Carsten Hansen

We argue that Recanati burdens his otherwise salutary “Mental File” account of singular thought with an “Actualist” assumption that he has inherited from the discussion of singular thought since at least Evans, according to which singular thoughts can only be about actual objects: apparent singular thoughts involving “empty” terms lack truth-valuable content. This assumption flies in the face of manifestly singular thoughts involving not only fictional and mistakenly postulated entities, such as Zeus and the planet Vulcan, but also “perceptual inexistents,” e.g., Kanizsa figures, rainbows, words and phonemes, as well as hosts of at best metaphysically problematic “objects,” such as properties, numbers, ceremonies, contracts, symphonies, “the sky,” “the rain.” Indeed, reflection on what seems to be the boundless diversity of “things” about which we seem to be able to have singular thoughts strongly suggests that there may be no general metaphysics of objects, much less “acquaintance” and “epistemically rewarding” relations that would distinguish singular from non-singular thought. We recommend that Recanati and other mental file theorists confine the theory to a metaphysically neutral account of singular thought as specific kind of internally “focused” computational state, and not seek any general account of the relation of thought to reality.

Holism is widely held to be a fundamental feature of human language and thought, but we lack a firm grasp of the nature and extent of its holistic character. The paper deals with the problem of distinguishing between various forms of semantic holism, and the grounds for preferring a particular one of them. It does so via a discussion of Michael Dummett's important contributions to the debate. I favour a more restricted species of holism than the one Dummett officially defends, but for reasons that are congenial to a leading idea in his philosophy - that we need a notion of meaning consonant with the fact that language-use is, typically, a rational activity. This would appear to entail that the meaning of an expression besuch that it can be brought to bear on the rational control of speech acts performed by a competent speaker. Following on from there, we can see how our cognitive capacities are the source of a fundamental restriction on the kind of complexity that the meanings of the expressions of a language can have. This gives significant support for a moderate variety of semantic holism.