emergence of the
distinction between sense and reference did Frege acquire the resources to make
something like the distinction I am after. Armed with that distinction, he can now allow
that there are fully “contentful” singular terms that, nonetheless, stand for no objects. He
can allow, that is to say, that expressions that fail to refer can have, nonetheless, fully
determinate referential purport. More importantly, Frege can now say both that
expressions that share a sense, share referential purport, even if they entirely lack a
reference, and that expressions that differ in sense differ in referential purport, even if
they do share a reference. Sharing referential purport is not yet sharing a reference -because two non-referring names may still share a sense. Sharing reference is not yet
sharing referential purport -- because of the possibility of co-referring names that differ in
sense.
On my view, both Kant and Frege got both something right and something wrong.
On the one hand, neither Kantian synthesis nor Fregean senses play any role in
explaining the ultimate source of the capacity for thinking with same-purport. Yet I fully
endorse the Kantian-Fregean insight that any adequate theory of the objective
representational content of our thought must explain the difference between merely
thinking of the same object again, without inward purport of sameness, and thinking of
the same object again with inner purport of sameness. What Frege sought to explain by
appeal to semantic notions, like the distinction between sense and reference, I explain by
appeal to the logical-syntax of the language of thought. It is not, as Frege imagined, that
each name is associated with a determinate and independent mode of presentation of its
referent such that names that co-refer may, nonetheless, present that referent to the
thinking subject in two different ways such that it cannot be determined a priori that the
names share a reference. Rather, it is just that distinct names are ispo facto referentially
independent, even if they are coincidentally co-referential. Names are quite distinctive
linguistic devices. To repeat a name is ipso facto to purport to repeat a reference. To
refer again to the same object, but using a different name is, in effect, to refer de novo to
the relevant object, that is, in a way not “anaphorically” linked with the previous act of
reference. And this is so both for shared public languages and for the de facto private
language of thought.
§ 4. Illusions of Objectivity
We need to note one further aspect of the relationship between merely objectual
and fully objective singular representations in order to position ourselves to fully
appreciate what is right and wrong about the both the acquaintance condition on singular
thought and about semantic instrumentalism. By at least two different measures, merely
9
objectual representations and fully objective representations are indistinguishable. First,
there are no narrowly syntactic markers of referential success. Consequently, merely
referentially fit and fully referentially successful representations play indistinguishable
syntactic roles in both language and in thought. Moreover, we play language and thought
games with a common dialogic structure with both the merely referentially fit and the
fully referentially successful. In particular, we play entitlement-commitment games with
both the merely referentially fit and the fully referentially successful. The syntactic and
dialogic similarity between the objectual and the objective can lead the inattentive to
suffer what I call the illusion of objectivity and to posit objects where there are none.
One is liable to suffer the illusion of objectivity if one supposes that wherever we make
rationally warranted moves with singular representations in some entitlementcommitment game, we are ipso facto getting at, or purporting to get at, how things are
by some domain of actually existent objects -- as if the objects are somehow given
merely through the play of the game. One is liable to think, for example, that in making
rationally warranted moves in fictive entitlement-commitment games we are getting at
how things are by a domain of fictional objects or that in playing mathematical
entitlement-commitment games, we are getting at how things are by a domain of
mathematical objects.
The illusion of objectivity is one source of both doctrines like Platonism in the
philosophy of mathematics and of skepticism about the prospects for a
causal/informational theories of reference. Anyone who is prepared to posit a domain
of objects wherever there are entitlement-commitment games played with objectual
singular representations is liable to think that causal/informational theories cannot explain
the nature of our cognitive contact with the plethora of objects she acknowledges. Since
we have no causal/informational contact with fictional objects or with
mathematical objects, it would seem to follow that the causal/informational theories
cannot possibly be a correct general account of how the gap between the merely
objectual and fully objective is bridged. The proper response to the line of thought is
that there are no such objects. Consequently, the causal/informational theorist bears no
burden to explain either the nature of such objects or what their epistemic givenness
consists in or our ability to refer to such objects. There are only what I call nonveridical entitlement-commitment games played with merely objectual singular
representations.
I call such games “non-veridical” because moves in such games are not
constrained to track strict-literal truth. It is not, for example, strictly literally true that
Sherlock Holmes lives at 221 Baker Street or that Santa Claus lives at the North Pole.
Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that because such statements are not fully propositional,
they make no determinate claim on how the world is and are thus neither true nor false.
xix
Nonetheless, I do not deny that within a certain entitlement-commitment game the
statement Sherlock Holmes lives at 221 Baker Street enjoys what I call truth-similitude.
Indeed, I argue elsewhere that operators like ‘true in the Holmes story’ are devices of
attributing to moves within a certain entitlement-commitment game not a species of truth
but a species of truth similitude.xx And though there is much work to be done in
explaining both what we are doing when we play such games and the cognitive
significance of such doings, the bare existence of such games causes no special problems
for the causal/informational theorist.
10
Because of our propensity to conflate merely objectual representations and fully
objective ones and our propensity to mistake mere truth similitude for genuine truth, a
play of merely objectual representations in non-veridical language games is liable to give
rise to illusions of objectivity. But that fact does not entail that a play of merely objectual
representations, deployed in non-veridical language-thought games, is thereby altogether
lacking in genuine cognitive significance. Indeed, such games occupy many important
places in our shared mental lives. They are, for example, the stuff of which shared
imaginings are made. The capacity for shared imaginings is a distinctively human
capacity that lies at the very foundation of our ability to produce culture and social life.
The production and consumption of fiction is one kind of shared imagining. Pure, as
opposed to applied mathematics is, I maintain, another. And there are many others as
well. We imagine putative places, people, societies, or entire world-orders alternative to
the actual. Through shared imaginings, we represent to ourselves moral and aesthetic
ideals nowhere realized in the history of the world. When we do so, we are not exploring
some platonic nether world of abstract real existents. Typically, we are manipulating, in
a more or less constrained fashion, a system of merely objectual representations in a nonveridical, but still constrained manner. Such moves need not be fully propositional and
typically will not enjoy strict, literal truth or falsity. Nonetheless, it is not the case that
anything goes. We try to constrain such moves so that they will enjoy various degrees
and manners of truth similitude. What degrees and manners will be highly dependent on
the nature of the game and the cognitive point of playing it.
I lack the space to explore the rich extent and variety of our shared imaginings
and the multiplicity of factors that condition their contents. But I hope I have said
enough to motivate a conjecture. The conjecture is that the very nature of the referential
apparatus of language and thought -- the whole apparatus of names, deictics, quantifiers,
variables, and anaphora – lies at the foundation of the capacity for shared imaginings.
Though the entire referential apparatus is, in one sense, made for talking about real
existents, we, nonetheless, have the capacity to deploy that apparatus even when no real
existents are given to thought.
§4 Semantic Instrumentalism and Acquaintance Revisited
Return now to semantic instrumentalism and the acquaintance condition. Here is
the simple first pass assessment of their truth and falsity. If it is taken as a claim about
merely objectual, merely referentially fit representations, semantic instrumentalism is
approximately true. On the other hand, if it is taken as a claim about fully objective
representations, semantic instrumentalism is clearly false. Merely objectual
representations are free for the thinking up. The cognizing mind profusely and
effortlessly stirs up such representations within itself. It often does so in the course of
non-verdical language-thought games. Through the stirring up of merely objectual
representations, however, no object is so far made available to thought. Where no object
is made available to thought, there is at most only the purport of singularity of content
and not yet the achievement of singularity of content.xxi Since the factors that render our
thought merely objectual do not yet suffice to make an object available to thought, the
acquaintance condition as applied to such representations is neither here nor there. But it
should be clear from what has already been said that to deny that objectuality is subject to
11
an acquaintance condition is not to say that merely objectual representations are entirely
devoid of cognitive function and significance.
The more pressing question, of course, is whether an object can be made available
to thought, with our thoughts being thereby rendered fully objective, in the absence of
acquaintance. There is something right about the acquaintance condition on singular
thought content. It certainly seems right to say that acquaintance with an object would
suffice to render that object de re thinkable. The real question, however, is whether
acquaintance with an object is necessary to render it de re thinkable. As far as I know,
strict Russellian acquaintance has no current advocates. But a succession of less
cognitively demanding requirements on singularity of content have been proposed in its
stead. As the requirements weaken, the plausibility of the proposed acquaintance
condition increases. Recall David Kaplan’s early view that an object as such is de re
thinkable only if the thinker is en rapport with the object.xxii Weaker even than
Kaplanian rapport or Russellian direct acquaintance is ordinary “knowledge wh” -ordinary knowledge who, what, when or where.xxiii In a quite ordinary sense, I know
who my wife Claire is, know when I am writing this sentence, know which computer I am
writing it on, and know where I am now sitting. But I am not, in Russell’s sense, directly
acquainted with any of these objects. Moreover, with the exception of my wife, it is
unlikely that I possess anything so strong as Kaplanian rapport with these objects either.
