ALMOG-Titlepage-Revised Proof III December 2, 2011 12:55 PM Having in Mind Th e Philosophy of Keith Donnellan Edited by Joseph Almog and Paolo Leonardi xwx 1 w ( 122 ) ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 122 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM CHAPT ER 8 An Idea of Donnellan DAVID KAPL AN This is a story about three of my favorite philosophers-Donnellan, Russell, and Frege-about how Donnellan's concept of having in mind relates to ideas of the others, and especially about an aspect of Donnellan's concept that has been insuffi ciently discussed: how this epistemic state can be transmitt ed from one person to another. BACKGROUND Donnellan compared his notion of the referential use of defi nite descriptions with Russell's notion of a genuine proper name . 1 On Russell's view the type of expression that comes closest to performing the function of the referential use of defi nite descriptions turns out, as one might suspect, to be a proper name (in "the narrow logical sense"). Many of the things said about proper names by Russell can, I think, be said about the referential use of defi nite descriptions without straining senses unduly. (Donnellan 1966 , 282) And I want to end by a brief examination of a picture of what a genuine referring expression is that one might derive from Russell's views. I want to suggest that this picture is not so far wrong as one might suppose and that strange as this may seem, some of the things we A N IDE A OF D ONNEL L A N  123  ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 123 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM have said about the referential use of defi nite descriptions are not foreign to this picture. Genuine proper names, in Russell's sense, would refer to something without ascribing any properties to it. Th ey would, one might say, refer to the thing itself, not simply the thing in so far as it falls under a certain description. (Donnellan 1966 , 302–3) Although he later seemed to withdraw the comparison (Donnellan 1970 , 337–38), his reasons for doing so relate more to Russell's changing ideas about what we can be acquainted with than with the fundamentals of Russell's approach. In withdrawing, Donnellan had the wrong Russell in mind. 2 Even though Donnellan is writing about defi nite descriptions and Russell is writing about proper names, the comparison between Donnellan's referential use and Russell's genuine proper names is indeed apt. Th ey each emphasize an epistemological requirement: the having in mind required for Donnellan's referential use and the acquaintance required for Russell's use of a genuine proper name. And they each insist that there are two uses of the same linguistic expression, with one semantic analysis for the case in which the epistemological requirement is satisfi ed and a quite diff erent semantic analysis for the case in which the epistemological requirement is not satisfi ed. 3 RUSSELL'S VIEW In 1903 Russell developed his view that for a use of a proper name to refer directly to an individual (Donnellan's genuine reference), and not by way of a description, the speaker must stand in a special epistemological relation to the named individual. He must be acquainted with the individual. If one were not acquainted with an individual, one might still speak or think about the individual, but only indirectly, through the use of a defi nite description. If a name were used, it would be no more than an abbreviation for a defi nite description. One has direct knowledge, knowledge by acquaintance , of that with which one is acquainted and, at best, only knowledge by description of that with which one is not acquainted. Th e sort of knowledge that Russell invokes here is not that of the propositional att itude "knows that" knowledge of truths. Rather it is knowledge of things . As Russell later put it: Th ere are two sorts of knowledge: knowledge of things, and knowledge of truths. We shall be concerned exclusively with knowledge of things, of which in turn we shall have to distinguish two kinds. Knowledge of things, when it is of the kind we call knowledge by acquaintance , is essentially simpler than any knowledge of truths, and logically independent of knowledge of truths, though it would be rash to assume that human ( 124 ) David Kaplan ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 124 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM beings ever, in fact, have acquaintance with things without at the same time knowing some truth about them. Knowledge of things by description , on the contrary, always involves, as we shall fi nd in the course of the present chapter, some knowledge of truths as its source and ground. ([1912] 1961) Knowledge of things by description is grounded in the linguistic form of the defi nite description and in denoting . Defi nite descriptions are denoting phrases that express denoting complexes . 4 Th e denoting complexes are constituents of the propositions expressed by sentences containing denoting phrases. A denoting complex denotes the individual that uniquely satisfi es it (if there is such an individual; otherwise there is no denotation). Denoting is important because Russell insisted that we could only entertain a proposition, that is, hold it in thought, if we were acquainted with all of its constituents. Otherwise, as he later said, we would not know what we were thinking. 5 We may know that a certain defi nite description, for example, "the spouse of Smith," is uniquely satisfi ed, although we are not acquainted with the individual that uniquely satisfi es it. However, if we are acquainted with all the elements of the denoting complex, the relations, the properties, and so on that are expressed by language in the defi nite description, we would be able to entertain a proposition that incorporates the denoting complex and thereby, through denoting, be able to think about the individual denoted. 6 Th us knowledge by description (that is, through denoting) may extend the range of individuals we can think about well beyond those we know by acquaintance. Here, briefl y, is Russell's picture. Propositions are built from worldly objects: individuals, properties, relations, and complexes of these. Such propositions straightforwardly represent states of the world, both actual and otherwise. Th us they are straightforwardly truth-evaluable. However, these worldly constructions are also the objects of thought. Th ey are the very things we entertain in thought. So external, material objects, like Donnellan himself or Mont Blanc, have to become or be transformed into cognitive objects . I need to be able to hold Donnellan and Mont Blanc in thought if I am to entertain the proposition that Mont Blanc is older than Donnellan. It is acquaintance that does this for us. Before I was acquainted with Donnellan, Mont Blanc, and the property of being the older than , I could not entertain this proposition. Once I am acquainted with them, I have a way of holding or representing them in thought, and thus I can entertain the proposition. (But see below for another view of the role of acquaintance in Russell's philosophy.) Now consider some ancient artifact I have never seen or interacted with, directly or indirectly, in any way. Perhaps it remains buried where it was left thousands of years ago. Th ere exists the proposition that it is older than A N IDE A OF D ONNEL L A N  125  ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 125 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM Donnellan. (Th is is a truism of the theory of Russellian propositions.) But how could I ever entertain such a proposition? I have no cognitive access to the artifact, no means to represent the artifact in thought. I might believe, even know that there are ancient artifacts still undiscovered aft er thousands of years, but how could I hold a particular one in mind? Once these epistemological ideas about acquaintance came into play, they supplanted Russell's earlier semantic views about the use of names ("Names just name"). Here is the passage from "Points about Denoting," an unpublished manuscript of 1903, in which Russell introduces (for the very fi rst time) his special epistemological notion of acquaintance and states his epistemological principle "All thinking has to start with acquaintance; but it succeeds [through denoting] in thinking about many things with which we have no acquaintance." (In all quotations, bracketed insertions are my comments.) . . . If I ask: Is Smith married? and the answer is affi rmative, I then know that "Smith's wife" is a denoting phrase [i.e., a phrase that does denote], although I don't know who Smith's wife is. We may distinguish the terms [i.e., individuals] with which we are acquainted from others which are merely denoted. E.g. in the above case, I am supposed to be acquainted with the term [individual] Smith and the relation marriage, and thence to be able to conceive a term [individual] having this relation to Smith, although I am not acquainted with any such term [individual]. . . . We know that every human being now living has one and only one father . . . . Nevertheless, it's a wise child etc. 7 Th is shows that to be known by description is not the same thing as to be known by acquaintance, for "the father of x " is an adequate description in the sense that, as a matt er of fact, there is only one person to whom it is applicable. . . . It is necessary, for the understanding of a proposition, to have acquaintance with the meaning of every constituent of the meaning, and of the whole [bett er, acquaintance with every constituent of the proposition, each of which may be taken to be a meaning]; it is not necessary to have acquaintance with such constituents of the denotation as are not constituents of the meaning. ([1903] 1994, points 1, 5) 8 It is obvious from this passage that Russell, in this pre-sense-data era, took it that one could be acquainted with an external material object like his friend Smith, probably as an "object of perception." Russell's distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description was really a schema, with the notion of acquaintance as a parameter. We can fi ll in diff erent notions of acquaintance, and the schema will tell us which things we can think about only through denoting, that is, for which things we must have mere knowledge by description. In 1903, when Russell fi rst hit upon his schema and fi rst articulated his epistemological ( 126 ) David Kaplan ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 126 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM principle-all thinking has to start from acquaintance, but it succeeds (through denoting) in thinking about many things with which we have no acquaintance-he took it that we are acquainted with those material objects that we perceive. Th at is why he says in "On Denoting" that we are not acquainted with other people's minds; he takes it that we are acquainted with their bodies. Roughly, we are acquainted with our acquaintances but have only knowledge by description of those individuals we have only heard about. Our knowledge of the latt er depends on inferences from truths that we accept, whereas knowledge by acquaintance is noninferential. Later, and much more famously, Russell reset the parameter. He demanded that we know objects of acquaintance "perfectly and completely" ([1912] 1961, paragraph 2) and concluded that we are never acquainted with external material objects but only with sense data, universals, the self, and the present time. 9 Th is had the result, according to the schema, that only those things could be named by a genuine name, that is, a name that is not a disguised defi nite description. And this led people to think that Russell's genuine names-also known as "logically proper names"-were very peculiar things indeed. But it wasn't the names that were peculiar; names always refer directly to what they name (provided the speaker is acquainted with it). It was the extreme narrowing of the underlying notion of acquaintance, what I have called the resett ing of the parameter. If we take perception as a paradigm for acquaintance with external material objects, it becomes natural to say that one is acquainted with one's acquaintances. And the notion that Russell might be acquainted with Smith, but not his wife (though knowing about her), has all the commonsense plausibility that Russell seems to have assigned it. Th e same plausibility att aches to his view that merely learning the name of Smith's wife ("Triphena," as it turns out) would have had no eff ect on his epistemic relation to her. 10 It is this lesser-known Russell, the Russell of 1903, whose views about genuine uses of names (names used by one acquainted with the individual named) and denoting (knowledge by description) should be compared with Donnellan's views about the referential and att ributive uses of defi nite descriptions. 11 DONNELLAN'S HAVING IN MIND COMPARED TO RUSSELLIAN ACQUAINTANCE Donnellan's and Russell's views coincide in several interesting ways. As noted, they both subscribe to the view that there are two uses of the same linguistic expression. For Russell, a proper name, which appears to be nondescriptive, may be used to express a descriptive denoting complex (or may A N IDE A OF D ONNEL L A N  127  ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 127 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM be used to genuinely refer to the individual), and for Donnellan, a defi nite description may be used to genuinely refer, that is, to put the individual itself into the proposition (or may be used descriptively). Russell's denoting and knowledge by description seem to be drawn from the same cluster of concepts as Donnellan's att ributive use of a defi nite description. Russell, of course, never noticed the referential use of defi nite descriptions. Perhaps he was too literal-minded for that. But much of Russell's discussion of acquaintance versus denoting is parallel to Donnellan's discussion of referential versus att ributive uses of defi nite descriptions. It is also striking that both set what is seemingly the same epistemological state as the prerequisite for, and ultimate source of, reference. (Here and henceforth I use "reference" for the form of designation in which we designate "the thing itself, not simply the thing insofar as it falls under a certain description"; this is intended to contrast with "denotation," which gives the individual satisfying a defi nite description.) Donnellan's having in mind and Russell's acquaintance play the same role in enabling referential intentions and what we may call singular or nondescriptive thoughts, and appear to be, in essence, the same notion. What I am calling a singular thought is sometimes called a de re thought. I prefer to reserve de re and de dicto for indirect discourse reports on thought. A drawback to my nomenclature is that the term singular thought misleadingly suggests that such a thought amounts to nothing more than our entertaining a Russellian singular proposition, a proposition containing an individual. Th is is exactly what Russell believed and may be what Donnellan believes, but it isn't what I believe, so please don't read it that way. (I don't believe that thoughts are Russellian propositions.) Le Verrier's naming of Neptune poses an interesting test for the hypothesis that having in mind and Russellian acquaintance are in essence the same notion. In the 1850s Le Verrier predicted that a previously unknown planet would be found in a certain orbit. Th e prediction was made on the basis of observed perturbations in the orbit of Uranus. Such perturbations would be explained, according to Newtonian gravitational theory, by a planet-size body traveling in the given orbit. Le Verrier was so confi dent about his prediction that he named the predicted planet "Neptune" before anyone actually spott ed it (which they eventually did). Le Verrier's knowledge of Neptune before it was seen would be a paradigm case of knowledge by description for Russell. And we see Donnellan following Russell in denying that Le Verrier's knowledge licensed "reference to the thing itself." Th e sort of knowledge that Le Verrier had did not provide for the requisite epistemic state. 12 So similar standards apply to having x in mind and to being acquainted with x . Just as for Russell, the mere introduction of the proper name cut no ice for Donnellan. 13 ( 128 ) David Kaplan ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 128 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM BUT WHAT ABOUT FREGE? One might think from reading Donnellan (or Russell) that what we have in mind is the individual itself, and that's the end of it. And in a way, this is correct, at least if we look only at the truth condition of our thought (the possible state of aff airs that our thought represents). Donnellan intends that the semantic content of what is said when using a defi nite description referentially will have the individual itself as a constituent, just as Russell intends that the proposition one entertains when using a genuine name will have the individual itself as a constituent. One might put it this way: Donnellan, like Russell, seems to claim that a singular thought is nothing more than a singular proposition (in Russell's sense of a proposition containing an individual at the relevant place). If our only concern is the truth of certain simple sentences, 14 then the sort of semantic content that has the individual itself as a constituent may well suffi ce. But if we are concerned with the sort of meaning that we grasp when we understand and communicate through language, the sort of meaning that fi gures into our ability to reason and act on the basis of what we take to be true, in short, the very sort of meaning that Russell took us to entertain in thought, then Russellian singular propositions will not do. Th is sort of meaning is what Frege called the cognitive signifi cance of an utt erance, and the individual itself couldn't be the constituent of this sort of meaning. 15 Frege's fi rst objection was that material objects can't be constituents of a thought, as he claimed in a horrifi ed response to a lett er from Russell: Truth is not a component part of the thought, just as Mont Blanc with its snowfi elds is not itself a component part of the thought that Mont Blanc is more than 4000 metres high . . . . Th e sense of the word "moon" is a component part of the thought that the moon is smaller than the Earth. Th e moon itself (i.e., the meaning [ Bedeutung ] of the word "moon") is not part of the sense of the word "moon"; for then it would also be a component part of that thought. 16 But a second, perhaps stronger objection is that there are diff erent ways in which one might, in Donnellan's own sense of having in mind , have the same individual in mind. And these diff erences make a diff erence in our reasoning, our belief-based actions, and our understanding of one another. Consider Donnellan's original case of the referential use of a defi nite description, the case of the man drinking a martini: Suppose one is at a party and, seeing an interesting-looking person holding a martini glass, one asks, "Who is the man drinking a martini?" If it should turn out that there is A N IDE A OF D ONNEL L A N  129  ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 129 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM only water in the glass, one has nevertheless asked a question about a particular person, a question that it is possible for someone to answer. (Donnellan 1966 , 287) I accept the claim that the referential use of "the man drinking a martini" succeeds in referring to the interesting-looking man before us. It is he whom I have in mind, and having him in mind guides my construction of a defi nite description that will succeed in calling your att ention to this man. I thereby convey to you who it is that I am asking about, which partially determines what I have said, what question I am asking. Donnellan's paradigms for the referential use of a description are cases in which the speaker has the intended referent in mind prior to the formation of the description and in a way that is independent of the description used. It is this independence that allows the description to mischaracterize the referent. Th e user intends that if push comes to shove, the individual in mind trumps the individual described. Donnellan believes that this is a regularized, convention-sanctioned use of defi nite descriptions in English (as opposed to an unintended, idiosyncratic, or spontaneous use). Th e description used is chosen for pragmatic, contextual reasons (to maximize communication with an addressee, to minimize communication with eavesdroppers, to avoid rudeness, to express an att itude, to display an att itude one does not actually have, etc.). With the same individual in mind, diff erent descriptions will be chosen on diff erent occasions of use. Maximizing the accuracy of the description may or may not maximize communication, but other contextual considerations may override maximizing accuracy while still allowing adequate communication. In cases of mischaracterization, the speaker may or may not have foreseen that the description used will not accurately describe the intended referent. Kripke and some others disagree that such uses are conventional. 