Does singular thought have an epistemic essence?

ABSTRACT

What is involved in having a singular thought about an ordinary object? On the leading epistemic view, one has this capacity if and only if one has belief-forming dispositions which would reliably enable one to get its properties right (Dickie, 2015). I first argue that Dickie’s official view entails surprising and unpalatable claims about either rationality or singular thought, before offering a precisification. Once we have reached that level of abstraction, it becomes difficult to see what is distinctively epistemic about the framework. If we are to tease out the delicate connection between singular thought and knowledge, we should suspend the assumption that there is a homogeneous core, present in all cases of such thought, and that it is from there that its (univocal) epistemic character derives.

KEYWORDS:

• Singular thought
• reference
• reliability
• rationality
• mental files

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Imogen Dickie, Christoph Hoerl, and several anonymous referees for helpful discussions and written comments. Earlier versions of this material were presented in 2019 at the 22nd meeting of the Israeli Philosophical Association, the London Mind Group, and the Summer Philosophy Seminar at Kings College London.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I follow Dickie’s (2015) notation for convenience. However, for perspicuity, readers may wish to read ‘<That is red>’, for instance, as shorthand for ‘’.

2 On the tension between thinking of beliefs as both vehicles of thought and instances of such thought, see Goodman and Gray (2022). Dickie provides a rationale for not packaging her account in terms of mental files in her (2020).

3 Perhaps individuating means of justification by ‘internal’ features could alleviate the dissonance here. If uptake from perceptual experience is a means present equally in the brain-in-a-vat case and in typical cases of veridical perception, this means may well be truth-conducive in the safety-theoretic sense. For it is safe in ‘normal’ conditions. However, Dickie needs to individuate means of justification more externally to underpin her ‘uniqueness lemma’ (2015, 52) and does so (2015, 49).

4 ‘Don’t we need to know which object a subject’s beliefs are about before we know which beliefs it would be irrational for her to form?’ Dickie (2017) and Pepp (2020) discuss circularity worries in detail. I set them aside in this paper.

5 Notice that it is no use suggesting in reply that limited fallibility is compatible with the reliability needed for singular thought, because Dickie’s account of the kinds of mistakes compatible with reliability requires that those mistakes be rationally permissible.

6 A similar case is described by Pryor (2004) and also briefly discussed by Dickie (2015, 58), as we will see below.

7 Someone might suppose that Halle’s actual perceptual judgments are rational because they would, in an experience machine, succeed in picking out virtual objects. A reader so-inclined is encouraged to change the scenario to one involving the supposed administering of a powerful hallucinogenic drug.

8 Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this potential reply.

9 At one point Dickie (2015, 58) seems to suggest that a secondary role for the counterfactual in R&J is precisely to allow for cases in which ‘a factor that undermines rational entitlement leaves aboutness intact’. And so Dickie herself may in fact have this approach in mind. While I think this is not entirely clear, I set exegetical matters aside here and simply illustrate that this line of reply to Case 2 is problematic and ought to be avoided.

10 Recognition is not essential to the problem. One could set the problem up with just perceptual means of belief formation involving tracking. In something like the classic ‘cups and ball’ trick, one could argue that the subject’s proprietary means might be highly reliable in the operative sense despite its still being the case that she is not in a position to entertain perceptually based singular thoughts about the ball.

11 ‘The target of this project is the question […]: How do the relations to ordinary things that enable us to think about them do their aboutness-fixing work?’ (Dickie 2017, 748).

12 Russell’s Principle is the thesis that ‘in order to be thinking about an object or to make a judgment about an object, one must know which object […] one is thinking about’ (Evans 1982, 65).

Additional information

Funding

This research was carried out with the support of a Mind Association postdoctoral research studentship. It was also later in part supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101032391 and also by grants no. 397530566 and no. 419038924 from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) as part of the DFG research group Constructing Scenarios of the Past (FOR 2812).