Abstract
Mental files serve as individual or singular concepts. Like singular terms in the language, they refer or are supposed to refer. What they refer to is not determined by properties which the subject takes the referent to have (i.e. by the information stored in the file), but through relations to various entities in the environment in which the file fulfils its function. Files are based on acquaintance relations, and the function of the file is to store whatever information is made available through the relations in question.
I offer a typology of files. The most important distinction is between proto-files and conceptual files. In contrast to proto-files, conceptual files can host not only information derived through the specific relation on which the file is based but also information about the same object gained in some other way.
In this framework, identity comes into the picture twice: (a) Identity is presupposed when two pieces of information occur in the same file. Such ‘presumptions of identity’ ground the linguistic phenomenon of de jure coreference, which takes place when two singular terms, or two occurrences of a singular term, are associated with the same file. (b) Judgments of identity work by linking two distinct files, thereby enabling information to flow freely between them. This corresponds to de facto coreference. (Linking is not merging; identity judgments have the effect of merging files only when the files belong to a very specific category, that of ‘encyclopedia entries’—a type of conceptual file based on a higher-order relation rather than on a specific acquaintance relation.)
In the last part of the chapter, I discuss, and attempt to rebut, two objections to the mental-file account. According to the first objection, the account is circular; according to the second objection, de jure coreference cannot be accounted for in terms of identity of the associated mental files because de jure coreference is not a transitive relation.
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Notes
- 1.
As Campbell (2006, p. 205) puts it, ‘Your visual system is managing to bind together information from a single thing, and you are consequently able to attend consciously to it, even though you have not managed to apply the right sortal concept to it’.
- 2.
Or, in token-reflexive form: ‘what is causing this visual/tactile experience’ (see, e.g. Searle 1983 for a token-reflexive analysis of the content of perceptual experience).
- 3.
‘Updating one’s files involves being disposed to collect information as if there is some one individual that one’s file F has always been about. One’s screening and pruning dispositions are responsive to this purported fact’ (Lawlor 2001, p. 88). ‘One reason for not allowing an individual concept [ = a file] to change its referent is that the referent fixes a condition for the coherence of information within an individual concept: if “is F” belongs in belief mode to a given individual concept, then “is not F” should not. The constraints on updating would not obtain if an individual concept might shift its referent’ (Sainsbury 2005, p. 232). For a detailed argument to the same effect, see Millikan (1997, pp. 504–506; 2000, pp. 141–144).
- 4.
‘If the identification [A = B] is tentative, the notions [ = files] may retain their identity; if not, they may merge and become one’ (Perry 2002, p. 196).
- 5.
Fine (2007) distinguishes ‘thinking of something as the same’ (de jure coreference, in the standard terminology, or, in Fine’s own terminology, ‘strict coreference’) and ‘thinking of something as being the same’. ‘A good test of when an object is represented as the same is in terms of whether one might sensibly raise the question of whether it is the same. An object is represented as the same in a piece of discourse only if no one who understands the discourse can sensibly raise the question of whether it is the same. Suppose that you say “Cicero is an orator” and later say “Cicero was honest,” intending to make the very same use of the name “Cicero.” Then anyone who raises the question of whether the reference was the same would thereby betray his lack of understanding of what you meant’ (Fine 2007, p. 40). However, as we shall see in Sect. 27.4, de jure coreference as characterized through this test is an overly broad notion which covers different types of case, including some cases in which distinct files are involved.
- 6.
Peacocke notes that when the subject falls prey to a perceptual illusion of which he is aware, the content of the illusion ought not to figure in the subject’s conceptual file about himself, because, at the level of judgment, ‘the subject rejects the content of his more primitive, pre-judgemental phenomenology’ (2012: 84). This might be taken to argue against the inclusion of the primitive proto-file within the conceptual file. I acknowledge the difficulty, but cannot discuss the issue here.
- 7.
