Singular thought, acquaintance, and mental file

Abstract

A singular thought is a thought about an object directly. For instance, when I think about an apple in front of me in virtue of the perceptual link with the apple, I have a singular thought about the apple. I think about the apple directly. Apart from perceptual cases, it seems that there are various kinds of situations where we have singular thoughts. For example, I can have a singular thought about Obama in virtue of my use of the name ‘Obama' to think about him. If there are different kinds of situations where we can have singular thoughts about objects, a question naturally arises about what underlies these kinds of situations such that it enables us to have singular thoughts. Philosophers have proposed different answers to this question. In this thesis, I examine several approaches to the explanation of singular thoughts. I argue that the popular approaches are not satisfactory and propose a theory of singular thought that can avoid the problems of these approaches. By examining the scope distinction approach and acquaintance theory, it is found that accommodating the possibility of singular thoughts about fictional, abstract, and nonexistent objects is a desideratum of a theory of singular thought. Recently, many philosophers have employed the idea of mental files to explain singular thoughts. A mental file conception of singular thought can provide a way of accommodating the possibility of singular thoughts about fictional, abstract, and nonexistent objects. I defend that the mental file conception offers a framework for explaining singular thought. Nevertheless, the currently popular mental file conceptions of singular thought are not satisfactory because they cannot provide a suitable initiation condition on mental files. In light of this, I propose a tracking conception of mental file and apply it to the idea of singular thought. The tracking conception provides an appropriate initiation condition on mental files because it is built around the tracking function of mental files. Hence, with the commitment to the mental file conception of singular thought, I conclude that the tracking conception offers a satisfactory account of singular thought.