
Contents
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§1. Acquaintance and Semantic Instrumentalism §1. Acquaintance and Semantic Instrumentalism
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§2. Preliminaries §2. Preliminaries
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§3. The Thought Experiment §3. The Thought Experiment
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Set 1: Acquaintance by Perception, Memory, and Communication Set 1: Acquaintance by Perception, Memory, and Communication
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Set 2: No Acquaintance; Descriptive Names, Dthat, Deferred Demonstratives and Pronouns Set 2: No Acquaintance; Descriptive Names, Dthat, Deferred Demonstratives and Pronouns
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Set 3: No Acquaintance; Descriptive Names, Deferred Demonstratives and Pronouns Set 3: No Acquaintance; Descriptive Names, Deferred Demonstratives and Pronouns
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§4. Semantic Instrumentalism §4. Semantic Instrumentalism
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§5. What's Wrong with Semantic Instrumentalism? §5. What's Wrong with Semantic Instrumentalism?
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§6. Cognitivism: A New View of Singular Thought §6. Cognitivism: A New View of Singular Thought
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Singularity of Mental Files Grounded on Singularity of Object Files Singularity of Mental Files Grounded on Singularity of Object Files
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Origins of Mental Files and the Significance Condition Origins of Mental Files and the Significance Condition
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References References
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4 Singular Thought: Acquaintance, Semantic Instrumentalism, and Cognitivism
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Published:June 2010
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Abstract
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.
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