Thomas Reid on Singular Thought

In my dissertation, I offer a new reading of Thomas Reid's philosophy of mind, in which I bring attention to his so far overlooked view that we can entertain a singular thought about an individual substance – we can think directly about a particular object. What emerges is a picture of Reid's theory as psychologically sophisticated, anticipating some very recent and influential views in empirical psychology., address central issues in philosophy of mind, psychology and vision science. Our ability to have singular thoughts is one of the recurring themes throughout his investigation. Whereas for Hume we do not have notions of individual substances, but only of bundles of qualities, for Reid the human mind is able to think in an immediate manner about individual bodies populating the external world. This is a very broad claim, since 'thinking' is a catch-all term for Reid, designed to refer to every operation of the mind: conceiving , perceiving, remembering, and imagining are all ways of thinking about external objects. I discuss the way in which singular thoughts occur in each of these faculties and explain how this singularity is brought about in some seemingly difficult cases. Reid does not use the terminology of " singular thought " , which became widespread in the twentieth-century, once the lessons from Russell and Quine had been fully appreciated. In Chapter 1, however, I show that his interest in our ability to think about individual substances in the world places him squarely within this tradition. After surveying recent work on singular thought, starting with Russell and ending with work by Bach, Recanati, and Jeshion, I argue that Reid's way of distinguishing between singular and general thoughts is interestingly different from theirs. Reid holds the surprising, but natural view that the nature of the objects of singular thoughts is what makes those thoughts singular: if we think about individuals, we think singularly; if we think about universals, we think generally. His position is important not only because it offers a new starting point for the examination of the connection between the mind and the world, but also because it draws attention to an overlooked solution to a long-standing problem. Some philosophers argue that in order to entertain a singular thought about an object, we have to think about it bare, without any of its properties. Since attributes are general, they seem to somehow taint the singularity of the …