17 Th ey regard them as spontaneous and unintended. But no one disagrees, I think, that whether conventional or not, such scenarios do arise and conversational participants do oft en (I would say usually ) recognize the speaker's intention and understand what was said as having the intended referent. It is the use of a description in such a scenario that I call a referential use . I myself think of such scenarios on the model of a demonstrative use of the description and regard what the speaker intends to express in such a scenario as a kind of meaning. Simply by following Donnellan's paradigm, we can show that there must be diff erent ways in which we can have that very man in mind. Extend the story back to the time at which we entered the room where the party was held. Suppose that we entered through an open archway (no door or doorway being involved) and that there was a man, in fact this very same man, but with his face obscured, wearing a brown hat and an enveloping overcoat, ( 130 ) David Kaplan ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 130 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM standing in the shadows just inside the archway, and greeting certain of the guests. He did not actually greet us , but we thought he did (he was greeting the people behind us). Now I can certainly have that man in mind, in Donnellan's sense, as easily as I can have the man before us in mind. (Perhaps a bit of short-term memory is required.) 18 Recalling our entrance to the party, I can ask a second question: "Who was the man who greeted us in the doorway?" Here we have a new question, also containing a referential use of a defi nite description. Each question is guided by a having in mind in which, unbeknown to me (and to you), the same individual is in mind . But the questions, as understood and as communicated, are very diff erent. One might answer the second question by saying "He is the man drinking the martini." But one would never answer the fi rst question that way. Now Russell or Donnellan might respond to this challenge by saying that the two questions have the same meaning, and that the diff erence in cognitive signifi cance merely fi gures into a nonsemantic account of why one answer is acceptable and the other not. Semantic meaning is one thing; cognitive signifi cance is another. Note, however, that we are not discussing a mere question of linguistic felicity. If I ask you, "Invite the man drinking the martini to join us," you will head off in one direction; however, if I ask you, "Invite the man who greeted us in the doorway to join us," you will head off in another direction. Th e diff erence in cognitive signifi cance is real, and it, rather than the object in mind, is what plays into understanding, reasoning, and the explanation of behavior. In both cases it can truthfully be said that you are seeking Bernard J. Ortcutt . But this will not explain why you went in one direction rather than the other. 19 I have posed this scenario as if it depended on communication and your understanding of what I aimed to communicate. But it doesn't. On your own initiative, you might have said, "I'm going to invite the man drinking the martini to join us." Or you might have said, "I'm going to invite the man who greeted us in the doorway to join us," and the results would be the same. Th ese statements express diff erent thoughts that would prompt different behavior. Furthermore there would be no fl aw in your reasoning if you thought Th e man who greeted us in the doorway was fr iendly. Th e man drinking a martini looks interesting. But there seem to be no fr iendly, interesting-looking people at this party. If, on the other hand, you had reasoned from just those two premises to the conclusion Th erefore there is a fr iendly, interesting-looking person at this party , a logician would complain that your reasoning was fl awed. For you to understand what I said, it does not suffi ce for you to simply represent the individuals I have in mind in your own ways; you must represent them in ways that coordinate with the ways I represent them. Suppose A N IDE A OF D ONNEL L A N  131  ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 131 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM a loud noise had drowned out part of my request, and because we had been discussing "the man who greeted us," you thought I said "who greeted us" when I actually said "drinking a martini." In that case you would have misunderstood what I asked. You would have failed to grasp what I meant. I have argued that a theory of meaning that aims to account for how we understand utt erances and communicate with them, in a sense in which understanding and communication can infl uence reasoning and behavior, must take account of the diff erent ways we can have a given individual in mind. And a theory of cognitive states, which Russell's theory of propositional att itudes pretends to be, must do likewise. Th is is why Russell's identifi cation of singular thoughts with singular propositions will not do. Th e nondescriptive ways in which one has a worldly object in mind are neither worldly objects themselves nor Russellian denoting complexes. Th e ways are drawn from a realm of cognitive entities much more fi ne-grained than Russell's worldly objects. Russell had warnings that something was amiss (see below on "Is that Scott ?"), but it would have required a wrenching change in his outlook on language and its representational role to incorporate ways of having in mind . 20 Note that the two havings in mind involved in my two questions are grounded in distinct perceptual episodes. I think of each of these two events, involving att ention to a perceptually available individual, as leaving us with a way of having an (unnamed) individual in mind and thus with the ability to entertain and articulate singular thoughts regarding each of them. I see these grounding episodes as loosely analogous to name-giving events, as if I had silently dubbed the one "Doorway Man" and the other "Martini Man." 21 Naming also endows us with the ability to entertain and articulate singular thoughts. To press the analogy, I also regard "Is Hesperus Phosphorus?" and "Is Hesperus Hesperus?" as diff erent questions. Th e points made regarding ways of having in mind could easily be made using proper names rather than referential uses of defi nite descriptions. Still, having in mind seems the more general, and perhaps more interesting, notion since we have many individuals in mind for whom we have, or can recall, no name. 22 For Donnellan, the semantic value of a referential use of a defi nite description is what the speaker has in mind. But we have come up against Frege's Enduring Insight : When it comes to cognitive signifi cance, in addition to the what , there is always a how . 23 What the thinker has in mind is an individual, pure and simple. But how the thinker has that individual in mind may be neither pure nor simple. To repeat: Th is does not imply that the ways of having in mind are descriptive. I take it that they are not. 24 But it is important to see that diff erent nondescriptive ways of having the same individual in mind have the same ( 132 ) David Kaplan ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 132 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM eff ect on communication, understanding, reasoning, and behavior as different descriptive ways of thinking about the same individual. We oft en give explanations of behavior in terms of diff erent descriptive ways of thinking about an individual. We might say of a bartender looking for someone to reach a bott le on a high shelf, "He didn't go into the offi ce because he didn't realize that the offi ce manager was the tallest person in the club ." We treat such reports as explanations of behavior, and that requires the widely accepted result that we must reject substitution of co-denoting defi nite descriptions in such reports. But such explanations of behavior are incomplete if they cannot account for behaviors that turn on diff erent nondescriptive ways of having in mind . Th e one notable diff erence between descriptive and nondescriptive representations is in regard to truth conditions. My assertions "Th e man drinking a martini is a spy" and "Th e man who greeted us in the doorway is a spy" have the same truth conditions (in virtue of the referential uses with a common referent in mind), whereas analogous assertions expressing descriptive thoughts would typically have distinct truth conditions. With the exception of truth conditions, all the reasons to distinguish thoughts involving distinct co-denoting defi nite descriptions are reasons to distinguish thoughts in which the thinker has the same individual in mind but in diff erent nondescriptive ways. A singular ( de re ) thought involving one nondescriptive way of having Ortcutt in mind may be among our beliefs, whereas the thought resulting from the substitution of a diff erent nondescriptive way of having Ortcutt in mind may fail to be among our beliefs. Both thoughts are singular and have the same truth conditions. Yet we may believe the one and fail to believe the other (or even believe the negation of the other) without irrationality. Th is is not because a thought can both be and not be among our beliefs. It cannot. Nor is it because we can have contradictory singular beliefs without being irrational. We cannot. It is because they are diff erent thoughts. Th e case for rationality here is exactly the same as it would have been if the distinct, not logically equivalent, nondescriptive ways of having Ortcutt in mind had been distinct, not logically equivalent, descriptive ways of having Ortcutt in mind. Frege himself is oft en said to use only defi nite description-like mental representations and thus to have nothing that corresponds to Russellian acquaintance or Donnellan's having in mind . But this is not historically correct. In the infamous section 8 of "Begriff sschrift ," wherein Frege states his early doctrine that identity is a relation between linguistic expressions, he briefl y discusses the case of a name given by ostension, thus given to an object with which the name giver and his audience are perceptually acquainted. He states that there is a mode of determination associated with A N IDE A OF D ONNEL L A N  133  ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 133 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM such a name, and says that the perceived object "is determined . . . immediately through intuition [ Anschauung ]." He calls this mode of determination "direct" (intended, I believe, to contrast with "descriptive"). Note that this mode is nondescriptive. By calling it "nondescriptive," I do not mean thin or point-like. A perceptual presentation can obviously be quite thick and rich. But it does not describe the object it represents. Th e object it represents is not necessarily the one that best matches the presentation qualitatively, that most looks like the presentation. Rather it is the object that the perception is of , the object that was perceived. Th is remains true even if the perceptual system distorts the presentation in such a way that a bett er match can be found at another location. In a powerful anticipation of the theory of "Sinn und Bedeutung," Frege contrasts this mode of determination with a descriptive mode of determination for the same object. He then goes on to use the two modes of determination to explain the need for an identity symbol to express a judgment involving the two modes of determination. Th e judgment is roughly Th at point = the point of intersection between line A and circle B when line A is rotated to tangential position. To my knowledge, Frege never comes back and directly discusses how the perceptual mode of determination fi ts in with the developed theory of "Über Sinn und Bedeutung" ([ 1892 ] 2001). 25 Th is is a shame. Russell's own examples illustrate the need to take account of diff erent ways of being acquainted with the same object. 26 In "On Denoting" itself, Russell sets out to explain what it means to give the description primary scope in "George IV wished to know whether Scott was the author of Waverley ." He says that the proposition expressed would assign to George IV the thought he would have expressed if he had seen Scott in the distance and asked, "Is that Scott ?" Now just think for a minute. What is the nature of the proposition whose truth value George IV is uncertain about? He is acquainted with Scott (qua "Scott "). He is perceptually acquainted with the individual he is pointing at. Th ey are the same object. So according to Russell, George IV should be entertaining a singular proposition of the form x = x. Has Russell att ributed an interest in the law of identity to the fi rst gentleman of Europe? Th e fact is that George had two diff erent ways of having the great poet in mind. Th e thought he was entertaining is a singular ( de re ) thought, but it doesn't have the form of a logical truth. Th e fact that there is a how of cognitive signifi cance challenges Russellian acquaintance just as it does Donnellan's having in mind . Russell didn't seem to recognize this unavoidable Fregean epicycle on his central epistemological notion. Th ese problems about the how of cognitive signifi cance fl ow from what I call "the recognition problem," an epistemological fact of life about our relationship to the sort of thing that has, as it were, a "front" and a "back" (and ( 134 ) David Kaplan ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 134 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM so can be perceived from diff erent angles) or persists through time (and so can be perceived on diff erent occasions). Th e same problem arises for identical siblings, whether of the biological kind or of the linguistic kind, like the oral presentations of the words "scent," "sent," and "cent" or the names of my mother's two Doctors Shapiro. Th e problem is that no matt er how severely we constrain what will count as acquaintance with such an object, situations can always arise in which we are acquainted with the same object from diff erent angles or on diff erent occasions without recognizing it, making it sensible to wonder whether it is the same object. I originally thought of the recognition problem as the analogue for demonstratives of the co-reference problem for names (Frege's puzzle), "that" and "that" versus "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus." But the recognition problem also infects our very means of expression: "color" and "colour," "Peking" and "Beijing," "Paderewski" and "Paderewski" We transmit words through perceptible presentations, and this makes them subject to the recognition problem. Here is a species of "linguistic error," misrecognizing a word, that we cannot ensure against by semantic and syntactic study. 27 If I observe Venus in the morning and wonder "Is that a planet?," and then observe it in the evening many months later and wonder "Is that a planet?," I might not take myself to be entertaining the same thought. But according to Russell, it is the same thought. Cases like this, and my opening case of the man both "in the doorway" and "drinking a martini," seem so obvious that it is hard to understand why Russell didn't see that there could be distinct cognitive modes of acquaintance with the same object. (Similarly, it is hard to understand why Frege fell into descriptivism instead of pursuing his good insight into perceptual modes of determination in section 8 of "Begriff sschrift .") It is interesting to speculate whether it was the recognition problem that drove Russell inward, drove him to eliminate external material objects as the objects of acquaintance. Donnellan, to my knowledge, never got caught up in any epistemologically implausible att empts to avoid the recognition problem. Even one who regards acquaintance and having in mind as cognitive relations to objects, relations that do not involve mediating cognitive representations, should acknowledge that there can be distinct such relations to the same individual. Th e relationist can accommodate this requirement by pointing, for example, to the distinct perceptual episodes that ground the two ways (as Martini Man and as Doorway Man) that I have the same individual in mind. But I don't know how we could store a pure relation in memory (a relation that would slowly fade aft er a certain period of time and disuse) without its having some occurrent feature in cognition. Donnellan's omniscient observer of history noticed the relation between the child who A N IDE A OF D ONNEL L A N  135  ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 135 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM was awakened and the awakening behavior of a certain guest at the party. However, if the child had not retained something in cognition that referred to or represented that guest (in this case, the name "Tom"), there would have been nothing for the omniscient observer to explain. So the view that acquaintance and having in mind are mediated in some such way seems plausible to me. Frege, of course, would account for such relations by postulating distinct constituents of cognition that mediate the relations. We might think of such a mediator as the cognitive witness of a relation stretching back along a path to the referent. My sympathies are with Frege. But whatever position one takes on the existence of such mediators, Frege was certainly on to something that is a very pervasive feature of cognition, namely, that there are distinct ways in which one can be acquainted with the same thing. Th is fl ows, in my opinion, from the hazards of recognition failures. SO WHAT ABOUT DIRECT REFERENCE? Direct reference has its place in the theory of objective truth conditions. We noted earlier that diff erent ways of having the same individual in mind do not aff ect the truth conditions of thoughts (not just the truth values but the truth conditions ). But I have argued that the diff erences in cognitive signifi cance among sentences with the same truth condition are linguistically important and are naturally taken to be a kind of meaning or semantic value . We do more with language than just making truth-evaluable assertions. I have called att ention to several areas in which the ways of having in mind do need to be taken into account. 28 Still, I have some appreciation for the claim that matt ers of cognitive signifi cance that go beyond direct reference are nonsemantic. It follows a line that Wett stein has argued vigorously since 1986, when he rightly criticized my att empt in "Demonstratives" to extract cognitive signifi cance from that paper's notion of linguistic meaning. 29 Wett stein's line was, very roughly, semantics is one thing; cognitive signifi cance is another. To try to sort this out adequately, I must go back and examine both Russell's and Frege's semantics more carefully. Russell viewed language as a system of representation for the objects, properties, relations, and (possible) states of the world. Russellian propositions are built from worldly objects (even the sense data to which he later reverted are, for Russell, worldly objects, as are properties and relations). In his reply to Frege's lett er, he insists that Mont Blanc is a component of "what is actually asserted" and calls such "objects of thought" objective propositions to indicate their worldly, object-oriented status. ( 136 ) David Kaplan ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 136 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM I believe that in spite of all its snowfi elds Mont Blanc itself is a component part of what is actually asserted in the proposition "Mont Blanc is more than 4000 metres high." We do not assert the thought, for this is a private psychological matt er: we assert the object of the thought, and this is, to my mind, a certain complex (an objective proposition, one might say) in which Mont Blanc is itself a component part. If we do not admit this, then we get the conclusion that we know nothing at all about Mont Blanc. 