It would be an interesting task to try to specify the weakest possible cognitive
hold on an object that suffices for the de re thinkability of that object. One could
plausibly argue that what is necessary for an object to be available to thought is that one
have an epistemic relation to the object at least as strong as the weakest possible relation
that would suffice to render the object de re thinkable. I won’t take up that task here.
That is because I suspect that acquaintance and its progressively more attenuated
descendant have been oversold as necessary constraints on the possibility of de re
thinkability.xxiv And I want to close this essay by motivating that suspicion.
The philosophical search for the cognitive relations, whatever they are, that would
suffice to render an object as such available to thought, and thus de re thinkable, is
rooted in philosophical worries about the epistemic one-sidedness of reference. David
Kaplan, for example, has recently claimed that there could be a pure, natural and
primitive notion of de re belief only if we were able to make “perfectly good sense of the
claim that George IV has a belief about Sir Walter Scott independently of the way in
which he is represented to George.”xxv But because the mental representations that
mediate our de re attitudes are cognitively one-sided, we cannot, he seems to conclude,
make sense of such claims. Those mediating representations are one-sided in the sense
that “a thinker could have two such representations of … the same object, without
realizing they are of the same object.”
But need the epistemic one-sidedness of all reference cause us to despair about
the very possibility that an object as such, rather than a merely one-sided presentation of
that object, might be made available to thought? The answer, I want so suggest, is that
we should not give in to such despair. The one-sidedness of reference is a merely
syntactic one-sideness. It is nothing but a reflection of the fact that the inner form and
role of name-like and other singular representations is insufficient to guarantee that when
two such representations refer to, and thus make available to thought, the same outer
object, they will ipso facto be syntactically and dynamically linked in our inner mental
12
lives. That is because co-referring names need not “same purport” in the sense outlined
above. Just because representations which refer to and make the same object thinkable
again are not guaranteed to inwardly same-purport, they are not guaranteed to be
syntactically and dynamically linked in our inner mental lives. Consequently, there is the
ever-present danger that even a rational mind may sometimes fall into a kind of external
incoherence.xxvi It is the fact of this ever present danger that leads philosophers like
Kaplan to despair over the purity and naturalness of de re belief. But such despair is
misplaced. It should not lead us to hold de re cognition to such extra-ordinarily high
epistemic standards. Even a confused or incoherent thought about an object may still be
a thought about that very object.
To be sure, referentially fit singular representations may begin to lose the grip on
the objects. Consider Joelle again. Imagine that, entirely unbeknownst to me, Joelle is, in
fact, one of a quintuplet. Each time I encounter one of her sisters, I token ‘Joelle.’ Now
suppose that I, as it were, agglomerate all of the information I have about any of the
sisters into one standing ‘Joelle’ file. I think to myself, “My that Joelle gets around.” I
deploy my inner ‘Joelle’ in a name-like and fully objectual, fully referentially fit fashion.
Each time I deploy ‘Joelle’ in a thought episode, I thereby think with inward purport of
sameness again. But of what object do I thereby think as of the same again? Do I deploy
a determinate individual concept in my thought episodes? And what about my standing
“conception,” that is, my standing database of information and misinformation? Is that
odd conglomeration of information from diverse sources a (mis)conception “of” Joelle?
Or is it a (mis)conception “of” one or the other of her sisters? Is it really determinate
whether my thoughts are of Joelle or of one of her four sisters? Perhaps I think of now
one sister as Joelle, now of another as Joelle, and now of yet another as Joelle. Perhaps I
think of a mereological sum of Joelle and her sisters. Perhaps there is simply no fact of
the matter about who, if anyone, I am thinking of. Perhaps, I do not succeed in having a
de re cognition at all.
