Forthcoming in Mind

The notion of a singular proposition has a variety of important applications and connections. It is tied up with questions about actualism and haecceitism, presentism, quantification into attitude clauses, reference and rigidity, acquaintance, perception and hallucination,1 and of course singular (‘de re’) thought. The latter connections in particular suggest that singular propositions have a central role to play in epistemology and philosophy of mind; Tyler Burge (2007) has argued that de re thought is necessary for language learning, that having any justified empirical beliefs (and hence empirical knowledge) requires having de re thoughts, and that de re thoughts are a prerequisite for the possibility of any thought at all. But at present, there are some deficiencies in our philosophical understanding of singular propositions. First, the literature contains various accounts of what it is for a proposition to be singular, but these accounts are rarely accompanied by careful comparisons with rivals or even by explanations of why the accounts capture the background ideas that motivate drawing a distinction between singular and general propositions in the first place. Indeed, it is often unclear exactly what the background ideas are which would help us gauge the success of an account of singularity. Second, and relatedly, there has been inadequate discussion of the extent to which accounts of singularity and accounts of propositions in general are independent of each other. As we will see, no standard notion of singularity is compatible with certain coarsegrained views of propositions. Drawing the singular / general distinction imposes at least some constraints on what propositions could be. But on the other hand, some accounts of singularity presuppose more than is necessary about the metaphysics of