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  1. Frege Puzzles and Mental Files.Henry Clarke - 2018 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (2):351-366.
    This paper proposes a novel conception of mental files, aimed at addressing Frege puzzles. Classical Frege puzzles involve ignorance and discovery of identity. These may be addressed by accounting for a more basic way for identity to figure in thought—the treatment of beliefs by the believer as being about the same thing. This manifests itself in rational inferences that presuppose the identity of what the beliefs are about. Mental files help to provide a functional characterization of a mind capable of (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Knowledge and the Flow of Information.Fred I. Dretske - 1981 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 175 (1):69-70.
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  • Mental Files.François Recanati - 2012 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Over the past fifty years the philosophy of language and mind has been dominated by a nondescriptivist approach to content and reference. This book attempts to recast and systematize that approach by offering an indexical model in terms of mental files. According to Recanati, we refer through mental files, the function of which is to store information derived through certain types of contextual relation the subject bears to objects in his or her environment. The reference of a file is determined (...)
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  • The Mental Files Theory of Singular Thought: A Psychological Perspective.Michael Murez, Joulia Smortchkova & Brent Strickland - 2020 - In Rachel Goodman, James Genone & Nick Kroll (eds.), Singular Thought and Mental Files. New York, NY, United States of America: Oxford University Press. pp. 107-142.
    We argue that the most ambitious version of the mental files theory of singular thought, according to which mental files are a wide-ranging psychological natural kind underlying all and only singular thinking, is unsupported by the available psychological data. Nevertheless, critical examination of the theory from a psychological perspective opens up promising avenues for research, especially concerning the relationship between our perceptual capacity to individuate and track basic individuals, and our higher level capacities for singular thought.
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  • Mental files and belief: A cognitive theory of how children represent belief and its intensionality.Josef Perner, Michael Huemer & Brian Leahy - 2015 - Cognition 145 (C):77-88.
    We provide a cognitive analysis of how children represent belief using mental files. We explain why children who pass the false belief test are not aware of the intensionality of belief. Fifty-one 3½- to 7-year old children were familiarized with a dual object, e.g., a ball that rattles and is described as a rattle. They observed how a puppet agent witnessed the ball being put into box 1. In the agent’s absence the ball was taken from box 1, the child (...)
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  • Cognitivism, Significance and Singular Thought.Rachel Goodman - 2016 - Philosophical Quarterly 66 (263):236-260.
    This paper has a narrow and a broader target. The narrow target is a particular version of what I call the mental-files conception of singular thought, proposed by Robin Jeshion, and known as cognitivism. The broader target is the MFC in general. I give an argument against Jeshion's view, which gives us preliminary reason to reject the MFC more broadly. I argue Jeshion's theory of singular thought should be rejected because the central connection she makes between significance and singularity does (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and its Semantics.Jerry A. Fodor - 1995 - MIT Press.
    Written in a highly readable, irreverent style, The Elm and the Expert provides a lively discussion of semantic issues about mental representation, with special attention to issues raised by Frege's problem, Twin cases, and the putative indeterminacy of reference. Bound to be widely read and much discussed, The Elm and the Expert, written in Jerry Fodor's usual highly readable, irreverent style, provides a lively discussion of semantic issues about mental representation, with special attention to issues raised by Frege's problem, Twin (...)
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  • A Problem About Continued Belief.John Perry - 1980 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 61 (4):317-332.
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  • Mental Files and their Identity Conditions.Thea Goodsell - 2013 - Disputatio 5 (36):177-190.
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  • Coreference and meaning.N. Ángel Pinillos - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 154 (2):301 - 324.
    Sometimes two expressions in a discourse can be about the same thing in a way that makes that very fact evident to the participants. Consider, for example, 'he' and 'John' in 'John went to the store and he bought some milk'. Let us call this 'de jure' coreference. Other times, coreference is 'de facto' as with 'Mark Twain' and 'Samuel Clemens' in a sincere use of 'Mark Twain is not Samuel Clemens'. Here, agents can understand the speech without knowing that (...)
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  • Are Concepts Creatures of Darkness?Laura Schroeter - 2013 - Analytic Philosophy 54 (2):277-292.
    In Our Knowledge of the Internal World, Robert Stalnaker presents a sophisticated new defense of a radically externalist and contextualist approach to mental content. Stalnaker holds that unstructured propositions—sets of possible worlds—can provide a complete account of mental content, including Fregean cognitive significance phenomena. So there is no theoretical job for concepts to fulfill. Stalnaker sees concepts as ‘creatures of darkness’ that encourage theoretical confusion. Concepts are a vestige of the mistaken internalist picture of the mind: internal states that are (...)
