The Publicity of Thought

Abstract

An influential tradition holds that thoughts are public: different thinkers share many of their thoughts, and the same applies to a single subject at different times. This ‘publicity principle’ has recently come under attack. Arguments by Mark Crimmins, Richard Heck and Brian Loar seem to show that publicity is inconsistent with the widely accepted principle that someone who is ignorant or mistaken about certain identity facts will have distinct thoughts about the relevant object—for instance, the astronomer who does not know that Hesperus is Phosphorus will have two distinct thoughts Hesperus is bright and Phosphorus is bright. In this paper, I argue that publicity can be defended if we adopt a relational account on which thoughts are individuated by their mutual relations. I then go on to develop a specific relational theory—the ‘linking account’—and contrast it with other relational views.

Shareability of thought and Frege's constraint: a reply to Onofri

“…If the answer is yes, then it would turn out that shareability is not compatible with (FC). Onofri (2018) proposes an individuation criterion for thoughts that purports to satisfy both constraints. His proposal is in three steps.…”

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Onofri (2018) proposes an individuation criterion for thoughts that purports to satisfy both shareability (the notion that different thinkers, or a single thinker at different times, can and generally do think type-identical thoughts) and Frege's constraint (according to which two thoughts are different if it is possible for a rational subject to endorse one while rejecting the other). I argue that his proposal fails to satisfy Frege's constraint.

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Thinking Disagreement

“…For instance, and although we take the following considerations to apply to other relational conditions as well, let us confine attention to the notion of knowledge of coreference of the terms involved (Onofri, 2018). Equipped with this requisite, the referentialist may propose that it is not true that (3)‐like cases ipso facto involve disagreement.…”

Sharing Our Concepts with Machines

“…More specifically, I want to consider whether chatbots or language models like GPT-3 can possess the concepts that they would need to understand human languages. One requirement for successful linguistic communication is that the communicators share concepts; this claim is appealed to in arguments that concepts must have a public, shareable character (Onofri, 2017;Prinz, 2002). This implies that a chatbot could only understand the sentence 'I have a rash', for example, if it possessed the lexical concept rash.…”