Singular Thought and the Contingent A Priori
نویسندگان
چکیده
De re or singular thoughts are, intuitively, those essentially or constitutively about a particular object or objects; any thought about different objects would be a different thought. What would a philosophical articulation or thematization of their nature be like? In spite of extensive discussion of the issue sin ce it was brought to the attention of the philosophical cornmunity in the late fifties by Quine (1956), a plausible response remains elusive. This is glaringly revealed by the contrasting recent takes on the issue of writers such as Soames (2005) who adopts the view ofDonnellan (1979) to be outlined presently and Jeshion (2001), who otherwise share a similar direct-reference approach to the prototypical expression of those contents. Discussing the matter in connection with the status of the Kripkean category of the contingent a priori in the article mentioned above,2 Donnellan (1979) argued that what can be properly classified as knowable a priori about utterances like those involving 'one meter' or 'Neptune' famously proposed by Kripke (1980) cannot be the very same singular content
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