For the next session, Joulia Smortchkova (Institut Jean Nicod) will talk about a work she's been developing with Michael Murez (Institut Jean Nicod & Harvard University).
Title: "Singular Thought: from Object Files to Person Files"
Date, Time, Place: 01/03/2013, 4pm, Salle de Réunion du Pavillon Jardin
Abstract: How do mind and world connect, so that particular things (objects,
people, etc.) find their way into the content of our thought? To answer
this question is to solve what philosophers call the problem of singular
thought.
Many singularists claim that to have a
non-descriptive thought about some thing is to represent it via a mental
file.
Psychologists' notion of an object file resembles philosophers'
notion of a file: both serve to represent things independently from
their properties. However, an account still needs to be given to connect
the existing psychological data with another crucial part of the
singularist thesis, viz., that we are able to form acquaintance-based
thoughts not just about objects, but also about people.
We argue for a careful extension of the notion of a file, starting
from psychologists' narrower notion. We postulate files specially
dedicated to the tracking of animated agents, biological entities, and
especially, people. We claim a file of this latter kind, which we call a
person file, explains our ability to form a singular thought about a
person.
