CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2013
| Author | Fus, Mirela |
|---|---|
| Title | Singular Thought: A Two-pronged Approach |
| Summary | Singular or de re thought puts one into a position to think about the object not via descriptions or de dicto, but rather in a relational, referential way and under a certain mode of presentation. Traditionally, it has been widely accepted that one can have singular thought by acquaintance, and that acquaintance encompasses perceptual acquiring, memorizing and communicating singular thoughts. In this thesis I defend a possibility of having a singular thought via extending acquaintance to intermediaries other than just written and spoken words. I argue that intermediaries such as photographs or video and audio recordings can, in certain cases, acquaint us with objects. I show that the dominant approaches to singular thought, namely Acquaintance Theories, cannot by themselves meet the requirements of extending singular thought since, as I shall explain, they are vulnerable to a certain paradox. On my account, singular thought includes two types of representations, namely indexical-iconic representation and (remote) indexical-discursive representation. Also, it is determined by two constraints: (i) the acquaintance constraint: singular thought includes a causal-historical relation to the object; and (ii) the cognitive significance constraint: we have a cognitive capacity to deliberately encode an indexical-iconic representation into an indexical-discursive representation, which enables us to have a singular thought. |
| Supervisor | Robinson, Howard |
| Department | Philosophy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2013/fus_mirela.pdf |
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