A good theory of the ultimate source and nature of de re cognitions should
ultimately answer such questions or at least say why, in the nature of things, there can be
no determinate answers to them. Moreover, any good theory of de re cognitions will
have to accommodate the fact that nothing lying merely on the side of the cognizing
subject can guarantee that when a thinker is presented with the same again, she will ipso
facto recognize that she is presented with the same again. Still further, a good theory will
accommodate the fact that nothing lying merely on the side of the subject guarantees that
when a thinker inwardly purports to think of the same again, she necessarily and
unambiguously succeeds in thinking of the same again.
These correlative facts do push us toward the limits of de re thinkability.
Moreover, they are direct consequences of the merely syntactic one-sidedness of
reference. That is, the merely syntactic one-sideness of reference gives rise to the ever
present possibility that entirely referentially fit representations may be so incoherently
and confusedly ordered in relation to outer objects that their inner deployment in thought
episodes gives rise to no de re cognitions. But even if we grant that enough external
confusion and incoherence can cause inwardly fit representations to lose their hold on
outer objects and even if we grant the ever present epistemic possibility that we have
fallen into such confusion and incoherence, it does not follow that our representations are
actually so incoherently and confusedly ordered as to make de re cognitions impossible.
13
If the mere standing possibility of confusion and/or incoherence in relation to outer
objects in our de re cognitions does not suffice to undermine the standing of those
cognitions as de re cognitions, then there is no reason to conclude that the one-sidedness
of our representations in any way threatens the purity and naturalness of de re belief.
It would be surprising if it were otherwise. Thinking about an object is one thing.
Thinking about that object coherently and unconfusedly is an entirely different matter. It
may help to distinguish mere de re thinkability from what we might call, following
Robert Brandom, epistemically strong de re thinkability.xxvii For the former, it suffices
that our thoughts be determinately bound-down to the objects and thereby rendered
semantically answerable to how things are by the objects in a way that is independent of
how those objects are presented to us. For the latter something more is needed. We must
achieve a tight cognitive grip on the object. Epistemically strong de re attitudes are
cognitively powerful things. They enable one not merely to think the objects of one’s
thought, but to re-cognize the objects that one thinks as the same objects again when they
are presented again, but under different guises. When we fail to attend to the distinction
between mere de re thinkability and epistemically strong de re thinkability, we are liable
to the tempting, but mistaken inference from the one-sidedness of all mental
representations to the conclusion that de re belief is somehow more problematic than
some other more secure and purer notion of belief.
14
Endnotes
i
The contemporary discussion of singular reference and singular thought has its main historical roots in
discussions of referentialist semantics and the causal-historical theory of reference. See Bach (1987),
Burge (1977), Donnellan (1966), (1979), Kaplan (1969), Kaplan (1989), Kripke (1980), Putnam (1975),
and Russell (1918), to name just a few. A different branch of the contemporary discussion is rooted in the
neo-Fregeanism of Evans (1982), (1985), and McDowell (1984). One leading lesson of these early
discussions was that the constitution of content was not the business of the mind alone, but involved the
mind being related to and embedded in the world. While this lesson was well-enough learned, it seems to
me that one downside of the focus on the world’s contribution to the constitution of singular content was
too little focus on the mind’s contribution, especially by many of the leading advocates of referentialist
semantics and externalist philosophies of mind. To be sure, there were always exceptions to this rough
rule and a second wave of referentialist thinking has been more concerned with matters of mentalistic and
epistemic import. This tendency reaches a high water mark in recent work by John Perry. See Perry
(2001), for example. Though she exihibits a quite different range of basic philosophical instincts and
hunches, one might also include the work of Ruth Millikan in this second wave of referentialist thinking.
See Millikan (1984), (1993), (2000), and (2004). Despite this second wave of referentialist thinking,
there remains much to be done if we are to achieve the full integretation of the best insights of
referentialism into a fully adequate theory of mind.
