Few now think that either direct reference or so-called singular, object-dependent thought requires anything so strong as Russellian direct acquaintance. But many contemporary thinkers do believe that Russell was right to impose an epistemic constraint on the thinkability of an object as such. So many contemporary philosophers remain somewhat Russellian in spirit, in this regard at least. It is frequently claimed, for example, that if one is to have thoughts ‘about’ an object, then one must ‘know which’ object one is thinking or talking about. And know-ing which object one is thinkknow-ing or talkknow-ing about is taken to be a matter of being able to recognize that object as the same again when one is presented with it again, at least over some range of circumstances.
This said, there has been little post-Russellian consensus on just how tight one’s epistemic hold on an object must be if one is to be able to think and talk about it by use of a (directly) referring expression like a name. In a justly famous and classic article, David Kaplan (1968), for example, argued that an object as such is thinkable only if the thinker is en rapport with the object. One is en rapport with an object, roughly, if one has the sort of cognitive commerce with the object that renders one’s use of a name of that object what he called vivid, where vividness has to do, roughly, with the fulsomeness and accuracy of the descriptive contents one associates with the relevant name. Roughly, a name was supposed to be vivid for a speaker if a speaker has lots of accurate descriptive information about the bearer of that name. If one has a vivid name of an object, one will, presumably, be able to recognize that object as the same again in a variety of different circumstances and as it appears under a variety of different guises. Kaplan’s other criterion of of-ness had to with the kind of role the object itself played in the genesis of a speaker’s
use of the name. The idea is that it’s not enough that one know a lot of truths about the relevant object. The object itself has to have played a decisive and central role in generating one’s knowledge of those truths, where having a ‘decisive and central role’ is somehow a matter of one’s causal and or perceptual encounters with the relevant object. Though Kaplan-style rapport is intended to be a strong constraint on what we might call the thinkability of an object, it isn’t as strong as Russellian direct acquaintance. An object with which one is en rapport is not, for example, immediately present to the mind. Even if one has a vivid name of an object, there can still be scenarios in which the object is present in a surprising or unrevealing guise. On such occasions, one might fail to recognize that one is presented with the same object again.
Weaker than Kaplan’s rapport is ordinary ‘knowledge wh’ – that is, ordinary knowledge who, what, when or where. In a quite ordinary and intuitive sense, I know who my wife Claire is, know when I am writing this sentence, know which computer I am writing it on and know where I am now sitting. But with the exception of my wife, it is unlikely that I stand even in a relation as strong as Kaplanian rapport with respect to these objects. What exactly is ordinary knowledge who, what, when, or where?
I won’t attempt to answer that question here. I will just say that it is clearly necessary, though just as clearly not sufficient for ordinary knowledge-who, what, when, or where concerning ordinary concrete objects that one have some causal and or perceptual commerce with the relevant object.
On the other hand, it is clearly sufficient, but perhaps not necessary, for ordinary knowledge-which that an agent have frequent enough percep-tual contact with the object or is able reliably enough to recognize the object as the same object again under various circumstances. How much perceptual contact is enough? How reliably is reliably enough? There may be no satisfactory and stable answer to these questions sufficient to yield a fixed and determinate criterion of what it takes to grasp the reference of a name or to use a name competently to refer to an object. One important consideration is that our workaday conception of knowledge-who would seem to be highly context-sensitive and interest-relative: what we require, in order to count a claim that b knows wh- c is as correct, varies with what we’re up to and what we’re interested in. For instance, it’s plausible that in some contexts, I count as knowing who Smith is only if I can visually dis-criminate between her and others. In other contexts, even if I cannot rec-ognize Smith as Smith when I see her, I may nonetheless count as knowing
who she is merely on the basis of having read the collected works of Smith and thinking of her as author of those works. Suppose I know little more about Smith than that she is the author of such-and-such important works of philosophy. At a philosophical conference, someone asks me, ‘Do you know who Smith is?’ And I respond, ‘Yes I do; she is the noted author of The World as Representation and Represented’. Even if that is the sum total of my knowledge of Smith, it would seem that here I speak truly.
Indeed, suppose that I am attending a crowded reception at the confer-ence and that I know that Smith is in attendance too. Dying to make the acquaintance of the renown Smith, I ask my friend to point Smith out to me. ‘Which one is, Smith?’ I ask. Suppose my friend does point Smith out.
And that I now come to know what Smith looks like. Despite my newly acquired capacity to recognize Smith when I see her, there is a sense in which I knew who Smith was all along. I may have gained some additional recognitional abilities with respect to Smith, but it seems wrong to say that I have for the first time come to know who Smith is and to think singular thoughts about her. All along, even before I could visually discriminate Smith, my knowledge of who Smith was sufficient to enable me to have Smith in mind in such a way that I was thereby able both to understand singular propositions about Smith and to use the name ‘Smith’ compe-tently to think and talk about her.
