On Singularity

On Singularity

Kenneth A. Taylor

Stanford University

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 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.⁶ 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.⁷ 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 well-formedly 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 extra-representational, 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.⁸ Reference happens only when the extra-representational 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.⁹

Now the class of referentially fit expressions contains a variety of different kinds of expressions, with a variety of different formal properties.¹⁰ 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 co-referential. Explicit co-reference must be sharply distinguished from coincidental co-reference. 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 co-referential 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. ¹¹

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 co-referentiality 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 co-referential with, any name not in that set. Call such a set a chain of explicit co-reference. 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.¹²

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 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.¹³ 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 across a variety of thought-episodes is likely to have stored in her head a standing database of information (and misinformation) about cats. In English speaking deployers of the concept 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 -- that is, whether 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, 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.¹⁴

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.

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 co-referential 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.¹⁵ 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.¹⁶

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 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 same-purporting 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 same-purporting 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 same-purporting 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, non-conceptual 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.¹⁷

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 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.¹⁸ 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 same-purporting 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 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.

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 non-veridical 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. ¹⁹ 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.²⁰ 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.

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 non-veridical, 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.²¹ 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 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.²² Weaker even than Kaplanian rapport or Russellian direct acquaintance is ordinary “knowledge wh” -- ordinary knowledge who, what, when or where.²³ 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.²⁴ 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.”²⁵ 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 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.²⁶ 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. 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.²⁷ 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.