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  • The uses and abuses of the personal/subpersonal distinction.Zoe Drayson - 2012 - Philosophical Perspectives 26 (1):1-18.
    In this paper, I claim that the personal/subpersonal distinction is first and foremost a distinction between two kinds of psychological theory or explanation: it is only in this form that we can understand why the distinction was first introduced, and how it continues to earn its keep. I go on to examine the different ontological commitments that might lead us from the primary distinction between personal and subpersonal explanations to a derivative distinction between personal and subpersonal states. I argue that (...)
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  • (1 other version)Learning Matters: The Role of Learning in Concept Acquisition.Eric Margolis & Stephen Laurence - 2011 - Mind and Language 26 (5):507-539.
    In LOT 2: The Language of Thought Revisited, Jerry Fodor argues that concept learning of any kind—even for complex concepts—is simply impossible. In order to avoid the conclusion that all concepts, primitive and complex, are innate, he argues that concept acquisition depends on purely noncognitive biological processes. In this paper, we show (1) that Fodor fails to establish that concept learning is impossible, (2) that his own biological account of concept acquisition is unworkable, and (3) that there are in fact (...)
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  • From Discourse to Logic: Introduction to Modeltheoretic Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and Discourse Representation Theory.Hans Kamp & Uwe Reyle - 1993 - Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
    Preface This book is about semantics and logic. More specifically, it is about the semantics and logic of natural language; and, even more specifically than ...
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  • Semantic Relationism, by Kit Fine. [REVIEW]G. Rattan - 2009 - Mind 118 (472):1124-1131.
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  • The fine line.David Sosa - 2010 - Analysis 70 (2):347-358.
    (No abstract is available for this citation).
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  • Direct Reference: From Language to Thought.François Récanati - 1993 - Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell.
    This volume puts forward a distinct new theory of direct reference, blending insights from both the Fregean and the Russellian traditions, and fitting the general theory of language understanding used by those working on the pragmatics of natural language.
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  • (1 other version)Understanding demonstratives.Gareth Evans - 1981 - In Herman Parret & Jacques Bouveresse (eds.), Meaning and understanding. New York: W. de Gruyter. pp. 280--304.
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  • Doing without concepts.Edouard Machery - 2009 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Over recent years, the psychology of concepts has been rejuvenated by new work on prototypes, inventive ideas on causal cognition, the development of neo-empiricist theories of concepts, and the inputs of the budding neuropsychology of concepts. But our empirical knowledge about concepts has yet to be organized in a coherent framework. -/- In Doing without Concepts, Edouard Machery argues that the dominant psychological theories of concepts fail to provide such a framework and that drastic conceptual changes are required to make (...)
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  • Semantic relationism.Kit Fine (ed.) - 2007 - Malden, MA: Blackwell.
    Introducing a new and ambitious position in the field, Kit Fine’s _Semantic Relationism_ is a major contribution to the philosophy of language. Written by one of today’s most respected philosophers Argues for a fundamentally new approach to the study of representation in language and thought Proposes that there may be representational relationships between expressions or elements of thought that are not grounded in the intrinsic representational features of the expressions or elements themselves Forms part of the prestigious new _Blackwell/Brown Lectures (...)
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  • Illusion of transparency.Laura Schroeter - 2007 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 85 (4):597 – 618.
    It's generally agreed that, for a certain a class of cases, a rational subject cannot be wrong in treating two elements of thought as co-referential. Even anti-individualists like Tyler Burge agree that empirical error is impossible in such cases. I argue that this immunity to empirical error is illusory and sketch a new anti-individualist approach to concepts that doesn't require such immunity.
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  • Visual indexes, preconceptual objects, and situated vision.Zenon W. Pylyshyn - 2001 - Cognition 80 (1-2):127-158.
    This paper argues that a theory of situated vision, suited for the dual purposes of object recognition and the control of action, will have to provide something more than a system that constructs a conceptual representation from visual stimuli: it will also need to provide a special kind of direct (preconceptual, unmediated) connection between elements of a visual representation and certain elements in the world. Like natural language demonstratives (such as `this' or `that') this direct connection allows entities to be (...)
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  • Knowledge and the Flow of Information.Fred I. Dretske - 1981 - Stanford, CA: MIT Press.