Now, it would be an interesting and challenging task to work out the weakest possible cognitive hold on an object that suffices for rendering that object thinkable in a singular or de re sense, but I won’t attempt that challenging task here. Instead, I will close by suggesting that acquaint-ance and its progressively more attenuated successor notions may have been oversold as necessary constraints on the thinkability of an object in the first place. The search for the cognitive relation, whatever it is, that would suffice to render an object as such, rather than a mere one-sided presentation of that object, available to thought is rooted in the philo-sophical worries about what we might call the epistemic one-sidedness of all reference. Many philosophers have noted that in any presentation of an object to either perception or thought, it is possible to distinguish what object is being presented from the way that objected is being presented.
It is equally widely noted that the same object may be presented to the mind in different ways, in different pres entations. Consider the perceptual presentation of a chair. When a perceiver views a chair from underneath, in bad lighting, with its upward facing surfaces occluded from view, the
chair is presented in one way. When the very same chair is viewed under good lighting, from above, with its downward facing surfaces occluded from view, it is presented in a different way. In the two different percep-tual episodes, we have the very same chair presented again, but in differ-ent ways, via two differdiffer-ent clusters of what we might call presdiffer-entational properties. Now the phenomenon of one-sidedness has tempted many philosophers to believe that the contents of our thoughts are given by the one-sided presentational properties by which we always (indirectly) appre-hend objects, that we cannot be said to entertain an object directly unless all one-sidedness is drained out of our cognition of it. It was something like this thought that lay behind both Russell’s original notion of acquaint-ance and behind Frege’s introduction of the distinction between sense and reference. In our own time, David Kaplan has claimed that there could be a pure, natural and primitive notion of de re or singular belief only if we were able to make ‘perfectly good sense of the claim that George IV has a belief about Sir Walter Scott independently of the way in which he is represented to George’. Though I lack the space to argue the point here, I close by suggesting that the epistemic one-sidedness of all reference need not cause us to despair about the very possibility that an object as such, rather than a merely one-sided presentation of that object, might be available to thought. In order for us to be able to think and talk about an object there must be causal and informational links sufficient to render our words and our thoughts semantically answerable to how things stand with that very object. But there is no reason to suppose that conditions sufficient to accomplish such semantic linking must ipso facto be sufficient to give us the kind of very tight cognitive hold on the object that Russell demanded. And if that thought could be sustained, there would be no reason to insist that direct reference to an object, in either thought or talk, require that we stand in the kind of intimate cognitive relation to it that Russell imagined we must.
Further Reading
Stephen Neale’s Descriptions (Cambridge University Press, 1990) offers an up-to-date defence of Russell’s theory of descriptions that deploys many of the resources of con-temporary logic and linguistics.
Mark Sainsbury’s Russell (Routledge, 1979) gives a wide-ranging critical analysis of the entirety of Russell’s philosophical outlook.
Peter Strawson’s ‘On Referring’ (Mind, 1950) contains important early criticisms of Russell’s views.
Keith Donnellan’s ‘Reference and Definite Descriptions’, (Philosophical Review, 1966) introduces a philosophically important distinction between the referential use of defin ite descriptions and the attributive use of such descriptions.
For an up-to-date discussion of the entire range of issues raised by the notion of a singular thought, see the essays in New Essays on Singular Thought, ed. Robin Jeshion (Oxford University Press, 2010).
Notes
1 Although I use the expressions ‘singular’ and ‘object-dependent’ as if they were synonymous here, I note that in the hands of some contemporary thinkers, these two concepts come apart. They maintain that even sentences containing empty names may express contents that are in some sense singular, even though they do not express any object-dependent proposition. See, for example: Jeshion, 2002; Sainsbury, 2005; Taylor, 2010.
2 This account of Frege’s views has been challenged by some. Evans (1985) argued that Frege wavered on whether there could be genuine singular terms which had sense but lacked reference, and concluded that Frege should not have allowed that there could be genuine singular terms with sense but not reference. Evans’
reading of Frege brings Frege much closer to Russell on this score. The interpret-ive issues raised by Evans are complex, delicate and important. I have largely ignored them here and have taken Frege’s stated view that there can be sense without reference at face value.
3 See the chapter on Kripke in this volume for a brief account of some of the argu-ments against taking ordinary proper names to be disguised definite descriptions.
The connection between direct reference and rigid designation is complex. Some descriptions are rigid, but no descriptions are devices of direct reference.
4 Of course, in the final and complete analysis ‘Xanthippe’, ‘Plato’ and ‘Athenians’
would have to have been analysed away in terms of descriptions too.
Bibliography
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