30 (Th e fi nal sentence of this passage suggests another outlook on Russellian acquaintance . Earlier I claimed that its purpose was to make an external object available to cognition. But here we see Russell looking at things from the opposite point of view. Suppose we use concept for a way of having in mind without the necessary connection to an object, like a word that we take to be a name , but without prejudice as to whether it names anything or is empty. If we start from cognition, with the nondescriptive concepts Mont Blanc and Donnellan , what is it that gives them objective content ? What separates us from a brain in a vat? Perceptual acquaintance! Th is explanation accords bett er with Russell's empiricism and anti-idealism than my earlier one.) Let us adopt Russell's terminology and speak of Russellian semantic values as the worldly objective content of a linguistic representation. Th e role of words, phrases, and sentences is to represent a certain worldly objective content . A Russellian proposition, the objective content of a declarative sentence, should be seen as a partial state of the world (perhaps not an actual one), or as Wett stein calls it, a state of aff airs . As Wett stein ( 1986 ) emphasizes, it is natural to distinguish a "cognitive perspective" on a state of aff airs from the state of affairs itself. 31 Th e sentence "Mont Blanc is older than Donnellan" represents, for Russell, a certain proposition, an object-fi lled complex involving Mont Blanc, the relation is older than, and Donnellan. 32 Th is state of aff airs obtains (the relation does, in fact, hold between its relata), so the sentence is true. 33 But there are many other sentences that represent the same state of aff airs, for example "Mont Blanc is older than I," utt ered by Donnellan; "Mont Blanc is older than you," utt ered to Donnellan; "Th at mountain is older than you," utt ered to Donnellan while pointing at Mont Blanc; "Th at mountain is older than he," utt ered while pointing fi rst at Mont Blanc and then at Donnellan. Each of these may represent a diff erent cognitive perspective on the same state of aff airs, a diff erent thought, as Frege would put it. Th ese thoughts diff er in their relata, which are diff erent (nondescriptive) ways of having Mont Blanc and Donnellan in mind. 34 If I view a certain state of aff airs as my pants being on fi re , it will prompt action in a way that viewing the same state of aff airs as that man's pants being on fi re (noticing a man in a mirror) might not. Same worldly objective content, diff erent cognitive signifi cance, diff erent action. It is natural to extend Russell's idea of objective content to thoughts, which, like A N IDE A OF D ONNEL L A N  137  ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 137 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM sentences, may also be seen as a form of representation with a worldly objective content. 35 Returning to the fi ve sentences with the same objective content, we see that direct reference theory washes out the cognitive diff erences, the ways of having in mind , and takes us directly to the worldly objective content. Th us direct reference theory has its place in the Russellian theory of worldly objective content. It is part of a theory of objective content and should not pretend to be a theory of cognitive signifi cance. 36 Even the kind of linguistic meaning I called Character (which I imprudently claimed was known to competent users) should not be confused with cognitive signifi cance. Th e Character of "I" is unchanging on diff erent occasions of utt erance and is always distinct from the Character of "you." But an utt erance of "I" can have the same cognitive signifi cance as an utt erance of "you." When Donnellan says, "Mont Blanc is older than I," and I reiterate by saying to him, "Mont Blanc is older than you," the cognitive signifi cance of his utt erance of "I" and my utt erance of "you" will likely be the same for Donnellan. And they will likely be the same for me. Here is why: I expect my utt erance of "you" to evoke "He means me " in Donnellan. When someone addresses me and uses "you," I take it personally. (Th is presupposes that I realize that I am the person being addressed.) It doesn't matt er whether I am being accused of having a pain in my lower back, being younger than Mont Blanc, or being dehydrated. I always take it personally. I never understand the remark as saying "the person being addressed is" . . . or as saying "David Kaplan is" . . . or as saying "this body is." . . . I always take it personally. I always understand it as saying "I." . . . And I expect others to react the same way. So when I say, "I am not!," and you assert, "You are too!," my understanding of my utt erance directly contradicts my understanding of your utt erance. Th e cognitive signifi cance (for me) of the two utt erances is contradictory (it is not just the two objective contents that are contradictory). Th is is why I say that the cognitive signifi cance of Donnellan's utt erance of "I" and my utt erance of "you" will likely be the same for Donnellan. Th e cognitive signifi cance of the two utt erances will also likely be the same for me, for analogous reasons. Is the cognitive signifi cance of the two utt erances for Donnellan the same as the cognitive signifi cance of the two utt erances for me? Not if Frege is right about the fi rst person. In a situation like this, where we are addressing one another, Frege doesn't expect Donnellan to have himself in mind the way I have him in mind. Th at sounds plausible to me, but all matt ers of interpersonal identifi cation of cognitive states are diffi cult. Th is is a view of cognitive signifi cance that is consonant with Frege's claim in "Th ought" ([1918] 1997) that my utt erance of "today" yesterday and my utt erance of "yesterday" today may have the very same cognitive signifi cance, provided I have kept track of the days correctly. If I am not ( 138 ) David Kaplan ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 138 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM bothering to keep track of the days, and they all seem to fade into one another, the cognitive signifi cance of "yesterday" might even be partially descriptive, and thus diff erent from what the cognitive signifi cance of "today" was yesterday. Alternatively, I may be tracking the passing days very carefully. I became acquainted with the day yesterday and expressed that way of being acquainted in my use of "today." Assuming no recognition or tracking failures and no memory failures, I should be able continue to have the day in mind in the same way today, though of course I will refer to it as "yesterday." 37 Here we see, once again, that the cognitive signifi cance of an utt erance should not be identifi ed with linguistic meaning. Compare the situation with "yesterday" and "today" with coming to have any individual in mind (in a certain way ) and later using diff erent linguistic devices appropriate to the occasion to express singular thoughts involving this same way of having in mind . Frege on "yesterday" and "today" is just another issue about cognitive dynamics. We need to leave linguistic meaning and turn to industrial-strength ways of having in mind to give a proper analysis of the notions in this area. 38 I am tempted to push this line of thought further, to the conclusion that those who, like myself, fi rst heard the names "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" in a context in which we immediately learned that they named the planet Venus, have only a single way of having the planet in mind (although we have three names for it). Th is is because I already had Venus in mind, and when I was told about Hesperus and Phosphorus I immediately assimilated them to Venus. (More on this below.) If this is correct, there is really no saying whether the cognitive content of the three names is or is not the same. It will be the same for some people at some times and diff erent for some people at some times. Strangely, Russell seems to make no provision at all for cognitive signifi cance. He sounds at times as if he is worried that too much legitimacy for cognitive signifi cance will promote a slide into idealism. He even insists that propositional att itudes (believes that, desires that, fears that, wonders whether, etc.) are simply relations between thinkers and objective states of aff airs. 39 But this view faces a problem of internal coherence. Although the objective content of "Th at man's pants are on fi re" and "My pants are on fi re" will be the same on certain occasions, the objective contents of "I believe that that man's pants are on fi re" and "I believe that my pants are on fi re" may still be two, quite diff erent worldly states of aff airs. Th e diff erence between those two worldly, objective states will be the way I have myself in mind. Th is diff erence is every bit as worldly as the diff erence between having a certain belief and not having it. Frege, in a lacuna that matches Russell's in strangeness, seems to make no provision at all for worldly objective content. Frege starts off from a radically A N IDE A OF D ONNEL L A N  139  ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 139 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM diff erent place than Russell. He assumes that language is a system of representation for thought and its constituents. 40 Th e primary representational function for linguistic expressions is to stand for a Sinn , a bit of cognitive content (in Frege's special sharable sense). I don't know how one would fi nally sett le the disagreement between Russell and Frege as to the representational role of language. (I tilt toward Russell because if we make Russell's assumption that what are represented are worldly objects, the how of representation will naturally refl ect cognitive perspectives. 41 But there is a lot to be said for the view that the role of cognitive objects and states is to represent worldly objects and states. Th is suggests that Fregean semantics needs Russellian semantics. And here, I believe, Frege's theory leaves a gap. Because Frege cares about factual truth, he adds a secondary form of representation, Bedeutung, whereby elements of cognition are given worldly values. But the values he assigns are extensions. Th is jumps over Russell's worldly objective content (which, for those familiar with the terminology, is intensional ). 42 Frege's Bedeutung takes us from the cognitive representation (or indirectly from the linguistic representation) directly to the actual extension. Th us from a sentence or thought to a truth value; from a predicate or property to a set of individuals. Th ese extensions are not the entities that cognitive objects and states are meant to represent. Th e role of Fregean thoughts is certainly not to represent truth values (although Frege sometimes sounds as if he is trying to talk himself into this view). Frege's cognitive contents should be seen as representing Russell's worldly objective contents, and extension should be defi ned on the latt er. For nondescriptive cognitive representations, the Bedeutung (extension) and the objective content coincide, which may lead one to confuse the two notions. But even in the case of nondescriptive representations, Bedeutung and objective content function diff erently. Fregean nondescriptive modes of representation (like my ways of having in mind ) are surely rigid. A perceptual representation of Ortcutt could not perceptually present another guy. Keep in mind that we have assumed that perception presents its object nondescriptively, that is, not as the individual I am now perceiving immediately in fr ont of me nor as the individual who looks like this . 43 Th e fact that nondescriptive representations are typically rigid is captured by Russell's notion but not by Frege's. Russellian objective contents, not extensions, are the locus of modality. Th e diff erence between Bedeutung and objective content is also easily seen for descriptive representations and for certain predicates. For descriptions, Frege's way of reaching out to the world, through Bedeutung , would lead one to think, quite wrongly, that the worldly content of a defi nite description is an individual. But it is not; it is, as Russell saw, a complex of properties and relations. 44 In an analogous case, Russell complains that a truth value (the extension of a sentence) is no part of the meaning of a sentence. ( 140 ) David Kaplan ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 140 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM For predicates, consider a common noun that stands for a natural kind. Presumably there are many diff erent ways to have such an empirical entity in mind. Remember the three blind men and their perceptual acquaintance with the elephant. Imagine a single blind man with three such perceptual encounters with an elephant. He will not recognize the beast. He will not even recognize a common kind of beast. At the level of Sinn , this blind man has three diff erent Sinne , three diff erent ways of thinking about elephants. 45 At the level of Bedeutung , there is the set of all (actual) elephants that is the common Bedeutung for all three Sinne . But the natural kind Elephantidae , which is Russell's worldly objective content, has disappeared from view. Th e possibility that elephants may become extinct has neither to do with cognitive content nor with a set of actual animals. It is notable that Russell, who was interested in representation, not modality, developed a semantics so well att uned to modal distinctions. I agree with Frege that something like cognitive signifi cance is required to individuate thoughts. But Russellian objective contents are the locus of modality, temporality, and truth. I can wonder whether the man drinking a martini is the man who greeted us in the doorway because I don't know whether he is or not. But if I claim that he might not be, my claim will be false. Th e thought Th e man drinking a martini is the man who greeted us in the doorway is true. Indeed this thought is (or represents) a necessary truth, in virtue of its objective content, which does have the form of the law of identity. But neither the sentence nor the thought is a logical truth, a truth of reason . Reason and rationality do not operate at the level of objective content. Th ey operate at the level of the representation. (Th is alone should be an adequate reason to consider diff erences in the way objects are represented a part of the theory of meaning.) 46 So here are two theories of linguistic representation: a theory of objective content and a theory of cognitive signifi cance. Which one is "semantics"? I have contrasted Russell's and Frege's semantics in terms of the representational role that each sought in language. Th is was to emphasize the fact that they were pursuing diff erent projects, and even made use of distinct ontologies. Th e problem with taking Russellian propositions to be the objects of propositional att itudes is not that they aren't fi ne-grained enough. It is that they are not meant to be thoughts; they are meant to be the worldly objects and states that thoughts represent. And the reason the Babylonians could rationally believe that Phosphorus was seen in the morning but Hesperus wasn't is not because rational people can believe contradictory thoughts. And it isn't because the cognitive signifi cance of a name is always descriptive. It is because thoughts aren't meant to be objective states of the world. Th e Babylonian's were entertaining non contradictory thoughts that cannot both be true because they represent contradictory objective states of the world. A N IDE A OF D ONNEL L A N  141  ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 141 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM Separating the theory of objective content from the theory of cognitive signifi cance, if, in the end, that seems appropriate, does not imply that a systematic theory of cognitive signifi cance has nothing to contribute to investigations traditionally thought to be semantic. Cognitive signifi cance is not foreign to semantics. For the maximum explanatory power, our semantic theory should countenance cognitive content, objective content, and extensions. Let us now return to Donnellan's claim that pure reference fl ows from having in mind . Did he really think that the individual itself was a constituent of the thought? Well, what he says is that the individual is a constituent of what is said when using a description referentially. So did he think that the individual was a constituent of the objective content of the thought? For this to be the case would require that the cognitive constituent be nondescriptive, and you will recall that for many readers of Frege, nondescriptive modes of representation seemed highly problematic. Th is, I think, is exactly the issue that Donnellan was addressing. His claim was that when one has an individual in mind (in his sense), the cognitive constituent is nondescriptive, and thus the objective content is the individual pure and simple. Th e existence of nondescriptive modes of representation may continue to be controversial, but I think Donnellan correct. Russell's view could be described from this perspective as follows: Acquaintance provides one with a nondescriptive cognitive representation whose objective content is the individual itself. If one then associates a name of that individual with this representation, it becomes, in the user's mouth, a genuine name. BACK TO DONNELLAN, RUSSELL, AND FREGE Frege needs ostensive modes of determination, the nondescriptive representations in thought of robust Russellian acquaintance. (He also needs Russellian objective contents, but that's another matt er.) And both Russell and Donnellan need Frege's ways of being acquainted or having in mind . One may speculate that Frege dropped the ostensive modes of determination in part because he wanted his sharable Sinne to determine their reference by the intrinsic properties of the Sinn -the way defi nite descriptions seem to do-rather than by their extrinsic properties, the way ostensive modes of determination must. He may also have worried that ostensive modes of determination weren't plausibly public or complete, and therefore, by Frege's lights, not shareable. 47 Th is completes my Fregean critique of both Russell and Donnellan (and my Russellian critique of Frege). Th ough I have tried to show that Donnellan's ( 142 ) David Kaplan ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 142 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM idea of having in mind is coordinate with Russell's idea of acquaintance , there is a diff erence, an important diff erence. DONNELLAN DEPARTS FROM RUSSELL Donnellan once said to me that he could imagine the name "Aristotle" having been fi rst introduced in the Middle Ages by scholars who previously had used only defi nite descriptions to write and speak about Aristotle. According to Donnellan, these scholars may well have had Aristotle in mind, and through their conversations, through the referential use of defi nite descriptions and other devices, passed the epistemic state of having Aristotle in mind from one to another. Th us they were properly situated from an epistemic point of view to be able to introduce a proper name, and one that subsequent users could use referentially, as a genuine name. Th ey would know the truths (or falsehoods) that were expressed (not just know that the sentences expressed truths or falsehoods). Th is conversation with Donnellan probably took place in the late 1970s or early 1980s. To my knowledge he has never published anything about it, though Geach ( 1969 , 288–89) introduces a notion he calls "mediated acquaintance" that may be just what Donnellan was talking about. 48 In any case, the topic seems so interesting and important that I am taking it up. Donnellan's idea is a striking departure from Russell's notion of acquaintance. Russell would have, and should have, strongly rejected such a notion as incoherent with his epistemology. It strikes at the heart of his ideas about knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. 49 It appears to directly violate his dictum that any knowledge ("of things") that depends on inferences or the acceptance of truths must be knowledge by description. Some form of acceptance of truths, that there was such a person, seems a prerequisite for Donnellan's story. 