    This book presents an attempt to develop a theory of knowledge and a philosophy of mind using ideas derived from the mathematical theory of communication developed by Claude Shannon. Information is seen as an objective commodity defined by the dependency relations between distinct events. Knowledge is then analyzed as information caused belief. Perception is the delivery of information in analog form for conceptual utilization by cognitive mechanisms. The final chapters attempt to develop a theory of meaning by viewing meaning as (...)
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  • Why be an anti-individualist?Laura Schroeter - 2008 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (1):105-141.
    Anti-individualists claim that concepts are individuated with an eye to purely external facts about a subject's environment about which she may be ignorant or mistaken. This paper offers a novel reason for thinking that anti-individualistic concepts are an ineliminable part of commonsense psychology. Our commitment to anti-individualism, I argue, is ultimately grounded in a rational epistemic agent's commitment to refining her own representational practices in the light of new and surprising information about her environment. Since anti-individualism is an implicit part (...)
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  • The Varieties of Reference.Gareth Evans & John Mcdowell - 1986 - Philosophy 61 (238):534-538.
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  • Mental Files: an Introduction.Michael Murez & François Recanati - 2016 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (2):265-281.
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  • Reference and Reflexivity.John Perry - 2001 - Stanford, Calif.: Center for the Study of Language and Inf.
    Following his recently expanded _The Problem of the Essential Indexical and Other Essays,_ John Perry develops a reflexive-referential' account of indexicals, demonstratives and proper names. On these issues the philosophy of language in the twentieth century was shaped by two competing traditions, descriptivist and referentialist. Oddly, the classic referentialist texts of the 1970s by Kripke, Donnellan, Kaplan and others were seemingly refuted almost a century earlier by co-reference and no-reference problems raised by Russell and Frege. Perry's theory, borrowing ideas from (...)
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  • What is entitlement?Albert Casullo - 2007 - Acta Analytica 22 (4):267 - 279.
    In his seminal paper, Content Preservation, Tyler Burge defends an original account of testimonial knowledge. The originality of the account is due, in part, to the fact that it is cast within a novel epistemic framework. The central feature of that framework is the introduction of the concept of entitlement, which is alleged to be a distinctive type of positive epistemic support or warrant. Entitlement and justification, according to Burge, are sub-species of warrant. Justification is the internalist form of warrant, (...)
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  • Discourse Referents.Lauri Karttunen - 1976 - In J. D. McCawley (ed.), Syntax and Semantics Vol. Academic Press. pp. 363--386.
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  • (4 other versions)Précis of doing without concepts.Edouard Machery - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 149 (3):602-611.
    Although cognitive scientists have learned a lot about concepts, their findings have yet to be organized in a coherent theoretical framework. In addition, after twenty years of controversy, there is little sign that philosophers and psychologists are converging toward an agreement about the very nature of concepts. Doing without Concepts (Machery 2009) attempts to remedy this state of affairs. In this article, I review the main points and arguments developed at greater length in Doing without Concepts.
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  • (1 other version)Reference and Reflexivity.Eros Corazza - 2003 - Mind 112 (445):171-175.
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  • Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis.Andrew Woodfield - 2004 - Mind 113 (449):210-214.
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  • (1 other version)Functional Role and Truth Conditions.Ned Block & John Campell - 1987 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 61 (1):157-184.
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  • Mental Files: Replies to my Critics.François Recanati - 2013 - Disputatio 5 (36):207-242.
    My responses to seven critical reviews of my book *Mental Files* published in a special issue of the journal Disputatio, edited by F. Salis. The reviewers are: Keith Hall, David Papineau, Annalisa Coliva and Delia Belleri, Peter Pagin, Thea Goodsell, Krista Lawlor and Manuel Garcia-Carpintero.
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  • Is de jure coreference non-transitive?Thea Goodsell - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 167 (2):291-312.
    Recent work has brought to prominence the idea that some utterances contain occurrences of noun phrases that not only corefer, but do so in a particularly guaranteed or explicit way—call such occurrences ‘de jure coreferential’. Studies of de jure coreference have considered both the characteristics of the relation, and its explanation. Pinillos (154(2):301–324, 2011) argues that de jure coreference is non-transitive, and uses this as part of his argument for a new semantic primitive explaining de jure coreference. In this paper, (...)
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  • Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis.Jesse J. Prinz - 2002 - MIT Press.
    In Furnishing the Mind, Jesse Prinz attempts to swing the pendulum back toward empiricism.
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  • Singular Thought, Cognitivism, and Conscious Attention.Heimir Geirsson - 2018 - Erkenntnis 83 (3):613-626.
