The Mental Files Theory of Singular Thought: A Psychological Perspective

We argue that the most ambitious version of the me ntal files theory of singular thought, according to which mental files are a wide -ranging psychological natural kind underlying all and only singular thinking, is unsup ported by the available psychological data. Nevertheless, critical examination of the theory fr om a psychological perspective opens up promising avenues for research, especially concerni ng the relationship between our perceptual capacity to individuate and track basic individuals , nd our higher level capacities for singular thought. 1. Introducing singular thought: the philosophical explanandum Many thoughts are general : they are about properties or categories. For exam ple, the generic thought that wombats are cute is paradigmatically g eneral. 1 So are quantificational thoughts, like the thoughts that all (or some) wombats are cu te. However, we also have singular thoughts, thoughts about particular individuals. Fo r example, if one sees an unfamiliar creature and judges that it is cute, whatever it is, one's thought is singular: One is thinking about that very individual, which one sees but cannot recogni ze. Such perception-based demonstrative thoughts are the most basic variety of singular th oug ts. But other varieties exist, which are based on memory or communication r ather than perception. For example, until now, you had never heard of Patrick, the “wom bassador” from Ballarat. Yet now we have told you about Patrick the wombat, you can thi k about him – for instance, you may wonder whether Patrick is cute. There are also descriptive thoughts, thoughts about whatever satisfies a cert ain description: for example, the thought that the world's oldest wo mbat (whichever one that is) is cute. Since the world's oldest wombat happens to be Patrick, th is thought is also, in a sense, about a particular individual: what makes the thought accur ate is Patrick's being cute. Yet unlike genuine singular thoughts, descriptive thoughts are not about individuals per se. They refer to individuals only indirectly, by representing attrib utes they possess (e.g., wombathood and elderliness). If some other wombat had turned out t he oldest, the same thought would have been about it instead. Hence, descriptive thoughts about individ uals are considered a kind of general (quantificational) thought: they are really about small categories, with at most one member, rather than directly about the particular c ategory members themselves. 1 A generic thought is about a category or kind. Whi le classifying generic thoughts as general is comm n, for example in encyclopedia entries (Crawford, 2013) th ey are sometimes described as singular, for the following reasons: a) occasionally the term ‘singul ar’ is used, misleadingly, for all nondescriptive t houghts b) sometimes kinds are identified with special sorts o f individuals which occupy multiple disconnected locations at the same time. We find this use of ‘si ngular’ misleading, given the straightforward fact that multiple individuals can belong to the same kind. B ut in any case, classifying generic thoughts as sin gular would only strengthen the arguments we make in this c apter.