ii
See Kant (1968), Frege (1980), and Quine (1960), (1974). I do not wish to overstate the commonalities
among Kant, Frege, and Quine. Nor do I wish suggest that any of them was an advocate of the very idea of
singular thought as understood by contemporary exponents of that notion. In fact, all of them in one way or
another deny the very idea that thought contents as such could be inherently singular. Kant, for example,
believed that while intuition was singular, thought was inherently general and discursive. And it is well
known that Quine rejected the very idea of a de re thought as deeply problematic. Finally, Frege explicitly
denied that the object itself could ever be a thought constituent. Still, I find in Kant, Frege and Quine
something that is missing in almost all extant approaches to thought content – a concern with the form of
our thought as of objects and how that form plays a role in enabling our words and our thoughts to make
contact with a world of objects – whether, as with Frege and Quine, that world of objects is not largely of
the mind’s own making or, as with Kant, that world is, in some sense, of the mind’s own making. The
contemporary philosopher who comes the closest to sharing concerns I address in this essay seems to me to
be Robert Brandom (1994). He has written much that can be understood as explorations of the form of
singular reference and singular thinking – though he might not himself put it quite that way. To be sure,
Brandom works within the context of an irrealist expressivism about reference and an inferentialist
semantics with which I have little sympathy. By contrast, I have much sympathy for the sort of
representationalism that Brandom explicitly rejects. Moreover, I remain a dyed-in-the-wool,
unreconstructed realist about reference. That is, I think there is such a thing as the reference relation.
And I think that relation can ultimately shown to be part of the natural order. I argue at length for such a
view in Taylor (forthcoming).
iii
See Jeshion (this volume?) for a discussion of the virtues and vices of semantic instrumentalism. See
also Kaplan (1989b). There Kaplan defends what he calls the Instrumental Thesis;
Our connection with the a linguistic community in which names and other meaning-bearing
elements are passed down to us enables us to entertain thoughts through the language that would
not otherwise be accessible to us. (603).
And further down, he asks the provocative question
15
So how shall I apprehend thee? Let me count the ways. I may apprehend you by (more or less)
direct perception. And I may apprehend you by memory of (more or less) direct perception. And
finally, I may apprehend you through a sign that has been created to signify you (emphasis
added.) (604)
At the same time, Kaplan grants that merely apprehending an object “through a name” does not suffice to
place one en rapport with the relevant object. He thus denies that there is an acquaintance condition on
singular or de re thinking. I shall be arguing that the budget of views endorsed by Kaplan here is a mixture
of the true and the false. And that untangling what is true from what is false requires some further
distinctions.
iv
See Russell (1918), Kaplan (1969) , Burge (1977), Donnellan (1979), Lewis (1979) , Boer and Lycan
(1986) , Recanati (1993), Bach (1987).
v
See Taylor (2004) and Taylor (forthcoming) for fuller discussion of the distinction between merely
objectual and fully objective representations.
vi
Taylor (forthcoming).
vii
Taylor (forthcoming).
viii
On my view, full blown singular reference is a distinctively linguistic phenomenon, a phenomenon that
first arises at the level of language and thought. It is often thought, however, that singular reference first
happens before we get to language and thought in the non-conceptual, not yet linguistically articulated
contents of perception. Indeed [it] may be thought to be the paradigm of the singular. Moreover, if one
thinks that perceptual contents are inherently singular, a natural enough seeming thought is to suppose that
the singularity of singular thoughts is somehow inherited from the singularity of perception. That might be
taken to suggest that there is nothing terribly distinctive to say about the singularity of singular thought, as
opposed to the singularity of perception. But I do not think that this can all be entirely correct. First, the
claim that perceptual contents are “non-conceptual” trades on a certain oft-noted ambiguity – between what
we might call bare perceivings and perceptual judgments. Seeing the cat run is one thing; seeing that the
cat is running is an entirely different thing. An episode of the latter does, I think, involve the deployment
of the concept <cat>. An episode of the former, one might think, need not involve the deployment of that
concept (or any other concept) at all. Of course, if you think that the contents of our thoughts are
somehow inherited, more or less directly, from the (non-conceptual) contents of bare perceivings, then you
have a problem. There is evidently a gap between the putatively non-conceptual contents of bare
perceivings and the conceptual contents of perceptual (and non-perceptual) judgments. Telling the story
about how that gap might conceivably be bridged is no doubt a challenge.
