Individuating (and Typing) Mental Files
François Récanati · 2024
According to a Sainsbury and Tye, concepts are mental vehicles: they have content, rather than being content-like entities. Their central role of that of allowing the accumulation of information about the reference (or putative reference) across deployments of the concept. In my terminology, that means that concepts are best construed as mental files . Positing such files, construed as vehicles, makes it possible to dispense with ‘senses’ in accounting for the so-called Fregean data: a rational subject may adopt conflicting attitudes toward the thought that Hesperus is F and the thought that Phosphorus is F simply because the thoughts in question involve distinct concepts (distinct files). How are mental files to be individuated? Following Sainsbury and Tye, I argue that they should be individuated by their origin, where the origin of a mental file is a file-opening event ; an event triggered by the presumption that there is an object in the environment to which the subject stands in some epistemically rewarding (ER) relation. As for the persistence conditions of mental files, I argue in my early work that mental files are typed by the sort of ER relation they exploit, in such a way that a file does not survive the ER relation it is based on. That view has been criticized, by David Papineau and others, who argue that mental files should survive changes in ER relation. To accommodate their insights, I draw a distinction between the file as a mental particular (a continuant) and the file-stage (the file at a time). It is the file-stage that plays the role of ‘mode of presentation’ and should be typed by the particular ER relation it involves.