When we watch movies, or are tricked by a trompe-l'oeil painting, we seem to be visually representing possible worlds; often non-actual possible worlds. This suggests that we really can visually represent possible worlds. The suggested claim is refined and developed here into a theory of visual experience that holds that all visual experiences, both veridical and non-veridical, represent possible worlds, many of which are non-actual.

This paper initially follows the final part of the debate between singularism and descriptivism to the point of convergence, and discusses the notion of acquaintanceless singular thought. Then a sketch of a mental files model is presented. Firstly, the triggering mechanisms for opening files are discussed. Two kinds of discourse situations, acquaintance-situations and decoding-situations, are identified and different triggering mechanisms are postulated for each. Secondly, a bipartite structure of a file is introduced, combining an objectual part, encompassing what traditionally has (...) been associated with the notion of a mental file, serving the purpose of storing information about the referent of the file, and a metadata part, serving the purpose of storing information about the file itself. Being capable of encoding a variety of types of mental files, this structure is then employed to illustrate how singularity/descriptivity of the files can be manipulated and how we can account for the cognitive discernibility of files containing identical objectual information and grounded with the same acquaintance relations. (shrink)