I don’t want to dwell on that challenge in this note, but I do want to suggest that there is parallel gap
between the supposed singularity of bare perceiving and the singularity of full-blown thought. Suppose we
grant that when one (barely) sees the cat scurrying across the room – without seeing that it is a cat or that it
is scurrying across the room – there is a sense in which one can be said to see a particular cat. There is
perhaps even a sense in which one can said to see it as a particular (even if one don’t see it as a cat.) To
see it as a particular plausibly amounts to seeing it via the deployment of inner tracking devices that are
“for” keeping track of particulars during and perhaps across (connected) visual episodes. I am thinking
here of Pylyshyn’s (2007 ) discussion of FINST. Seeing a particular as a particular in this sense is,
however, pretty far from the full blown singularity that is implicated in full blown singular thought. First,
it lasts at most only over a range of “connected” perceptual episode. That is, in tracking a particular over
the duration of a connected range of perceptual episode, one does not thereby represent it as an enduring
thing that can be encountered again, from arbitrarily different perspectives, by the same or different
cognizers or by multiple cognizers simultaneously. The singularity of a singular thought decidedly does
16
involve such representation. Such representational achievements may well be built on the backs of the
relatively low-level perceptual constancies implicated in bare perception. But they implicate much more
of the mind’s representational and conceptual armor than is deployed in bare perceiving.
ix
Wittgenstein (1953)
x
The contrast here implied between the lexical-syntax and lexical-semantics is meant to distinguish
certain lexically governed or constrained word-word relationships, on the one hand, from lexically
governed and constrained word-world relationships, on the other. Not just any word-word relationship is
lexical-syntactic in the sense I intend. Relations of synonymy, for example, are lexical-semantic rather
than lexical syntactic. Unlike relations of synonymy, the relations of concern to us are entirely independent
of facts about the peculiar or idiosyncratic meanings of the words that bear those relations. Rather, the
relations of interest to us hold in virtue of facts about membership in bare word-categories. They are
lexical-syntactic because facts about category membership are themselves lexical facts. Though the
lexical-syntactic relations that make for objectuality are independent of -- because prior to -- facts about
idiosyncratic word-meanings, they are not for that reason semantically irrelevant. Lexical-syntactic
relations constrain semantic interpretation. In particular, they constrain whether two items in a sentence or
discourse must be semantically interpreted together or may be semantically interpreted independently. It
may help to think of lexical-syntax not on analogy with bare “shape” but more on analogy with interrelated
“structures.” The paradigm example of what I have in mind are explicitly anaphoric relationships.
Anaphoric relationships are structurally marked relationships of interpretational dependence. Anaphoric
structures are not, on my view, fully semantic. Such structures do determine content and do not tie a
representation to what it represents. But such relationships do constraint semantic interpretation by
constraining which items may be interpreted independently and which must be interpreted together.
xi
See Taylor (2003), Taylor (2004), and Taylor (forthcoming) for further elaboration. For views similar
in spirit, but different in detail from my own, see Fiengo and May (2006) and Fine (2007).
xii
Diego Marconi (in conversation) objects that the twin properties of explicit co-referentiality of cotypical name tokens and referential independence of type-distinct name tokens does not distinguish names
from certain other sorts of expressions. For example, he notes that according to a popular account all
tokens of the type 'tiger' refer (rigidly) to the species "tiger." Similarly with the word 'yellow'. So, Marconi
worried that my account fails to pick out any distinctive property of names. In response, it should be noted
that my claim is only that explicit co-referentiality and referential independence partially characterize the
syntactic category NAME. Names are also expressions that, for example, may well-formedly flank the
identity sign and may well-formedly occupy the argument places of verbs. Some totality of such
properties jointly constitute a broader, still syntactically characterized class of expressions, the class of
SINGULAR TERMS. The category NAME is a distinguished subclass of that broader class, however
exactly the broader class is defined. Included in the class of singular terms are also demonstratives and
indexicals –the anaphoric properties of which I discuss in detail elsewhere. What I claim, in effect, is that
the category NAME consists of the set S of singular term types such that: (a) if a term t is a member of S,
then tokens of t are explicitly co-referential and (b) if t and t’ are members of S such that t  t’ then t and
t’ are referentially independent. So my approach requires an antecedent analysis of singular termhood. I
haven’t offered such an analysis here, at least not a full-blown one. But see Taylor (forthcoming). The
account of singular terms offered therein bears a certain affinity to that offered in Brandom (1994). The
twin properties of referential independence of type distinct tokens and explicit co-referentiality of cotypical tokens does, I think, serve to distinguish names from other singular terms. Another distinguishing
feature of the anaphoric character of names is that names may dominate anaphoric chains, but are never
dominated within any such chain. Contra Marconi, then, it wouldn’t bother me at all if there were other
expressions in, say, the category PREDICATE or the category COMMON NOUN that had somehow
“correlative” syntactic properties. This wouldn’t, though, suffice to make predicates be names or
17
obliterate the important syntactic distinction between names and predicates. But I stress again that it is not
my goal here to offer a full blown and explicit analysis of the very idea of a singular term.