‘Think of the architecture of our beliefs as a three-story building. At the top level are detached files… At the bottom level are perceptions and perceptual buffers. Buffers are new notions associated with the perceptions and used to temporarily store ideas we gain from the perceptions until we can identify the individual, or form a permanent detached notion for him, or forget about him. The middle level is full of informational wiring. Sockets dangle down from above, and plugs stick up from below’ (Perry 2001a, pp. 120–121).
- 8.
The circularity worry is already expressed in this passage from Lawlor’s dissertation: ‘In the context of building from the ground up an account of what constitutes coreferential thinking… [the theorist] owe[s] an account of what makes information belong to a single file. And [she] cannot provide this account in terms of a thinker’s capacity for coreferential thinking. That would be viciously circular’ (Lawlor 2001, p. 80).
- 9.
At this point, Bochner quotes Forbes, who writes: ‘When we receive what we take to be de re information which we have an interest in retaining, our operating system may create a locus, or dossier, where such information is held; and any further information which we take to be about the same object can be filed along with the information about it we already possess. […] The role of a name is to identify a file for a particular object—as I shall put it, we use names to “label” dossiers. In sum, then, on coming across a new name, one which is taken to stand for some particular individual, the system creates a dossier labeled with that name and puts those classified conditions into it which are associated with the name’ (Forbes 1990, p. 538; Bochner’s emphasis).
- 10.
Earlier, I mentioned recognition as a rather fundamental cognitive phenomenon involving linking. Presumably, recognition exists in nonconceptual creatures, and if it does, it is an instance of proto-linking. This suggests that proto-linking by itself is not sufficient to turn proto-files into conceptual files; for if it were, it would be incoherent to assume that nonconceptual creatures can have recognitional capacities (since proto-linking would automatically endow them with concepts). There are, indeed, several reasons for decoupling proto-linking from conceptualisation. First, the limited intake of alien information that comes with proto-linking is likely to be only a first step towards satisfying the full-blooded Generality Constraint. Second, more constraints than the Generality Constraint presumably have to be satisfied for conceptual thought to emerge. Instead of assuming that proto-linking automatically converts proto-files into conceptual files, therefore, we should enrich the hierarchy of files with an extra level: Between the proto-files and the conceptual files, we should posit an intermediate category, namely the expanded proto-files which result from proto-linking. Such files remain nonconceptual yet they are hospitable to alien information (to some extent at least) and go some way towards satisfying the Generality Constraint.
- 11.
‘On receipt of an identity-statement invoking two…clusters, the two appropriate cards are withdrawn and a new card is prepared, bearing both the names of which one heads one of the original cards and one the other, and incorporating the sum of the information contained in the original cards; the single new card is returned to stock and the original cards are thrown away’ (Strawson 1974, p. 56).
- 12.
As Fine notes, ‘it is not that the merged file represents the individual as the same as the earlier files, since that would require that the earlier files represent the individual as the same. Rather, the new file, if I choose to create it, will represent the individual as being the same as the earlier files’ (Fine 2007, p. 69). In this passage in which he talks about the mental-file account, Fine seems to acknowledge that ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Hesperus/Phosphorus’ are not ‘strictly coreferential’ (even though they pass the ‘knowledge test’ he himself uses—see footnote 5). Strict coreference, thus understood (i.e. narrowly), corresponds to the idea that the two terms are associated with a single file. (Fine argues against accounts of strict coreference in terms of either mental files or nondescriptive senses, but his arguments do not convince me, and, as far as I can tell, his criticism does not apply to the present account).
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Acknowledgments
This chapter was my Gareth Evans Memorial Lecture (Oxford, 25 January 2011); I am happy to dedicate it to Kevin for his birthday. The research leading to the lecture has received funding from ANR-10-LABX-0087 IEC and ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL
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Recanati, F. (2014). Mental Files and Identity. In: Reboul, A. (eds) Mind, Values, and Metaphysics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05146-8_27
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