50 Presumably if the medieval scholars had not accepted what they were being told as true, if, for example, they thought they were being lied to by their senior colleagues, no having in mind would pass. Th is is how we do react when people tell fantastic stories about being abducted by space aliens. In Russell's original example, if Smith had said to Russell, "Wait till you meet my wife, you will fi nd her very interesting. She's a physician," this still would not have acquainted Russell with Smith's wife. He would still, according to Russell, have knowledge about her only by description. Th e fact that Smith, who presumably was acquainted with his wife, had his wife in mind at the time would have cut no ice with Russell. So for Russell, there is no transmission of acquaintance / having in mind . But I have come to think that Donnellan is right, that having in mind can be transmitt ed, and even that it is transmitt ed when Smith tells Russell A N IDE A OF D ONNEL L A N  143  ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 143 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM about his wife. 51 Having in mind may be the functional equivalent of Russellian acquaintance for certain purposes, but it is not Russellian acquaintance since Russellian acquaintance, plainly, cannot be transmitt ed. It may be that we have not understood the importance of the transmission of having in mind because we, and Donnellan himself, have been too focused on the epistemic requirements for the initial step. SIDEBAR ON THE INITIATION OF HAVING IN MIND Are there constraints on how an individual must be given to one who initiates a having in mind chain? I will mention three views, though there are others and many varieties of the three. 52 Pure Russellianism : As we have seen from the "Neptune" case, Donnellan was insistent that one could not introduce a genuine name, that is, a name that was referential, merely by fi xing its reference on the basis of an arbitrary defi nite description (unless, of course, the description was already being used referentially). If the name is introduced by ostension, as is oft en assumed, the name introducer will be acquainted (in the Russellian sense) with the name bearer, and thus can have the name bearer in mind, in Donnellan's sense. In this case a genuine name will be introduced. Donnellan seems to want the initial step to require something like Russellian acquaintance. Causal Russellianism : Others would allow evidence cases as initial steps. Surveying the eff ects of an individual's causal agency-at fi rst the footprint, then the broken lock-we hypothesize the existence of the individual, whom we hold in mind as we build a mental picture, piece by piece, from his causal residue. 53 Here we may have Pure Russellian acquaintance with the causal eff ects, for which we postulate a cause. It is not required that we be directly acquainted with the eff ects; we need only have them in mind and (correctly) postulate some sort of causal origin. Th is process plainly involves reasoning and the acceptance of truths. 54 Th is standard would encompass Le Verrier's relation to Neptune. It would also encompass a reader's relation to the author. Donnellan did not share the view of the Causal Russellians; he considered the descriptions used in such cases to be att ributive. As noted, Donnellan's paradigms for the referential use of a description are cases in which the speaker has the intended referent in mind prior to the formation of the description and in a way that is independent of the description used. In contrast, in these causal cases, what we have in mind seems to remain descriptive. When I notice that my computer has been ripped from its mooring and is missing, my way of thinking about the person who stole ( 144 ) David Kaplan ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 144 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM my computer is as "the person who stole my computer." Th ere seems no room here for mischaracterization, nothing to trump the object described. But suppose we go looking for the brigand, succeed in fi nding him, and it turns out that, unbeknown to either of us, he has an ownership right in the computer, so it wasn't actually a theft or (on the basis of some even more fantastic scenario) it isn't actually a computer. We did fi nd the person we were looking for, but we had drawn some wrong conclusions from the evidence and so we mischaracterized him. Th ere is oft en a kind of looseness, a post hoc adaptability, in such descriptions that allows for some mischaracterization. Th is looseness is not characteristic of all uses of descriptions. If you bet me that the next computer we see will not be a computer but a very computer-like table lamp, you can't win no matt er what we see. And the shortest spy couldn't turn out to actually be not quite as short as another spy. Th is looseness may suggest that the Causal Russellians are right, that we are able to have the cause in mind in a nondescriptive way. If we do, it would account for the looseness and would provide enough independence to qualify as a referential use. It is natural to think that in evidence cases we don't have causes in mind in quite the manner in which we have the eff ects in mind. It is one thing to read the book and think about the author, and another to meet the author. It is even one thing to be told about the book and another to be told about the author. Still, we do seem to stand in a special epistemic relation to the causes. Th ey have spoken to us; they have impinged on us. We are on their trail, or at least in their wake, and our connection with them is diff erent from our connection with the many individuals for which we could dream up a description (like the shortest spy). Perhaps there is a kind of singular thought based on this kind of awareness of an individual that is not quite the singular thought based on the kind of having in mind that Donnellan invokes. Th is would be a compromise with the Causal Russellians (one that I will not pursue). I want to dispose of one argument against the Causal Russellians. Th e claim that a reader can have the author in mind does not imply that he cannot also wonder whether the author is Sir Walter Scott , and in that sense, fail to know who the author is. Even a Pure Russellian can glimpse a colleague entering an elevator or see him in the distance and, in that sense, fail to know who he is. Th ere is no incompatibility between not knowing who x is, understood in a natural sense, and having x in mind. Referential Conversion : Th is is a radically anti-Russellian view that ascribes to all of us the ability to simply convert an arbitrary piece of knowledge by description to a state in which we hold the described individual in mind in a nondescriptive way. 55 Strawson seems to have held something like this radically anti-Russellian view as early as 1950. In "On Referring" he A N IDE A OF D ONNEL L A N  145  ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 145 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM claims that in sentences with a defi nite description as subject, the defi nite description is a referring expression , not just in the sense of being a singular term, but seemingly also in the sense that the assertion one makes in using the sentence contains the denotation of the defi nite description as a constituent and does not involve the descriptive conditions, which are relegated to presuppositional status. (It is hard to see what else might serve as the assertion once the descriptive conditions are made presuppositional.) Th is assertion is precisely the proposition that Russell claimed we could only describe, not entertain, without acquaintance. 56 It is also the assertion that Russell denied we could make when he explained that we could have only descriptive knowledge about an individual with whom we were not acquainted. Strawson's leap is almost breathtaking in its audacity, at least from a Russellian point of view-as it was surely intended to be. Strawson seems to have been the fi rst person to emphasize the use of a defi nite description in a way akin to what Kripke calls fi xing a reference . 57 Like Kripke, he set no epistemic condition, such as Russellian acquaintance (or near acquaintance), for a reference-fi xing use; nor did he require that the speaker have the object in mind in any way other than that given by the defi nite description. Nor did he argue from special properties of proper names, such as rigidity, since proper names play no role at all in his discussion of this use of a defi nite description. 58 On the contrary, he thought this the natural use of defi nite descriptions when they appear in subject position. He called it the referring use of a defi nite description and berated Russell for not recognizing it. 59 One could imagine a compromise between the Strawsonians and the Russellians according to which one could make a referring use, in Strawson's sense, only of certain defi nite descriptions, defi nite descriptions that in some sense encapsulate one of the varieties of Russellian acquaintance, for example, what I call evidence cases , those countenanced by the Causal Russellians, "the person whose fi ngerprints are on the jewel case." 60 Not wanting to allow that we can entertain singular thoughts about the fi rst child to be born in the twenty-second century (aka "Newman 1"), I once held a view of this kind myself (Kaplan 1968 ). Th e general view of Referential Conversion-that an arbitrary defi nite description can be converted- may confound a mental state with a genuine epistemic state. I can obsess about Newman 1 and make her a central character of my mental life. My thought about her may have more vivacity than my thought about dimly remembered acquaintances. But I do not have knowledge of her. 61 I appreciate the seriousness of the disputants on the issue of the initiation of having in mind , having held confl icting views on the matt er myself. 62 But methodologically, I want to separate my focal issue, the transmission of having in mind , from the independent issue of its initiation . For me, ( 146 ) David Kaplan ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 146 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM Donnellan's notion of having in mind is taken as an intuitively understood primitive. And speculation about how it might be initiated is part of the diff erent theories of having in mind . Of course if one doesn't believe that having in mind can be initiated by, say, Causal Russellianism, one won't believe in certain cases that there is any having in mind to be transmitt ed. So we have to assume that having in mind has been initiated in some way or other. Given that assumption, what I will argue for is the plausibility and ease of transmission. THE TRANSMISSION OF HAVING IN MIND So long as a touch of Russellian acquaintance remains in our standard for initiating a chain of singular thought, whether it is a chain of transmission of having in mind or a chain of use of a proper name, many of the ultimate participants in the chain will surely lack Russellian acquaintance with the individual in question. Th is fact set Donnellan to wonder what puts the ultimate name user in the requisite epistemic position to refer to the name bearer. . . . Why, if indeed it is true, is one in a position to assert and know de re things about an entity when the entity becomes (in the right way) a part of the history of one's use of the name? What does that accomplish that allows for this possibility? But perhaps this is a misconceived question. Perhaps the only answer is that that is just when we do ascribe de re propositional att itudes. Perhaps the only task we can perform is . . . to make sure that we have spelled out as exactly as possible the conditions under which such att itudes are correctly ascribed. (Donnellan 1979 , fi nal paragraph) An alternative answer is to spell out as exactly as possible the conditions under which having in mind is transmitt ed. I think that these conditions will turn out to be much less stringent than those working in the Russellian tradition have thought (since they have generally thought that it could not be transmitt ed). Perhaps Donnellan had been thinking about such an alternative answer when we had our conversation. Before the present refl ections on my conversation with Donnellan about the medievals being able to have Aristotle in mind without having a name for him, I had argued that it was through names that we were able to have someone in mind with whom we were not acquainted. I thought that my ability to think and talk about Aristotle arose basically from the transmission of the name "Aristotle" into my vocabulary. It was in this way that I saw language as what enabled me to think about Aristotle while a nonlinguistic animal living today could not. 63 Although these views were formulated aft er A N IDE A OF D ONNEL L A N  147  ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 147 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM my conversation with Donnellan, what struck me at the time of the conversation was that if Donnellan were correct, and the name could have been introduced by the medievals, we would not be able to track "Aristotle" back to Aristotle. Th is troubled me. Now, aft er further refl ection, I think it obvious that names are an inessential artifact for having and holding an individual in mind. Helpful, but inessential. I still think that language is what gives me my comparative advantage over our dog (at least when it comes to thinking about Aristotle). But it is not because his name can be transmitt ed to me; it is because I can be told about him. 64 Consider a language that has no names, or one in which for, say, theological reasons, one is reluctant to use a name. 65 Would it be impossible to entertain singular thoughts about revered ancestors? To wish for or even expect their return? To pray to or for them? We may not have had the pleasure of their acquaintance, but we have Geachean mediated acquaintance with them. As the discourse referents people have noted, we can keep in mind an individual who is mentioned in a conversation and track anaphoric references to that individual through a discourse even though the individual's name, if the individual even has a name, is never mentioned or used. 66 Furthermore, we can retell the story about that individual and even elaborate on it, ask questions about the individual, or give commands to take certain actions with regard to the individual. Th ose commanded will have to keep the individual in mind in planning their actions. All this can happen in a name-free environment. Language is what enables me to think about Aristotle, but it isn't the presence of names that does it, it's the ability to transmit a having in mind , it's your ability to understand that in my discourse I have told you about a certain individual, an individual that you can then talk about, speculate about, or question me about. You will recall that I said that when Smith tells Russell about his wife, Smith's own acquaintance with his wife should cut no ice for Russell. But I now think that Smith has passed the ability to have her in mind. Of course the conversation doesn't "acquaint" Russell with her (in Russell's sense). Russell is right about that. His relation to her is through Smith; it is mediated by his acquaintance with Smith. Russell is only vicariously acquainted with her. Still, the more Smith tells Russell about her, the more fi rmly embedded Russell's having her in mind seems to become. And when Smith fi nally whispers to Russell, "You know, we're not really married," it is only Russell's moral sensibility, not his cognitive state, that is shatt ered. 67 Cognitively, Russell will take the correction in stride, a feat that would have been impossible had he known her only "by description" as "Smith's wife." 68 Once Russell has her in mind in a nondescriptive way, he can fairly freely ( 148 ) David Kaplan ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 148 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM att ach and detach properties as new information comes his way. But he would not have been able to detach the property is married to Smith from the denoting complex Smith's wife . Th e example of Smith's wife is to illustrate a point: In many typical scenarios that Russell would describe as our obtaining knowledge by description, what is really going on is transmission of having in mind . What this has come down to for me is that there are two ways to come to have someone in mind. Th e fi rst way is to do it on our own. Russell's way, by perceptual (or "direct") acquaintance with the individual, is the most prominent way of doing it on our own. A second way, the one I am advocating for here, is being told about the individual, told, among other things, that there is such an individual. Th at's how having Aristotle in mind passed down to the imagined medievals. Th is passage of having in mind seems much more fundamental than the passage of names. Th e diff erence, so important to Russell, between a chain of communication initiated by Pure Russellian acquaintance and one initiated by a Causal Russellianism, as in the Neptune case, seems to matt er litt le to the transmission of having in mind . If the police report on good evidence that a madman is loose and has been committ ing gruesome murders, I will respond cognitively the same way whether they have glimpsed this madman or only seen his victims. Perhaps their having glimpsed him makes all the diff erence epistemically, but I don't see why it should. Reports of this kind, about serial killers, are not rare. And having a nom de crime for the killer doesn't seem to make much diff erence to us cognitively, again undercutt ing the importance I once att ached to the introduction of a name. Th ere are those who argue that we can obtain knowledge of truths , knowledge that P , by hearsay testimony. 69 Donnellan's idea might be characterized by saying that we can obtain knowledge of things by hearsay testimony. I now think that the reason proper names mediate singular thoughts is that in the paradigm cases of name giving, the name giver has the individual in mind, and when we "receive" a proper name for the fi rst time, it typically comes with an explicit or implicit being told about the individual. 70 Note that I do not require that the name giver be acquainted with the individual, only that he has the individual in mind. Th is is in line with my methodology of separating my focal issue, the transmission of having in mind , from the independent issue of the initiation of having in mind . When we transmit having in mind , we sometimes transmit a name, but sometimes we don't. Many of the things we have in mind have no names (that pothole where I always turn onto Amalfi Drive), and we think and talk freely about individuals who have names but whose names we do not know. Th ere is that Navy SEAL who shot Bin Laden. I don't see how knowing that his A N IDE A OF D ONNEL L A N  149  ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 149 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM buddies all called him "Bear" would make a diff erence to my ability to think about him, to have him in mind. In the past, I had the relation between names and having in mind backward. Th e name rides on the having in mind , not the reverse. 71 Th e idea that one can come to have an individual in mind by being told about the individual has come to seem more natural to me as I age. I don't travel as much as I used to, when I was out there perceiving new individuals right and left . I depend more and more on vicarious experience, which is usually safer (and oft en more enlightening) than when I was racing around to check things out for myself. I read the newspapers, check the Internet, watch television news, and talk, through email, with many friends. I have a lot of new individuals in mind through that route. Th ere is that guy who left the Republican Party to run for the Senate on his own, but then lost to the offi cial Republican nominee. He was the governor of some southern state. I know a lot about him. I even know his name, but I can't think of it at the moment. Th ere is a particular person whom I have in mind, and I'm trying to think of his name. But, as is so oft en the case nowadays, I'm not succeeding. We began with Donnellan's speculation that the medievals, even if they had no name for Aristotle, would have been able to have Aristotle in mind and to transmit the epistemic state of having Aristotle in mind through the referential use of defi nite descriptions and other devices. 