xiii
Think here of Perry’s file folders. See Perry (2001). But what I cannot find in Perry is any
acknowledgement of the need to distinguish between standing and recurring mental structures. He seems
to want file folders to do both the work of conceptions and the work of concepts simultaneously.
xiv
For further exploration of the distinction between concepts and concepts see Taylor (2003).
xv
For a suggestive and helpful discussion of mental anaphora and its role in identity thinking and contentpreservation, see Lawlor (2002).
xvi
Same-puporting is not, on my view, something that agents, qua agents, consciously do at the so-called
personal level. It is rather something that our cognitive system “does” at what is often called a subpersonal
or subdoxastic level. The capacity for same-purporting thought is, as it were, an architectural feature of
our representational system. And I have argued at length elsewhere this architectural feature is partly
responsible for a capacity to make cognitive contact with a world of objects not of the minds own making.
But I have also argued that the mind’s representational architecture does not suffice, on its own, to achieve
full blown cognitive contact with a world of mind-independent objects. For a fuller elaboration and
defense, see Taylor (forthcoming).
xvii
See Manley Thompson (1972) for the classic discussion of this issue.
xviii
In complete fairness, I should say that Kant can plausibly be credited with some recognition of this
fact. Recall in this connection his distinction, referred to above, between merely thinking an object and
cognizing an object. With this distinction Kant anticipate the possibility of same-purport in the absence of
reference to any object at all. Same purport in the absence of reference amounts to what I have called
objectuality without objectivity, referential fitness without referential success.
xix
See Taylor (2003) and Taylor (forthcoming).
xx
Taylor (forthcoming)
xxi
This fact enables us to see both what is right and what is wrong about Jeshion’s view that there can be de
re beliefs even in the absence of real existents. See Jeshion (2001). Certainly there can be the form of de
re thought in the absence of any real existents. But de re contents cannot subsist in the absence of such
existents. Jeshion has not quite succumbed to the illusion of objectivity, however, since she does
recognize that no object – not even a non-existent one -- is given through the use of a non-referring singular
term. But because she fails to appreciate the distinction between the objectual and the objective, she
struggles to express an insight that can only be adequately expressed with that distinction in hand.
xxii
xxiii
Kaplan (1969)
See Boer and Lycan (1986).
xxiv
For a similar claim see Jeshion (2001), (2002), and (2008). As mentioned above, however, Jeshion’s
failure to distinguish between objectuality and objectivity – that is, between the form and content of de re
thought -- weakens her otherwise quite compelling and provocative arguments. Now one might wonder,
as Jeshion has in conversation, whether my view entails that there is no singular thought in the absence of
an object of thought. My answer is that that depends on how exactly one wants to use the expression
“singular thought.” There are many occurrent mental episodes and states that enjoy objectuality without
enjoying objectivity. There is no harm in calling states of this sort thoughts or singular thoughts as long as
18
long as one recognizes that the singularity of such a thought is exhausted by its mere purport of singularity.
A fully objective singular thought enjoys more than the mere purport of singularity. It “successfully”
purports. There is no harm in reserving the phrase “singular thought” for mental episodes and states at
successfully purport. But if one does so, one must allow that there are also mental episodes and states that
are merely objectual and not yet objective. And one needs some other term to pick out that class of states.
In the past, partly inspired by Frege, I have tended to call such states pseudo-thoughts. But I am not
deeply wedded to that way of talking. Part of the problem with that way of talking is that it tends to
suggest that pseudo-thoughts can have no deep or important cognitive role in our mental lives. But on my
view, that is simply not the case.
xxv
Kaplan (20003).
xxvi
To a first approximation, one’s mental life is externally incoherent if there is no metaphysically possible
world in which one's beliefs (as widely individuated) are jointly true and one's desires (as widely
individuated) are jointly satisfiable.
xxvii
Brandom (1994).
19
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