Philosophers of mind and language who advance causal theories face a sort of conjunction problem. When we say that the thing had in mind or the thing referred to is a matter of what causally impacted the thinker or speaker, we must somehow narrow down the long conjunction of items in a causal chain, all of which contributed to the having in mind, but only one of which becomes the object of thought or the linguistic referent. Here, I sketch a (...) notion of cognitive focus intended to do this narrowing. The notion borrows three key aspects from visual focus and some technological aides—causation, amplification, and suppression. I suggest a broader application of this framework to address the conjunction problem not only in ordinary contexts of perceptual focus but also in evidence cases involving non-perceptual cognitive focus. I further suggest cognitive focus is helpful in distinguishing referential vs. attributive thought. (shrink)

I take it as given that we manage to linguistically refer to objects we can neither perceive nor uniquely describe. Kripke accounts for this fact by appeal to causal-historical chains of communication. But Evans famously presented what has seemed to many a devastating counterexample to Kripke’s view: the phenomenon of reference-shifting. Here, I’ll agree with critics that Kripke’s view is insufficient to handle cases of reference shift, but I’ll argue for an alternative version of the causal-historical account that is immune (...) to Evans’ counterexample. The key move will be at the foundations; it will require a change in what it is we’re giving a causal-historical account of. Critically, I’ll argue that we should reject two claims associated with the causal-historical picture. First, we should reject the claim that names are used to think of their referents. Second, we should reject the claim that later speakers defer to earlier ones. (shrink)

Building upon the foundations laid by Russell, Donnellan, Chastain, and more recently, Almog, this paper addresses key questions about the basic mechanism by which we think of worldly objects, and (in contrast to many connected projects), does so in isolation from questions about how we speak of them. I outline and defend a view based on the notion of bound cognition. Bound cognition, like perception, is world-to-mind in the sense that it is generated by the item being thought of rather (...) than by the mind doing the thinking. It is a direct, two-place, non-representational relation, and it is prior to any epistemic connection between the thinker and the object of thought. Although the paradigm case for bound cognition involves sensory perception of an individual, I argue that the cognitive relations falling under the heading of bound cognition also include non-perceptual cognitive relations (such as the relation between a thinker and a historical individual) as well as cognitive relations to non-individuals (such as pairs, pluralities, species, and features). Four illustrative cases are discussed, and anticipated worries about abstract and empty cases are addressed. (shrink)

Michael Devitt has recently claimed that the Neo-Donnellian position about mind and language puts us “en route to the batty conclusion that we don’t have a language” (2020, p. 391). My aim in this paper is to sketch what I take to be Devitt’s argument for this claim and explain how a Neo-Donnellian might resist it. This will involve sketching Neo-Donnellian answers to two key questions raised by Devitt--first, the question of what a language is, and second, the question of (...) what we get out of having one. (shrink)

Chastain and Sawyer, among others, claim that direct cognitive relations can be initiated in evidence cases. Direct cognitive relations will here include Chastain’s knowledge-of and Sawyer’s trace-based acquaintance, as well as related notions such as having-in-mind and singular thought. Against this controversial claim, it is often objected that such cases are better understood as cases of inference rather than cases of direct thought. When one detects something by its footprint, the objection goes, one merely infers that it exists rather than (...) thinking of it directly. The goal of this paper is to analyze what is meant by the inference objection and consider several possible responses to it. Ultimately, I will not offer a knock-down argument against the inference explanation; in fact, I’ll try to explain why I suspect one isn’t possible. Instead, I’ll appeal to the possibility of misdescription and analogous cases involving non-human animals to show that the inference explanation is less plausible than the account to which it provides an alternative. (shrink)