72 Just to keep things straight, Donnellan's classic case "Who is the man drinking the martini?" is not a case of transmission of having in mind by being told about an individual. Donnellan does talk about communicative aims in this case, but he isn't communicating the having in mind by telling about ; he is doing it by calling his friend's att ention to a particular, perceptually available individual. Th e having in mind in the friend is accomplished by good old, do-it-yourself Russellian acquaintance, just as it was for the speaker. Most of Donnellan's cases seem to be of this kind. 73 MY INSPIRING TEACHER Within the Donnellan tradition, the kind of having in mind that I have been exploring is what is required as a source for a referential intention, the intention required for a referential use of a defi nite description. I also take having in mind as suffi cient (and perhaps necessary) for what I have called a singular thought. Imagine the following dialogue: "I had an inspiring logic teacher at UCLA," I announce. "I'd like to meet him," you assert. "Is he still in L.A.?" you ask. "If so, please call him and arrange for us to meet," you politely, conditionally command. ( 150 ) David Kaplan ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 150 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM If a test of having in mind is its ability to enable a referential use of a definite description, then the preceding dialogue gives us an example of the transmission of having in mind . "Have you had a chance to call the inspiring math professor you told me about?" you ask (mischaracterizing my logic teacher). I think Donnellan should and would regard this as a prime case of the referential use of a defi nite description. 74 Note that when you meet my teacher, you will certainly be able to say, as Donnellan demands for having in mind , "You are the person I've looked forward to meeting for the past two weeks." Although I have used a mischaracterization to exemplify a referential use, the essence of a referential use is the referential intention enabled by a prior having in mind . It is certainly not required that the description mischaracterize the referent in order for the use to be referential, as Donnellan indicates in his case of the referential use of "the murderer." As Donnellan notes, the focus on mischaracterizations is primarily to eliminate the likelihood that the use is att ributive. If we are prepared to say, as seems natural, that in your questions, assertions, and commands about my logic teacher you have in mind the person I was speaking of, then having in mind transmission may be easier to pull off than some of us have thought. Let me conclude my argument for the transmission of having in mind by making a comparative argument. Few would deny that full television coverage of a trial, including fi lm of the judge and the accused, enables singular thought about those participants. 75 But then, I claim, a newspaper account from a reporter and a sketch artist (as we oft en do get for courtroom events) should do likewise. In one case we have information in the form of images and sound stored in a physical medium and then reproduced. In the other we have information, including images and sound, stored in human memory and then reproduced. One might resist this step by insisting on the vastly greater confi dence we have in the veridicality of the camera. "Pictures don't lie." However, in the age of Photoshop and Industrial Light and Magic, this proverb no longer rings true. When we take a picture at face value we must presuppose the honesty of the photographer and others involved in the processing of the image, just as we presuppose the honesty of journalists when we take newspaper accounts of events at face value. It may be argued that the video would allow us to recognize the participants, whereas the verbal report (without the sketches) would not. But the report may include identifying biographical facts that are not apparent to visual inspection (that she donated one of her kidneys to her sister), and so provide a sounder basis for identifi cation than a visual image. Reading the report and viewing the sketches certainly puts us one "mediator" away from Russellian acquaintance. But, as I have argued, viewing the video also puts a mediator, whose A N IDE A OF D ONNEL L A N  151  ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 151 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM integrity we must assume, between us and the trial participants. And if we once take the fi rst step, what reason is there not to iterate and accept the transmission of having in mind through a biography writt en by a conscientious biographer who consulted contemporaneous newspaper accounts and records? In this way, it should be seen that a chain of tellings is subject, in principle, to the same kinds of preservation and degradation as a chain of video reproductions would be. BLIND DESCRIPTIONS Th ere is an important kind of description (really a use of a description) that I call a blind description , a description for which you know, or at least are confi dent, that it is uniquely satisfi ed, but a description that does not evoke any individual with which you are epistemically connected, thus a description that does not evoke an individual with which you are acquainted or have been told about or in whose causal wake you lie ("the fi rst child to be born in the twenty-second century," "the shortest spy," "the tallest living woman," "the next Republican nominee for president," 76 "the oldest ancient artifact still undiscovered aft er thousands of years"). We may be told that there will be a next Republican candidate and that he will be a man and a conservative. But such tellings do not involve having in mind transmission, 77 and, more important, we don't take them as if they do. One of Donnellan's most important insights, independent of the actual intentions of the speaker, is that we hear defi nite descriptions in two diff erent ways: usually, I believe, as an expression of having in mind , thus referentially, but sometimes as blind. I take the deployment of blind description as a usage that is relatively rare but important in forward-looking (and certain other) situations. I don't rule out cases in which a description is used referentially but heard as blind (or vice versa). Blind uses of descriptions are not merely att ributive uses. Th ey are the paradigm of att ributive use, the most att ributive of the att ributives. Donnellan regards the descriptions generated by evidence cases ("the cause of the perturbations," "the person who stole my computer") as att ributive, and he may be right since they do not quite fi t his paradigm for referential use. But evidence cases are not blind. In using such descriptions we signal an epistemic connection with the denotation that is not present in blind uses. And, as noted, there is some wiggle room for mischaracterization. 78 I contrast blind uses of descriptions with those that are directed. Th is is not meant to be an exhaustive classifi cation; uses of descriptions that one does not hear as satisfying the usual presuppositional requirements are neither blind nor directed. 79 Whether one regards all directed descriptions as referential depends, ( 152 ) David Kaplan ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 152 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM in part, on one's views about the initiation and transmission of having in mind . Th e notion of a blind use of defi nite descriptions is meant to be neutral regarding those issues. Th e distinction, such as it is, between blind and directed defi nite descriptions applies also to indefi nite descriptions. Th e indefi nite in "A student stole my lunch" is directed (it's an evidence case); whereas the indefi nite in "A student will speak, if the instructor remains silent long enough" seems blind. 80 Although some linguists claim that it is infelicitous to use a defi nite description if the individual (so given) is "unfamiliar" to the audience, it seems that no foundation needs to be laid for the felicitous use of a blind description. 81 Blind descriptions are important because Russell took them to be typical of the mainstream use of defi nite descriptions. In contrast, I believe that most uses of defi nite descriptions are not blind. (And not only our uses but also the way we hear defi nite descriptions used by others.) Russell might be said to have taken blind uses as the only use of defi nite descriptions. In his discussions of the use of names and descriptions, he seems intent on ignoring any epistemic relations other than direct acquaintance. 82 "On Denoting" off ers an analysis of the semantics of blind descriptions. Donnellan treated blind descriptions as att ributive uses , but did not distinguish blind descriptions from other nonreferential uses (nor need he have). 83 I claim that most uses of defi nite descriptions are intended to pick out something that we are acquainted with or that we have already been told about, something that we have in mind (even if we exclude evidence cases). 84 Nonfi ction writers tend to write about what (and whom) they know, and we hear them as telling us about individuals they have in mind. Not every description we use denotes something we have been told about or have in mind in some other way, but I believe that most of them do. In Donnellan's terms, the preponderant use of defi nite descriptions is referential. 85 (In assessing this claim, keep in mind the fact, argued for earlier, that having an individual in mind is compatible with not knowing who the individual is.) My disagreement with Russell is probably due to the fact that I believe that having in mind is much more widely distributed than he does. Th e question of which use of descriptions is preponderant should, I believe, aff ect how we think about what belongs to the common, conventionalized meanings that we call semantic. Consider the use of demonstrative gestures associated with the demonstrative "this." Usually, what Frege calls "the pointing of fi ngers" is guided by perceptual acquaintance. And so we (or many of us) are inclined to give weight to the speaker's intentions in determining the referent when a demonstrative is used conventionally. But there are also blind uses of a demonstrative, as when a blindfolded offi cial A N IDE A OF D ONNEL L A N  153  ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 153 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM picks a ball from an urn fi lled with numbered balls and announces, "Th is shows the winning number." If the latt er were the preponderant use of "this" and the perception-guided uses were considered to be deviant, peeking cases, we would, I believe, have a diff erent view of the semantics of demonstratives. WAYS AND PATHS Finally, I want to go back to my ways of having an individual in mind and the individuation of such ways interpersonally and intrapersonally, especially when one has been told about an individual that the speaker has in mind. Suppose I go home and tell my wife about our encounter with the man with a martini glass. (To fi ll out this scenario, let's put aside the encounter at the entryway and suppose that you answered my question "Who is the man drinking a martini?" in an informative way.) It is the thesis of this paper that she can, and probably will, thereby come to have the man in mind. 86 Since I still subscribe to my old slogan, "No Mentation without Representation!," I think that he will be represented by some element of her cognition. It is this element of cognition that determines (in the sense of leads to ) the referent. It does this by way of its origin, by way of a particular descending path through a network of tellings about , a path that ideally is ultimately grounded in an event involving a more fundamental epistemological relation such as some form of Russellian acquaintance. I do not rule out cases in which the path is blocked (in the sense of Donnellan 1974 ) by a lie or a story made up from whole cloth. But in this case we know that the path is properly grounded. If my wife thinks she recognizes the man ("Oh, that must have been Janet's husband. I'm surprised he was drinking in public"), she will just assimilate the individual she is being told about to the individual she already has in mind and associate the new information with her old representation. It is an important fact that we oft en do recognize individuals we are told about. Otherwise our minds would be clutt ered with an even greater welter of singular thoughts. 87 If my wife doesn't think she recognizes the man, then she will create a new representation. In what way will she think of him if she doesn't recognize him? Will she think of him as the man drinking a martini ? Almost certainly not. I might not have mentioned martinis. What I have called the ways of having an individual in mind are essentially nondescriptive, though they may form the center of a cluster of descriptive material. 88 Th ere may be diff erent ways of having the same individual in mind that are diff erentiated only by their occasion of formation. I have Ortcutt in mind in a certain way , ( 154 ) David Kaplan ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 154 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM but the way is not as the man drinking a martini . Th at's just a description that I (mistakenly) believe true of the individual I have in mind. It isn't essential to the very grasp I have of him. It is assumed in all of Donnellan's scenarios of referential use that we can have an individual in mind in a way that is independent of the description that we use to refer to it. Generally speaking, when a speaker has someone in mind and refers to that individual through referential uses of defi nite descriptions, the speaker will use diff erent descriptions on diff erent occasions. Th e description used is shaped to the occasion and the situation of the person addressed. If you or I recognize "the man drinking a martini" on another occasion when no one would take him to be drinking a martini, we will not use "the man drinking a martini" to refer to him. In the cases I have presented, both you and I have Ortcutt in mind through perception (and memory) in two diff erent ways corresponding to the two diff erent occasions on which we perceived him. Th ere may be properties that are essential to the ways we have him in mind, but martini drinking and doorway greetings are not among them. So do the diff erent ways of having the same individual in mind correspond to paths that are grounded by diff erent events (for example, the two perceptual events that grounded our two ways of having Ortcutt in mind)? It would be nice if things were that simple, but they aren't. I earlier suggested that for you to understand me when I ask you to invite Ortcutt to join us, your representations should "correspond" to mine. We each have Ortcutt in mind in two ways . What is it for the two ways in which we each have Ortcutt in mind to be synched up in such a correspondence? Th e example of Doorway Man and Martini Man, where there were only two (shared) grounding events, may have suggested that it is being on the same path. But it isn't. You might have arrived well before me but had the same kind of experience with Ortcutt at the entrance that I did. Th e grounding events of acquaintance would have occurred at diff erent times and thus will have been distinct events. Also, you might not have noticed Ortcutt , standing there with the martini glass, until I called your att ention to him. Again, my grounding perceptual event may have occurred long before yours. In this scenario, our four ways of having Ortcutt in mind are all on diff erent paths. But they are coordinated pairwise. What is it that makes for such coordination? I don't know. Th e fact that we each have two ways of having a particular x in mind doesn't suffi ce for communication. We need to be in synch. It is very hard to say what this interpersonal coordination amounts to, but it is not that we are on the same path, nor that we are on paths grounded in the same event. Even in the easier case of intrapersonal ways of having in mind , we cannot identify distinct ways with paths that are grounded by distinct events. We have already seen one case (my wife recognizing Ortcutt ) in which recognition A N IDE A OF D ONNEL L A N  155  ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 155 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM and assimilation allow paths grounded in diff erent events to yield a single way of having in mind . Others are easily generated. I believe that I have each member of my immediate family in mind in only one way, although I have had thousands of sightings of each of them and thousands of occasions of being told about them. But I recognize them by sight and in the tellings, and I immediately assimilate them to the original way of having in mind . So despite the many paths to many grounding events, few new ways of having in mind are retained. 89 It can also happen that paths to a single grounding event may lead to distinct ways of having in mind . Suppose that long aft er I told my wife about "the man drinking a martini" you or I tell my wife another story about him. (He turned out to be quite an interesting character.) I have forgott en that I already told her one story about him (and you never knew that I told her about him), and she fails to recognize that it is the same man. (Who would think that the star bugle player who wakes the troops every morning would also lead evening prayers at the Magen David Synagogue?) She may even remember the fi rst report and think, "All those interesting people at that party-I'm sorry I missed it." She will come to have a new representation of Ortcutt , a second way of having him in mind. But both of the paths involved are grounded in the same event. Th e fact that my wife takes it that I have told her about two diff erent people shows that she has misunderstood what I told her. If she had understood, she would have quickly concluded that there is a bugle player who leads prayers. But her failure to recognize the bugle player in the second story blocks her from making the inference. And when she declares that the bugle player has the property F and separately that the prayer leader has the property G, I will misunderstand her to believe that someone is both F and G. She and I are out of synch, and the misunderstandings are mutual. Our cognitive perspectives on the objective content of our utt erances are not coordinated. She may come to wonder whether the individuals that she has in mind in these two ways are one ("Is that he?") in the way that Russell wondered about Scott seen in the distance ("Is that Scott ?"). Like Russell, my wife is entertaining a singular thought. But it may be impossible for me to understand (in a certain sense) and represent what she is wondering about. Th is is understanding in the sense that those who understand another's thoughts can share or at least represent the other's thoughts in a way that translates them into their own. Translational understanding is what is expressed by our usual de dicto propositional att itude talk. Such translations are impossible if one of the persons has an individual in mind in more ways than the other. You can't translate one representation of an individual into two, nor two into one. However, there is another sense of understanding in which one surveys another's thought fr om above , noting, from one's own ( 156 ) David Kaplan ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 156 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM point of view, failures to recognize and assimilate as well as misrecognitions leading to confl ations. Understanding from above should enable explanations of behavior and reasoning even in cases where translational understanding is blocked. Consider an observer who knew-or believed he knew-the whole story: that aft er seeing Ortcutt in the doorway we had failed to recognize him when we saw him holding the martini glass, and so we had him in mind in two diff erent ways . Th is observer might be said to understand what I said. I have called this latt er way of understanding description fr om above . In this sense, the observer could understand our state of mind and explain our behavior. He would characterize us as having failed to recognize the same individual when we saw him the second time. Similarly, if we were persuaded that we knew the whole story-that the observer had wrongly confl ated two individuals, and so had a single way of having two diff erent individuals in mind-we could understand him by description from above. We would characterize him as having confused the man drinking a martini with the man who greeted us at the doorway. So this sense of understanding by description from above is independent of whether the subject's thought corresponds to reality. To return to the bugler and the prayer leader. Because my wife and I are out of synch in this area, it may be impossible for me to understand my wife's thought by translation. Let me put it this way: Th ere is no translation that captures what the description from above captures: both the fact that her thought is singular and the good explanations of behavior and of her reasoning. 