New Essays on Singular Thought [Hardcover]

New Essays on Singular Thoughtpresents ten new, specially written essays on an issue central to philosophy of mind, language, and perception: the nature of our thought about the external world.
Is our thought about objects in the world always descriptive, mediated by our conceptions of those objects? Or is some of our thought somehow more direct, singular, associated more intimately with our perceptual, linguistic, and socially mediated relations to them? Leading experts in the field contributing to this volume make the case for the singularity of thought and debate a broad spectrum of issues it raises, including the structure of singular thought, the role of acquaintance in perception- and communication-based reference, the semantics of fictional and mythical terms, and the merits of epistemic, cognitive, and linguistic conditions on singular thought. Their essays explore new directions for future research and will be an important resource for anyone working at the interface of semantics and mental representation.

Introduction (Robin Jeshion)
I. The Structure of Singular Thought
1. Getting a Thing Into a Thought (Kent Bach)
2. Three Perspectives on Quantifying In (Nathan Salmon)
3. On Singularity (Kenneth Taylor)
II. Conditions on Singular Thought
4. Singular Thought: Acquaintance, Semantic Instrumentalism, and Cognitivism (Robin Jeshion)
5. Singular Thought: In Defense of Acquaintance (Francois Re?anati)
III. Demonstrative and Communication-Based Reference and Thought
6. Demonstrative Reference, the Relational View of Experience, and the Proximality Principle (John Campbell)
7. We Are Acquainted With Ordinary Things (Imogen Dickie)
8. Millian Externalism (Arthur Sullivan)
IV. Thinking of Nothing
9. Fictional Singular Imaginings (Manuel Garcia-Carpintero