    The focus of this paper will be on singular thoughts. In the first section I will present Jeshion’s cognitivism; a view that holds that one should characterize singular thoughts by their cognitive roles. In the second section I will argue that, contrary to Jeshion’s claims, results from studies of object tracking in cognitive psychology do not support cognitivism. In the third section I will discuss Jeshion’s easy transmission of singular thought and argue that it ignores a relevant distinction between general (...)
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  • Mental files, concepts, and bodies of information.Poong Shil Lee - 2018 - Synthese 195 (8):3499-3518.
    In this paper, I argue that mental files are both concepts and bodies of information, against the existing views proposed by Fodor and Recanati. Fodor argues that mental files are not concepts but memories of information because concepts are mental symbols. However, Fodor’s argument against the identification of mental files with concepts fails. Recanati disagrees with Fodor and argues that mental files are concepts. But Recanati’s view does not differ essentially from Fodor’s because Recanati holds that mental files are simple (...)
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  • The Varieties of Reference.Louise M. Antony - 1987 - Philosophical Review 96 (2):275.
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  • New Thoughts About Old Things: Cognitive Policies as the Ground of Singular Concepts.Krista Lawlor - 2001 - New York: Routledge.
    This book defends a novel theory of singular concepts, emphasizing the pragmatic requirements of singular concept possession and arguing that these requirements must be understood to institute traditions and policies of thought.
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  • (1 other version)Singular Thought: In Defense of Acquaintance.Francois Recanati - 2010 - In Robin Jeshion (ed.), New Essays on Singular Thought. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press. pp. 141.
    This paper is about the Descriptivism/Singularism debate, which has loomed large in 20-century philosophy of language and mind. My aim is to defend Singularism by showing, first, that it is a better and more promising view than even the most sophisticated versions of Descriptivism, and second, that the recent objections to Singularism (based on a dismissal of the acquaintance constraint on singular thought) miss their target.
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  • Bootstrapping our way to samesaying.Laura Schroeter - 2012 - Synthese 189 (1):177-197.
    This paper articulates two constraints on an acceptable account of meaning: (i) accessibility: sameness of meaning affords an immediate appearance of de jure co-reference, (ii) flexibility: sameness of meaning tolerates open-ended variation in speakers' substantive understanding of the reference. Traditional accounts of meaning have trouble simultaneously satisfying both constraints. I suggest that relationally individuated meanings provide a promising way of avoiding this tension. On relational accounts, we bootstrap our way to de jure co-reference: the subjective appearance of de jure co-reference (...)
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  • Mental files theory of mind: When do children consider agents acquainted with different object identities?Michael Huemer, Josef Perner & Brian Leahy - 2018 - Cognition 171 (C):122-129.
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  • We are acquainted with Ordinary Things.Imogen Dickie - 2010 - In Robin Jeshion (ed.), New Essays on Singular Thought. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press. pp. 213-245.
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  • (1 other version)Learning Matters: The Role of Learning in Concept Acquisition.Stephen Laurence Eric Margolis - 2011 - Mind and Language 26 (5):507-539.
    In LOT 2: The Language of Thought Revisited, Jerry Fodor argues that concept learning of any kind—even for complex concepts—is simply impossible. In order to avoid the conclusion that all concepts, primitive and complex, are innate, he argues that concept acquisition depends on purely noncognitive biological processes. In this paper, we show (1) that Fodor fails to establish that concept learning is impossible, (2) that his own biological account of concept acquisition is unworkable, and (3) that there are in fact (...)
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  • References.Kit Fine - 2007 - In Semantic relationism. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 141–142.
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  • Varieties of Coreference.Krista Lawlor - 2010 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (2):485-495.
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  • (4 other versions)Précis of Doing without Concepts.Edouard Machery - 2010 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2-3):195-206.
    Although cognitive scientists have learned a lot about concepts, their findings have yet to be organized in a coherent theoretical framework. In addition, after twenty years of controversy, there is little sign that philosophers and psychologists are converging toward an agreement about the very nature of concepts.Doing without Concepts(Machery 2009) attempts to remedy this state of affairs. In this article, I review the main points and arguments developed at greater length inDoing without Concepts.
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  • Singular thought: acquaintance, semantic instrumentalism, and cognitivism.Robin Jeshion - 2010 - In New Essays on Singular Thought. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press. pp. 105--141.
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  • Reference and Reflexivity.John Perry - 2009 - Critica 41 (123):147-162.
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