90 It seems that the number of ways in which one has a given individual in mind depends on recognition (and assimilation) versus failure to recognize and misrecognition. Th ese mental events are independent of the external paths and their groundings, the realities of reference. 91 Interpersonal synching also seems to be dependent on a kind of mutual recognition. It is striking that failures in the recognition of things are so much more disruptive to the framework in which we ordinarily understand (and talk about) one another's thought than failures in the att ribution of properties. Th e latt er is the kind of error the framework seems designed to accommodate. I think of these two kinds of errors as Russell did, as mistakes in our knowledge of things and mistakes in our knowledge of truths . I take Russell's talk of knowledge of things seriously, and think that in spite of all the work on reference, issues concerning the transmission and coordination of our knowledge of things have been understudied. I read Kripke's "A Puzzle about Belief " (1979) as a contribution to this study (though I don't know if he intended it that way). At the time of the lectures that included my "Words" (1986), I argued that Peter had made a "linguistic mistake" when he misidentifi ed (failed to A N IDE A OF D ONNEL L A N  157  ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 157 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM recognize) a second occurrence of the same word and added a bogus name to his lexicon. What was said to him implied that some politicians are musical. But he misunderstood it. It is as if he had failed to track anaphoric pronouns correctly. His misunderstanding was due to a failure to disambiguate all occurrences of the generic name "Paderewski" correctly. Since the stated (and natural) preconditions of disquotation require that no linguistic mistake is made, we were not justifi ed in making de dicto reports of his beliefs on the basis of any avowals that use the bogus name. Th is still seems to me correct. However, in the name-free cases that are under discussion here, like that of my wife's multiple interesting partygoers, I see no linguistic error. So diffi cult problems about representing the beliefs of another persist in a name-free environment. CLAIMS In conclusion, I would like to pull together a series of claims that have been made (and in some cases argued for) in this paper. 1. In comparing Donnellan to Russell, as Donnellan does, we must use the Russell of 1903–5. For that Russell, the comparison is indeed apt. 2. Within Russell's theory, acquaintance plays two roles: It transforms a worldly object into one accessible to cognition. Th e objects we are acquainted with are those we can represent or hold in thought. Acquaintance also plays the role of connecting our mental concepts to the world, thus giving them worldly objective content and ensuring that we are not brains in vats. Acquaintance with an individual, x , gives us the power to entertain in thought a singular proposition, in Russell's sense of a proposition with x as a constituent at the relevant place. For the 1903 Russell, we were acquainted with our acquaintances, but not with individuals we had only been told about and had never encountered. Our knowledge about the latt er could only be under a description. With that understanding of acquaintance, his distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description has commonsense plausibility. 3. Donnellan's and Russell's views coincide in several interesting ways. Th ey both subscribe to the view that there are two uses-referring and descriptive-of the same linguistic expression (for Russell, names; for Donnellan, defi nite descriptions), and Donnellan's having in mind and Russell's acquaintance play the same role in enabling singular or nondescriptive thoughts. Also, Russell's denoting and knowledge by description are conceptually parallel to Donnellan's att ributive use of a ( 158 ) David Kaplan ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 158 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM defi nite description. Furthermore both Donnellan and Russell seem to take perceptual acquaintance as their paradigm. Th us having in mind and Russellian acquaintance initially look to be, in essence, the same notion. 4. Donnellan, like Russell, appears to claim that a singular (or de re ) thought is nothing more than a singular proposition (in Russell's sense). Th is cannot be correct because there are diff erent ways in which one might have the same individual in mind (in Donnellan's own sense of having in mind ). Th e case of the man in the doorway who is also the man drinking a martini shows that a theory of meaning-in the sense in which meaning plays into reasoning and aff ects behavior, communication, and understanding-must take account of the diff erent ways in which we can have the same individual in mind. Th is sort of meaning is what Frege called the cognitive signifi cance of an utt erance. Th e individual itself couldn't be the constituent of this sort of meaning. While agreeing that perceptual acquaintance allows one to cognitively represent an individual, I insist on Frege's Enduring Insight: that in the realm of cognitive signifi cance, we must account not only for what is represented but also for how it is represented. So Russell's identifi cation of singular thoughts with singular propositions will not do. 5. Our usual method of explaining behavior on the basis of belief can accommodate descriptive diff erences in belief. However, nondescriptive diff erences in ways of having in mind can play the same role in explaining behavior. If our method of explaining behavior on the basis of belief cannot accommodate nondescriptive diff erences in belief, it is incomplete. 6. Perceptual acquaintance, whatever descriptive or pictorial elements may accompany it, does not pick out its object descriptively. Perceptual acquaintance with one twin represents the twin perceived; it does not represent the other twin no matt er how perfectly the twins resemble one another. (Th us it is not an instance of Russellian knowledge by description). I would hope that all parties agree upon this. Once we have ways of perceptual acquaintance, it should not be surprising that Frege puzzles and their variants are easily generated purely within the realm of perceptual acquaintance (or purely within the realm of transmitt ed having in mind cases). Th ese puzzles fl ow from recognition problems. 7. For want of ways of having in mind (to appear in the objects of propositional att itudes), Russell has George IV expressing an interest in the law of identity when, upon seeing Scott in the distance, he asks, "Is that Scott ?" George IV is clearly acquainted with the man he perceives, and he is also acquainted with Scott (qua "Scott "). 8. Frege's continual citations of descriptive senses of names, not only for "Aristotle" but for names of individuals the speaker is plainly acquainted A N IDE A OF D ONNEL L A N  159  ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 159 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM with (for example, when the acquaintances of Dr. Lauben speak of him), may suggest that he entirely rejects the sort of nondescriptive having in mind that Donnellan and Russell fi nd so central to their theories of thought. But the discussion of perceptual modes of presentation in section 8 of "Begriff sschrift " involves exactly the sort of ways of being acquainted with an object that Russell and Donnellan need. Unfortunately, from "Über Sinn und Bedeutung" ([ 1892 ] 2001) on, Frege drops the discussion of perceptual modes of presentation and even switches his examples so that they become descriptions. Although his discussions of the fi rst-person pronoun and of other indexicals may suggest the possibility of nondescriptive constituents of thoughts, it is a possibility that Frege never follows up on. 9. Russell viewed language as a system of representation for the objects, properties, relations, and (possible) states of the world. Russellian propositions are built from worldly objects. (Even the sense data to which he later reverted are, for Russell, worldly objects, as are properties and relations.) Mont Blanc itself is a component of "what is actually asserted," which he calls an objective proposition to indicate its worldly, object-oriented status. So words, phrases, and sentences represent their worldly objective content . Th e sentence "Mont Blanc is older than Donnellan" represents, for Russell, a certain objective proposition, an object-fi lled complex involving Mont Blanc, the relation is older than, and Donnellan. We may think of such an objective proposition as a state of aff airs. Th is particular state of aff airs obtains (the relation does, in fact, hold between its relata), so the sentence is true. Direct reference fi nds its place in Russell's theory of worldly objective content. 10. In addition to using language to represent the objects, properties, and states of the world, we also use language to convey our thoughts and to represent the thoughts of others. It would be convenient if our thoughts simply consisted of the very same objective states of aff airs that declarative sentences represent. But they don't. It is here that we must part company with Russell. Th ere are many sentences that represent the same state of aff airs as "Mont Blanc is older than Donnellan," for example "Mont Blanc is older than I," utt ered by Donnellan; "Th at mountain is older than you," utt ered to Donnellan while pointing at Mont Blanc; and so on. Each of these may express a diff erent cognitive perspective on the same state of aff airs, a diff erent thought, as Frege would put it. Th ese thoughts diff er in their relata, which are diff erent (nondescriptive) ways of having Mont Blanc and Donnellan in mind. A natural view of these matt ers supports Frege's claim that an utt erance of "yesterday" today may have the same cognitive content as an utt erance of "today" yesterday. Th is makes it clear that cognitive signifi cance is not linguistic meaning. ( 160 ) David Kaplan ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 160 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM 11. Frege starts off from a radically diff erent place than Russell. He assumes that language is a system of representation for thought and its constituents. Th e primary representational function for linguistic expressions is to stand for a Sinn , a bit of cognitive content (in Frege's special sharable sense). It is hard to know how one would sett le the disagreement between Russell and Frege as to the representational role of language. But there is a lot to be said for the view that the role of cognitive objects and states is to represent worldly objects and states. Th is suggests that Fregean semantics needs Russellian semantics. 12 . Strangely, Frege's theory makes no provision at all for Russellian objective content. Frege does add a secondary form of representation, Bedeutung, whereby elements of cognition are given worldly values. But the values he assigns are extensions. Th is jumps over Russell's worldly objective content, which is intensional. Extensions are not the entities that cognitive objects and states are meant to represent. Th e role of Fregean thoughts is certainly not to represent truth values. Frege's cognitive contents should represent Russell's worldly objective contents, and extension should be defi ned on the latt er. 13 . Strangely, Russell seems to make no provision at all for cognitive signifi cance. He sounds at times as if he is worried that too much legitimacy for cognitive signifi cance will promote a slide into idealism. He even insists that propositional att itudes (believes that, wonders whether, etc.) are simply relations between thinkers and objective states of aff airs. But this view faces a problem of internal coherence. Although the objective content of "Th at man's pants are on fi re" and "My pants are on fi re" will be the same on certain occasions, the objective contents of "I believe that that man's pants are on fi re" and "I believe that my pants are on fi re" seem to be two, quite diff erent worldly states of aff airs. Among the diff erences between those two worldly, objective states will be the way I have myself in mind. Th is diff erence is every bit as worldly as the diff erence between having a certain belief and not having it. 14 . Something like cognitive signifi cance is required to individuate thoughts, whereas Russellian objective contents are the locus of modality, temporality, and truth. I can wonder whether the man drinking a martini is the man who greeted us in the doorway because I don't know whether he is or not. But if I claim that he might not be, my claim will be false. Th e thought Th e man drinking a martini is the man who greeted us in the doorway is true. Indeed this thought is (or represents) a necessary truth, in virtue of its objective content. But neither the sentence nor the thought is a logical truth, a truth of reason . Reason and rationality operate at the level of the representation, not the objective content. (Th is alone A N IDE A OF D ONNEL L A N  161  ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 161 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM should be an adequate reason to consider diff erences in the way objects are represented a part of the theory of meaning.) 15 . For the maximum explanatory power, our semantic theory should countenance cognitive content, objective content, and extensions. 16 . Donnellan's remarks that pure reference fl ows from having in mind are best understood as claiming that having in mind requires a nondescriptive cognitive representation, and thus one whose objective content will be an individual, pure and simple. 17. Despite their similarity, Donnellan's having in mind could not be Russell's acquaintance because Donnellan believed that we could come to have a nondescriptive cognitive representation of an individual, to have the individual in mind, not only through a perceptual encounter but also by being told about the individual by one who already had the individual in mind. His original idea was that he could imagine the name "Aristotle" having been fi rst introduced in the Middle Ages by scholars who previously had used only defi nite descriptions to write and speak about Aristotle. According to Donnellan, these scholars may well have had Aristotle in mind, and through their conversations, through the referential use of defi nite descriptions and other devices, transmitt ed the epistemic state of having Aristotle in mind from one to another. Th us they were properly situated from an epistemic point of view to be able to introduce a genuine proper name, and one that subsequent users could use referentially. 18 . We certainly gain knowledge of truths through the testimony of others (who already have knowledge of those truths). We can also gain knowledge of things by the testimony of others (who already have knowledge of those things). Th is is one way to characterize Donnellan's idea. 19. Historically, there have been confl icting views on how having in mind can be initiated. But methodologically, we can separate issues regarding the transmission of having in mind from the independent issue of its initiation . I take Donnellan's notion of having in mind as an intuitively understood primitive. Speculation about how it might be initiated is part of the diff erent theories of having in mind . 2 0 . Names are an inessential artifact for holding an individual in mind. We hold many things in mind that either have no names or whose names we do not know. Some of these things we have interacted with directly, but others we have only read about or been told about. Perhaps the reporters who told us about these things witnessed them themselves, but it may also have been the case that they, in turn, were merely told about them. 21. Although it is widely believed that the transmission of a proper name enables singular thought-perhaps because proper names are nondescriptive ( 162 ) David Kaplan ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 162 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM representations (like demonstratives and indexicals)-the transmission of names should be subsumed under the broader notion of being told about an individual. When a proper name is transmitt ed, we typically have been told about the individual. Th us having in mind has been transmitt ed, and we take the name to refer to the individual we were told about. Note that we may forget the name and remember the individual. 2 2 . A blind use of a description is one that does not evoke an individual with which the speaker is epistemically connected. In contrast, a directed description evokes an individual with which the speaker is acquainted or has been told about, or in whose causal wake the speaker lies. (In their standard use, "the fi rst child to be born in the twenty-second century," "the shortest spy," "the oldest living woman," "the next Republican candidate for president" would all be blind.) Th is distinction is neutral regarding views about the initiation and transmission of having in mind . One of Donnellan's most important insights is that, independent of the intentions of the speaker, we hear defi nite descriptions in two diff erent ways: sometimes as directed, and sometimes as blind. Th e distinction applies also to indefi nite descriptions. Th e indefi nite in "A student stole my lunch" is directed (it's an evidence case), whereas the indefi nite in "A student will speak, if the instructor remains silent long enough" seems blind. Russell took blind uses of descriptions as typical of the mainstream use. In contrast, I believe that blind uses of defi nite descriptions are rare. Not only are most uses of defi nite descriptions directed, but most are intended to pick out something that the speaker is acquainted with or has been told about, something that the speaker has in mind. In Donnellan's terms, the preponderant use of defi nite descriptions is referential. Th is disagreement with Russell is due to the fact that I believe that having in mind is much more widely distributed than he did. 2 3 . Th e number of ways in which one has a given individual in mind depends on recognition (and assimilation) versus failure to recognize and misrecognition. Th ese mental events are independent of the external paths and their groundings, which determine what individual is in mind. 2 4 . Th ere are two senses of understanding another's thoughts. Th ere is understanding in the sense that those who understand another's thoughts can share or at least represent the other's thoughts in a way that translates them into their own. Translational understanding is what is expressed by our usual de dicto propositional att itude talk. Such translations are impossible if one of the persons has an individual in mind in more ways than the other. You can't translate one representation of an individual into two, nor two into one. However, there is another sense of understanding in which one surveys another's thought fr om above , noting, from one's own point of view, failures to recognize and assimilate as well A N IDE A OF D ONNEL L A N  163  ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 163 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM as misrecognitions leading to confl ations. Understanding from above should enable explanations of behavior and reasoning even in cases where translational understanding is blocked. I have called this latt er way of understanding description fr om above . Th is sense of understanding, by description from above, is independent of whether the subject's thought corresponds to reality. It may be impossible to understand another's thought by translation because there is no translation that captures what the description from above captures: both the fact that certain thoughts are singular and the good explanations of behavior and of reasoning. 2 5 . It is striking that failures in the recognition of things is so much more disruptive to the translational framework in which we ordinarily understand (and talk about) one another's thought (using the idioms of propositional att itudes) than failures in the att ribution of properties. Th e latt er is the kind of error the framework seems designed to accommodate. I think of these two kinds of errors as Russell did, as mistakes in our knowledge of things and mistakes in our knowledge of truths . 