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Niall Connolly, BOOK REVIEW, The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 64, Issue 256, July 2014, Pages 517–520, https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqu018
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The problem of what to make of thoughts and other mental states that get characterized as ‘about Hamlet’, ‘about Pegasus’ and in general ‘about things that don't exist’ is the focus of Tim Crane's new book The Objects of Thought (TOT). Crane aims to give an account of these mental states that respect their similarity to mental states that are about real entities. It is of crucial importance that this aim is realizable, if a proper understanding of the aboutness of mental states—of intentionality (for Crane the mark of the mental)—is to be achieved. The phrase ‘thoughts and other mental states that get characterized as “about Hamlet”’ (let me shorten this to ‘Hamlet-thoughts’) is my attempt at a specification of the subject matter of TOT that doesn't assume the position that Crane argues for—that there is something, Hamlet, that Hamlet-thoughts are about.
‘The best phenomenological account of intentionality’ (p. 5) Crane says, entails there are non-existent objects of thought, like Hamlet and Pegasus, and truths about these. (These truths include ‘Pegasus is a mythical horse’ but not ‘Pegasus is a horse’; there is no such horse (p. 62).) Let me call the denial that there is something, Hamlet, that Hamlet-thoughts are about ‘eliminativism’. Crane is not an eliminativist in this sense but he is also not, or doesn't want to be, what Mark Sainsbury calls an ‘exoticist’ ((2010) ‘Intentionality without Exotica’ in R. Jeshion (ed.) New Essays on Singular Thought (Oxford: OUP)). A Hamlet-thought, he is adamant, does not relate the thinker to some kind of ‘exotic’ item. Aboutness is not a ‘real relation’ (p. 9). Having defended, in the first part of TOT, the ‘truisms’ that eliminativists deny, in the second part Crane offers ‘reductive’ explanations of the ‘truths about non-existent objects … in terms of truths about existing things’ (p. 5). TOT is an attempt to carve out a new position between eliminativism and exoticism, and finally solve ‘the problem of nonexistence’ (p. 3).