2 6 . Having an individual in mind may be a cognitive state that is more diffi cult to describe than has been thought, but it is also a state that is much easier to achieve than has been thought. Rather than its being a rare and precious thing, we are rife with singular thoughts about individuals we haven't personally met and events we haven't personally participated in but have only been told about. Th e moral is: For singular thought, vicarious or mediated acquaintance is as good as the real thing (as well as being a whole lot safer). And thank goodness I don't have to remember someone's name to think about him. HOMEWORK Now here is your homework assignment. If those medieval scholars could have Aristotle in mind, without having a name for him, and transmit this state to their students, couldn't they have been in an analogous cognitive state and transmit that state to their students even if there had never been an Aristotle, that is, if what they thought they had learned about him had originated as a fi ction or a lie? Would they ( 164 ) David Kaplan ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 164 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM not be in qualitatively identical epistemic states (in the sense of Kripke [ 1972 ] 1980, lecture 2) with the actual medieval scholars? Perhaps in these cases the originating storytellers, the liars, have no one in mind, and so the recipients of the story also have no one in mind. But if the recipient believes the story, or enters into the form of pretence involved in listening to an acknowledged work of fi ction, it may feel just as it does in cases of actual having in mind . Th ere is that embeddedness and constancy of referential intention that seems characteristic of having in mind . And note that bogus and fi ctional individuals we are told about, like the real individuals we are told about, don't need to have names-witness the priest in Hamlet. Might there not also be diff erent ways of having nothing in mind? Th is way of thinking about the transmission of cognitive states similar to having in mind breaks the transmission of a cognitive state loose from problems of knowledge and existence, and thus from epistemology. In "Speaking of Nothing" Donnellan (1974) has made an analogous move with proper names, studying the network of transmission and the use of the name independently of the nature of initiating events. Part 1: Write an essay on having nothing in mind in a name-fr ee environment . Must every path down the tree end in a block (see Donnellan 1974 ), or could they end in an event that grounds the path in a nonentity? Are there diff erent ways to have the same nothing in mind? Part 2: What kinds of recognition problems can arise? Note that many diff erent people may tell you about the same nonexistent individual. Could their tales be grounded in diff erent events? Can Paderewski cases arise? Can the converse, so-called confusion or misrecognition cases arise? 92 NOTES Th anks to Joseph Almog, Michael O'Rourke, Robin Jeshion, Terry Parsons, and John Carriero, who commented on versions of this paper. Very special thanks to Alex Radulescu and Skef Iterum, who commented on many penultimate versions, and most special thanks to Sam Cumming, whose views, arguments, and examples have been very infl uential in my thinking about this topic. Unfortunately no one seems suffi ciently in agreement with the views stated herein to share the blame for errors. 1. Keith Donnellan's arrival at UCLA was a signifi cant event for me. He arrived just when we lost Carnap (Sept. 14, 1970) and were shortly to lose Montague (Mar. 7, 1971). All the rest of the philosophy of language group had been trained as mathematical logicians and were moving slowly to the consideration of "natural language" from that perspective. But Donnellan, although he had taught symbolic logic at Cornell, had been trained more in the tradition of Witt genstein and in the philosophy of mind. Indeed in some deep way, Donnellan is a mind-fi rst philosopher of language. His arrival created an immediate A N IDE A OF D ONNEL L A N  165  ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 165 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM broadening of perspectives. None of us, and certainly not I, would have begun thinking about what's in the head (and what isn't) in the way that we do now had it not been for his presence. His infl uence was powered by a profound philosophical mind and fl avored with a wonderful, wry sense of humor. Beyond the gift of his intellect, I've been the benefi ciary of a warm and rewarding friendship for over three decades. In the course of that friendship I have been moved by his fi erce rejection of coercion as a mechanism of institutional order. It is interesting that a former Air Force offi cer and Air Force Academy instructor should so fi ercely reject such methods. His repugnance for coercion strongly infl uenced our graduate program and was refl ected in the classroom, where students spoke admiringly of his "intellectual modesty." I share their appreciation for his freedom from arrogance, but I appreciate his intellectual audacity even more. 2. Donnellan was focused on the logically proper names that appeared when Russell's epistemology drove him inward, sometime aft er "On Denoting" (1905) and before "Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description" (1910–11). He should have focused on the Russell of 1903–5, starting with "Points about Denoting" ([1903] 1994). Th is is the period in which Russell fi rst set an epistemological requirement on the use of a genuine proper name, introduced his special epistemological sense of acquaintance , introduced his so-called epistemological principle , and announced the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description . Th is Russell had to be unearthed by Alasdair Urquhart from the Russell archives at McMaster. Th e relevant papers appear in the invaluable Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. 4: Foundations of Logic 1903–05 (1994), a must-have for Russell fans. 3. It is worth noting that no one has claimed that Russell's theory of proper names is not a semantic theory, despite the fact that there are both descriptive and referential uses of the same name and that the use is dependent upon the epistemic state and intentions of the user. Yet Donnellan's seemingly parallel claim about defi nite descriptions has been strongly challenged in Kripke's "Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference" (1977) by an argument claiming that it is not a semantic theory. 4. Originally, in Th e Principles of Mathematics ([1903] 1938), Russell called them denoting concepts . Later on he uses denoting complexes . I follow the later usage, which bett er conveys the idea. At the time these ideas were developed, Russell had not yet "eliminated" defi nite descriptions and the associated denoting complexes. 5. One way to make Russell's claim seem plausible is to think of it in terms of entertaining the proposition expressed by a particular sentence. We need to understand or comprehend what the sentence means. For Russell, this comes down to knowing, by acquaintance, the meaning of each word. Th ese meanings are the constituents of the proposition. So to contemplate the proposition that the spouse of Smith is fortunate, we must be acquainted with Smith (the meaning of "Smith"), the relation spouse of , and the property of being fortunate. If you didn't know the meaning of "spouse" or didn't know who was meant by "Smith," you wouldn't understand the sentence. You could mouth it, but you wouldn't know what you were saying. Th is is my way of making the claim plausible, but what Russell is thinking is bett er stated by saying that the proposition would be inaccessible to one who was not acquainted with all its constituents. 6. Much of this was to change with the advent of the theory of "On Denoting" (1905), which entirely eliminated the denoting complexes (while somehow maintaining knowledge by description) and left all the denoting on the shoulders of the linguistic, defi nite description. 7. Th e ancient proverb "It's a wise child that knows its own father" would have been familiar to Russell's contemporaries. 8. Th is last, though not as elegant as some of Russell's more polished formulations, is undoubtedly a formulation of the epistemological principle. ( 166 ) David Kaplan ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 166 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM You may fi nd talk of constituents of the denotation puzzling. Th ey stem from Russell's early struggles to distinguish what he then called a denoting concept from the denotation. Th is was confusing because Russellian propositions are usually about their own constituents (the proposition that Russell met Smith is an example), but propositions containing denoting concepts are an exception to this rule. So in order to distinguish denoting concepts from their denotation he says things like: Consider the denoting concept the center of mass of the solar system . Th is denoting concept is complex, but the denotation, being a point, is simple. One has constituents; the other doesn't. Th e shift to the terminology denoting complex helped to emphasize this point. 9. Russell's "perfect and complete" knowledge seems to, and was possibly intended to, imply that if one were acquainted with x, one could not become acquainted with x again or in a diff erent way without recognizing that it was x. Th is would foreclose the recognition problem (see below) for objects of acquaintance. 10. Merely being acquainted with Triphena should not be suffi cient for Russell to understand or use sentences containing her name. He needs to associate her with her name. We may be sure that Russell has acquainted himself with the beautiful new physician at the clinic he visits. But he may not know that she is "Triphena." I don't know of a place where Russell takes cognizance of this fact. A caution to scholars: In the manuscript he contrasts the semantics of the name "Triphena" with that of the denoting phrase "Smith's wife" from the point of view of one who is acquainted with her, thus anticipating the George IV puzzle of "On Denoting." 11. I have argued for the philosophical interest of this earlier Russell in Kaplan 2005 , part 2. 12. In "Th e Contingent A Priori and Rigid Designators" Donnellan ( 1979 ) states that Le Verrier did not have de re knowledge of Neptune (by the mere act of naming it). He argues that Le Verrier could not truthfully assert, aft er fi nally traveling to Neptune, "I knew many years ago that this planet was the cause of the perturbations in the orbit of Uranus." Nor could the Neptunians, who call their planet "Enutpen," have truthfully said in the 1850s, "Le Verrier knows that Enutpen is the cause of the perturbations in the orbit of Uranus." He also points out that it does not follow from the fact that a term is a rigid designator that when it enters into a statement of a de dicto propositional att itude, the object of the att itude ascribed must be a singular thought. His counterexample involves mathematical descriptions, which are arguably rigid designators. 13. Donnellan ( 1979 , section 2) does tentatively accept the possibility of reference-fi xing uses of defi nite descriptions to introduce rigidly designating proper names, which he qualifi es by saying that though we may know that a sentence containing such a name expresses a truth, we cannot know the truth that it expresses. Russell makes a strikingly similar claim when he writes, "It would seem that, when we [use a proper name to] make a statement about something only known by description, we oft en intend to make our statement, not in the form involving the description, but about the actual thing described." Russell then shows how to specify, through a description, the proposition we intend to express. We may take the description to be "the result of replacing the denoting concept in the proposition we do express by its denotation." Russell then continues, "Th is proposition, which is described and is known to be true, is what interests us; but we are not acquainted with the proposition itself, and do not know it, though we know it is true" ([1912] 1961). In one of my favorite passages, Russell remarks (perhaps harking back to his purely semantic intuitions) that when the speaker is acquainted with the referent of a proper name, "the proper name has the direct use which it always wishes to have, as simply standing for a certain object, and not for a description of the object" (emphasis added). 14. In particular, those not involving att ributions of mental states such as belief. 15. I take it that Frege's cognitive signifi cance of an utt erance is just the sort of meaning involved in understanding, action, communication, and thought. Frege's account may be fl awed, A N IDE A OF D ONNEL L A N  167  ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 167 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM but his sort of meaning is undoubtedly of the greatest importance in a theory of language. Th e most relevant Frege texts are section 8 of "Begriff sschift " ([1879] 1952), "Über Sinn und Bedeutung" ([1892] 2001 ), and "Th ought" ([1918] 1997). 16. Lett er from Frege to Russell dated November 13, 1904, in Frege 1980 . 17. See Kripke's "Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference" (1977). 18. We could make the situations completely parallel by supposing that I turn away from the man who is holding a martini glass in order to talk to you. Donnellan includes such cases (his king/imposter case is such), and Russell does also (once having met Smith, Russell remains acquainted with him when he is not present). It would be odd to suggest that one could not continue to have an individual in mind once he walks out of view. 19. Perry 1977 urged this point. 20. Donnellan, on the other hand, moves easily in this realm of cognition. He adverts, obliquely, to cases in which there are two ways of having the same object in mind in section 3 of "Th e Contingent A Priori and Rigid Designators" (1979) and gracefully steps around them. 21. Recall that we began with a quote from Donnellan comparing referential use to Russellian genuine names. 22. Th is might be an appropriate place to raise the question whether these arguments show that proper names are not Millian. If Millian means that diff erent names of the same individual never diff er semantically, I do not think that names are Millian, because I take the way the bearer is represented, even if nondescriptive, to belong to semantic theory. However, Mill himself claimed only that names had denotation but no connotation. Connotation was, for Mill, descriptive meaning that determines denotation. Mill believed that predicates and natural-kind terms had such connotations. So if by Millian we mean that names do not have Millian connotations, then I do regard names as Millian since the way the bearer is represented is nondescriptive. As we have learned, it is important to separate how the individual is represented from the mechanism that determines what individual is represented. Th is is a distinction that the notion of a referential use of a defi nite description presupposes. 23. I read Burge as endorsing this insight in the second paragraph of note 2 of "Five Th eses on De Re States and Att itudes" (2009). 24. In this respect, John Perry's ( 1980 ) metaphor of a mental fi le for what I call a way of having in mind may be apt. (Perry att ributes the metaphor to Donnellan. A full history is in Recanati 2010 .) Th e metaphor doesn't work well for relations, which would seem to require that we put the fi les into each other. Skef Iterum calls such mental representations aggregative in contrast to his view of classical Fregean senses, which he terms compositional . 25. Fidelity to text requires me to mention that in section 8 the "ostension" is to a mathematical point, possibly as represented in a diagram. So some explaining has to be done to get from the chalk dot to the deferred referent, the imperceptible mathematical point. Part of the explanation is that Frege just liked to use mathematical examples, and in the present case he wanted to make the point that it requires a mathematical proof to establish that the two modes of determination determine the same thing. A similar point is made by an example in "Über Sinn und Bedeutung" ([ 1892 ] 2001), but without any discussion of the "direct" mode of determination given by "intuition." In the example in "Über Sinn und Bedeutung," both modes of determination are given descriptively. I recognize that I am exercising some imaginative extensions of Frege's brief remark in my interpretation of the section 8 example. But I still think it correct. Tyler Burge insists (in conversation) that nowhere in the Fregean corpus does Frege assert that senses of names must be descriptive. Th e evidence of section 8, the discussion of the fi rst-person pronoun, and perhaps that of indexicals, support the underlying suggestion ( 168 ) David Kaplan ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 168 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM of the possibility of nondescriptive senses. Burge too has taken special note of section 8 in note 16 in. Th e view that a correct version of Frege's theory would include nondescriptive cognitive modes of representation of individuals has, by now, been explicitly endorsed by many, including Burge ( 1977 ), McDowell ( 1984 ), and Evans ( 1982 ). Th ese Fregean nondescriptive modes of determination also provide a textual foundation for the nondescriptive connotations of Ackerman ( 1979 ), although Ackerman's important work is focused on ordinary proper names rather than demonstratives or demonstrative thought. It seems natural to regard Frege's "special and primitive way" in which everyone is presented to himself or herself but to no one else (as is claimed in "Th ought" [(1918) 1997]) as being nondescriptive and thus akin to the perceptual mode of determination in this respect. 26. For brevity, I speak of diff erent ways of being acquainted for ways of having in mind that result from diff erent acquaintance events. 27. Th e more basic idiom seems to be recognize as . One may recognize Venus as the same heavenly body seen on recent mornings without recognizing it as the same heavenly body seen on much earlier evenings. Although a recognition failure is typically taken as a failure to recognize the same individual on two occasions, there is also misrecognition in which one incorrectly takes two individuals to be one. 28. Th is is not to denigrate what I below call worldly objective content as a kind of meaning or semantic value. Worldly objective content is, roughly, the Content of my "Demonstratives" (1989b). I only wish to resist the term "semantics" being hijacked for one kind of content. 29. See Wett stein 1986 . In Kaplan 1989b , section 17, "Epistemological Remarks," I proposed to identify cognitive signifi cance, the way the proposition is presented, with what I called Character. I realized prett y quickly that taking this notion of linguistic meaning to be cognitive signifi cance was a bad idea-it was a piece of irrational exuberance-and Wett stein and others helped to drive the point home. Th e cognitive signifi cance of "now" (the way we have the time in mind) could not be unchanging from moment to moment since we notice the passage of time. (Another argument for diff erentiating cognitive signifi cance from linguistic meaning is given below in the text.) But the more important idea in section 17 was to make a distinction between the objective content of the thought and the way the thought is presented. My semantic notions of Character and Content provided a handy model for the distinction, which led me into a reductive error. But in rereading "Epistemological Remarks," I note that there is very litt le that turns on the details of the model. Th e main thrust is that the relation between the relevant sharable cognitive states and the objective content that is thereby entertained is context-sensitive, in the sense that the objective content is not solely determined by the cognitive state, which requires the addition of contextual information to determine the content. Th e notion of cognitive state in Kaplan 1989b is somewhat diff erent from the one discussed below. 30. Russell to Frege, lett er dated December 12, 1904, in Frege 1980 . Th is correspondence takes place during the period of the Russell I am comparing to Donnellan. Note that he gets Frege's notion of a thought wrong, since for Frege, thoughts are not private but shared, which undercuts Russell's criticism. However, Sam Cumming has made me aware that it is very diffi cult to see what Frege's notion of sharable cognitive content comes to empirically. We should probably focus on what coordinated or synchronized cognitive content comes to empirically. Cumming 2010 makes such a proposal. 31. Wett stein 1986 . Th e view is elaborated in Wett stein 2006 . 32. In Russell's semantics the sentence has the function to represent that state. It is a separate question whether a given person can use the sentence to represent that state. For this, the given person must be acquainted with the three constituents of the state. Otherwise the person would just be mouthing the words without knowing their meaning, without entertaining A N IDE A OF D ONNEL L A N  169  ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 169 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM the proposition. Russell suggests that such a person entertains a diff erent, descriptive proposition, not the one the sentence has the role of representing. 33. Although Russellian propositions are naturally seen as being the truth conditions for sentences, Russell took the notion of such a condition obtaining (that is, the proposition being true or factual) as a primitive idea. It never occurred to him to give a recursive defi nition of this notion, though it should be easy to do so if the notion of a proposition is given by recursion. 34. I am assuming that the cognitive signifi cance of a nondescriptive singular term is a way of having the term's referent in mind, and that the referent is the objective content of both the term and the term's cognitive signifi cance. 35. Th ere are, of course, nondescriptive thoughts with no worldly objective content, just as there are, contra Russell, nondescriptive names with no worldly objective content. Th oughts about phlogiston and hallucinated objects are, presumably, both nondescriptive and with no worldly content. 36. In the formal developments of Kaplan 1989b , what I call Content is not objective content, not objects and complexes thereof, but rather a version of Carnap's intensions as represented in "Modalities and Quantifi cation" (1946) and Meaning and Necessity (1947) and refi ned by Kripke in "Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic" (1963). Such intensions are functions on possible states of the world. Th is allowed me to easily produce an intensional logic . To do Russellian semantics as Russell envisioned it we must think of the intensions as a way of representing objective content. I did so at the time, and it still seems plausible to me. (Carnap, I believe, tended to think of them as representing something closer to cognitive content.) To reconstruct the Russellian objective content we must fi rst represent the structure of complex contents. Th e representation by intensions wipes out structural diff erences between logically equivalent objective contents. Th is reconstruction does not seem diffi cult. Th ere is also a problem in reconstructing the objective content of quantifi ed sentences, if we wish to countenance the possibility of alternate domains of merely possible individuals. Russell's idea of using functions from individuals to objective propositions (propositional functions) will not work unless we alter the contemporary set-theoretical understanding of what a function is. 37. A tracking error - mis recognizing the referent of "yesterday" as a diff erent day, as Rip Van Winkle might do-is a more serious disorder, one that is discussed below. Th ere is a sense of "cognitive signifi cance" in which one might say there has been a change in cognitive signifi cance because I have learned many new facts about the day since yesterday (for example that it was not actually my birthday, as I had thought it was), so I would describe the day quite diff erently today from the way I would have described it yesterday. Th is is not my usage. 38. Given that Frege views language as a representation of thought, it would be odd to end up viewing cognitive content as nothing more than the conventional meaning of language. Perhaps one might say that the cognitive content of an utt erance is the idiolectal meaning of that utt erance. 39. As indicated in the lett er to Frege quoted above and quite explicitly in many other places. 40. See Kaplan 2005 , section 1.1.1 for the development of the two views about the representational role of language. 41. If we start with thought, especially purely descriptive thought of the kind Frege seemed to favor in his later years, I have Russell's brain-in-a-vat worry. Frege needs to say more about this, especially about how the mental predicates get their extensions (or their worldly objective content, if he were to accept that they do). 42. Quine seems to endorse Frege's ontology in. 43. Th ere is a lot more to say here, but it would take us too far afi eld. Suffi ce it to say that a bit of the essence in origin intuition is raising its metaphysical head. ( 170 ) David Kaplan ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 170 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM 44. Note that it is not necessary to "eliminate" defi nite descriptions in order to make it clear that the objective content of a sentence involving a defi nite description contains a complex of properties and relations rather than the denotation of the description. 45. A bett er known philosophical example involving a nonnatural kind concerns the diff erence in cognitive signifi cance between "Greeks" and "Hellenes." 46. Note that in intensional logics, like my "Demonstratives" (1989b), the relation of logical consequence is not defi ned on the intensions (my Content), but rather on the sentences (the representations) themselves. Russell was mistaken in thinking that logical consequence was a relation among his objective propositions. 47. As noted, Frege seemed to accept what may have been a nonpublic sense of the fi rst person. He says that in this use of the fi rst person the sense is "special" and "primitive," though he doesn't actually say it is private. So maybe that formula-"special" and "primitive"- could also work for ostensive modes of determination. 48. Geach's account is sketchy and cryptic (his main topic lies elsewhere), and it is focused on justifying the maintenance of reference during the passage of a name, whereas part of the importance of Donnellan's point is that the phenomenon is independent of the presence of a name. Still, it is the only other place I have seen the idea, and the terminology "mediated acquaintance" seems just right. (A possible problem in Geach's brief discussion is that he seems to require face-to-face pure Russellian acquaintance for passage of a name, which ignores passage through documents by authors with whom one lacks face-to-face acquaintance.) 49. Russell is explicit that lack of acquaintance causes the names of the ancients, in our mouths, to be mere abbreviations of descriptions. See Russell ( 1912 ) 1961 on the name "Julius Caesar." 50. Perhaps not, if the story that is passed down is explicitly fi ctional. But then, what is in mind? 51. Note how closely this case fi ts the paradigmatic scenario (described earlier) for the referential use of "my wife" by Smith. If I am correct that Donnellan's notion of reference to x is founded in the epistemic state he calls having x in mind , then the transmission of having in mind needs to have been at work in the background of his groundbreaking 1970 paper "Proper Names and Identifying Descriptions." Surprisingly, having in mind shows up there only indirectly, by way of note 8, which reads, "Although I do not have space to develop it, my account of proper names in this paper seems to me to make what I called 'referential' defi nite descriptions (as discussed in 'Reference and Defi nite Descriptions' . . . ) a close relative of proper names." "Reference and Defi nite Descriptions" (1966) is, of course, the source of the having in mind notion. 52. For useful taxonomies and critical reviews of the literature on this subject, see Jeshion 2010 ; Recanati 2010 . Both also present interesting theories of their own. Jeshion's paper was instrumental in starting me thinking about this topic again. 53. "Ye shall know them by their fruits." Matt hew 7:16. 54. I use evidence in the manner of a detective searching for evidence of the perpetrator, not in the broader sense in which theorists cite evidence for the truth of their theories. Th e latt er is evidence for truths ; the former evidence of things . 55. I am among those who have held this view. I remember asking Saul Kripke in the early 1970s whether he found it surprising, as I did, that we could simply perform what is essentially a mental transformation, say, by introducing a new proper name and fi xing its referent by the use of a defi nite description, and thus expand the range of what we could say and think from the purely descriptive to the directly referential. As I recall, he agreed that it was surprising and that it could be done. See Kaplan 1989b , 560n76. Jeshion calls this view semantic instrumentalism . A N IDE A OF D ONNEL L A N  171  ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 171 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM 56. See note 13. 57. In Kripke ( 1972 ) 1980, lecture 1. He adds provocative remarks on the subject in lecture 3. 58. Here he is unlike Kripke and unlike me at the time of my conversation with Kripke alluded to in note 55. 59. Donnellan writes, "Strawson, on the other hand, certainly does recognize a referential use of defi nite defi nitions. But what I think he did not see is that a defi nite description may have a quite diff erent role-may be used non-referentially, even as it occurs in one and the same sentence" (1966, paragraph 4). I do not agree that Strawson recognizes what Donnellan calls "a referential use." What is in common between Strawson and Donnellan is only that what is asserted contains, as a constituent, the referent itself rather than a complex corresponding to the descriptive phrase (a Russellian denoting complex ). So in both cases, we get something like what I called "direct reference" in "Demonstratives" (1989b). But the mechanism by which the referent is determined is radically diff erent. For Strawson, this referent is completely determined by the Russellian denotation of the descriptive phrase (or, when indexicals are involved, by what he calls a use of the descriptive phrase). For Donnellan, the referent is determined by what the speaker has in mind and is independent of the denotation of the descriptive phrase. It is for this reason that I think Russell, and not Strawson, is a natural counterpart to Donnellan. 60. In a lecture at UCLA in 2005, Kripke seemed to indicate that in Naming and Necessity he had assumed some such constraints on the descriptions that could be used to fi x the reference for the introduction of a proper name. But I may have misunderstood him. 61. In the sense of Kaplan 1968 . Th ere are other cases of more proximal future individuals that I am somewhat uncertain about. Given an actual knock-down lectern kit, containing instructions for assembly (form) and all the materials (matt er), why should we not be able to have in mind the lectern we are about to assemble? And if we procrastinate until the need is past, will we have in mind the unique, merely possible lectern that would have been assembled? I think of such examples as pregnancy cases . Another forward-looking case occurs when we view the murder victim's body. Th e body is evidence of the murderer's causal agency, but it also has its own causal agency. It foreshadows the coroner who will perform the autopsy. 62. Th e question In which cases does the right sort of relation hold between the individual and the thinker to enable having in mind ? seems to be a knowledge of things problem parallel to the Gett ier problem about the route of acquisition for knowledge of truths (but without the consensus of intuitions about specifi c cases that the Gett ier problem has generated). 63. See Kaplan 1989a , section 4, especially the discussion of the Instrumental Th esis . 64. Robin Jeshion has suggested in discussion that some animal behaviors may be understood as telling the herd about a predator. Th is slightly reduces my comparative advantage over the springbok. 65. I am told that there are languages of the latt er kind. 66. Th e notion of a discourse referent was introduced by Kartt unen in his 1969 dissertation and fi rst appeared in print in his 1976 paper "Discourse Referents." Th ere are well-known developments by Hans Kamp ( 1981 ) and Irena Heim ( 1982 , 1983). For a recent take on the matt er, and one that very much infl uenced my own thinking, see "Discourse Content" by Sam Cumming ( 2009 ). 67. Here we must imagine a youthful, prim Russell. 68. Note that Russell cannot simply jump from one description to another and maintain the unity of the subject he is being told about. Nor can he anchor the descriptions in the name "Triphena" since, according to his doctrines, the name only again abbreviates the description "Smith's wife." 69. See Burge 1993 . Burge uses "testimony," presumably to emphasize solemnity and sincerity; I add "hearsay" to emphasize iteration. I believe that in a courtroom, facts told to a ( 172 ) David Kaplan ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 172 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM testifi er but not witnessed directly are counted as hearsay and not accepted as testimony. But it is exactly this iterative possibility that I want to emphasize (and possibly Burge too). So, but for its overtones of untrustworthiness, I would prefer to use just "hearsay." 70. I recall Donnellan talking about an atypical case in which a mailman reading from a package label asks, "Does George Kaplan live at this address?" Donnellan claimed that though the name is used, the mailman does not know what he is asking. Russell poses the same concern. 71. Even if inessential for having in mind , names have many advantages over descriptions used referentially or other ways to refer. Th ey are public, relatively stable in appearance, neutral, appropriate for most occasions, and almost perfectly individuating (in that such questions as "Which Ignacy Jan Paderewski are you referring to?" don't actually arise very oft en). Th ese virtues make them valuable for helping us to coordinate on whether we have the same individual in mind. It seems likely that if we banned names, certain defi nite descriptions used referentially would be standardized. Th ey would, in the words of Ruth Marcus, "grow capitals" (as did "the Holy Roman Empire") and take over the functions of names. In claiming that names are inessential, I was addressing only Donnellan's question: What puts the ultimate name user in the requisite epistemic position to refer to the name bearer? 72. Th e referential use of in defi nite descriptions (see below) might also have fi gured in. 73. Donnellan's king/imposter case may be a told about case since we don't know whether the speaker had observed the imposter or whether he had merely been told about him on good authority (for example, by the true heir to the throne). 74. A linguist might regard it as an anaphoric use, though such uses don't usually countenance errors. In any case, the ability to refer anaphorically is certainly compatible with having in mind and, from some points of view, represents a structure of record keeping that is very much like having in mind . I don't claim that all anaphoric uses of a pronoun express a way of having in mind . An anaphor tied to what I call a "blind" defi nite or indefi nite description (see below) would not express a way of having in mind because such descriptions do not transmit having in mind . 75. Few, other than those (of whom Frege sometimes seems to be one) who would deny the existence of singular thought altogether 76. Even if a campaign manager introduced his candidate in the primaries this way, I would not take the use to be referential, in Donnellan's sense. Rather I would take the introduction as a kind of identity claim: that Ortcutt will be the next Republican nominee for president (roughly, that Ortcutt will win the nomination). 77. Th ere seems no proper having in mind transmission path (see below) back to the individual under this description. 78. But this may turn out to be characteristic of all uses where the reason for the use does not require a literal reading. Robin Jeshion suggests, "Stop at the next gas station with a bathroom," a blind description by my lights, but who cares if it is a gas station or an ethanol station? 79. I'm not certain I have correctly characterized the notion I am trying to articulate. Originally I thought of blind descriptions as descriptions that the speaker just dreamed up , as if one were merely playing with syntactical possibilities. But of course there is usually a good reason for the usage. 80. Note that the blind case is future-directed. 81. Th is is a speculation. 82. Th e closest he comes may be in "Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description" ([1912] 1961), where he states that "there are various stages of removal from acquaintance." 83. Donnellan takes the use of "the murderer" by one who has viewed or been told about the victim as a paradigm of his att ributive use, which he does not distinguish from a blind use. A N IDE A OF D ONNEL L A N  173  ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 173 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM Insofar as we share Donnellan's way of hearing things (and he certainly has an acute ear), it is a mark against the Causal Russellians, who would allow this use to be referential. Russell's well-known treatment of "the author of Waverly " as an att ributive use demonstrates that he too was not a Causal Russellian (which we knew already). Th e Causal Russellians, of which there are currently many, must take the position that George IV had Sir Walter in mind in two diff erent ways : through acquaintance and as the authorial cause of the known novel Waverly . Since many of them are also direct reference theorists, Russell's puzzle should pose the same challenge when the description is given secondary scope as when the description is given primary scope (the problem discussed earlier). 84. I must admit that my empirical research is slim, derived from newspapers and introspection. In newspaper accounts, singular defi nite descriptions oft en appear as titles, "the Speaker of the House," for example. I don't count these as specimens of the usage under study, but if I did, they would count in my favor. 85. I don't have a view as to which use of indefi nites is preponderant. Cumming 2011 seems to take the position that the most felicitous use is referential. Referential uses of indefi nites seem a natural and easy way to tell someone about an individual. Th us they are natural vehicles for the transmission of having in mind . 86. She may be so uninterested in what I say that she hardly takes note of the man and quickly puts him out of her mind. For a way of having in mind to have staying power, or perhaps even to take in the fi rst place, it must be of interest. Th is is a point emphasized by Jeshion. 87. It is also possible that my wife mis recognized the person I was telling her about, and Janet's husband is Frank Ortcutt , not Bernard J. Th e other recognition errors that have been discussed- failures to recognize-aff ect the ways of having in mind and may disrupt interpersonal coordination and understanding. Errors of mis recognition are much more serious. Th ey disrupt reference itself. How should we describe such a communicative disorder ? As a failure to transmit having in mind , or as a mis transmission of having in mind ? Does she not have Bernard J. in mind at all, or does she have two diff erent individuals in mind in the same way ? Note that exactly the same thing can happen when one learns a name. One may misrecognize the individual whose name one is learning and (mis)assimilate that individual to an already known individual. Th e result would be that one uses the name to refer to the "wrong" person. Th is may be an idiosyncratic error that washes out. But there is a form of this disorder that can become widespread, so widespread that this use overwhelms the "correct" use (namely, the one that follows the path back to the individual named). Th is occurs when one takes it that a name already in one's lexicon refers to an individual with whom one is not only acquainted but regularly interacting. In these cases, users are oft en inclined to say, "Th is may not be the way you use NAME, but it is what I call NAME. Th at's how I use NAME." Misrecognition plus interaction trumps history. Th is, I believe, is the way that "Madagascar" changed its referent and that Native Americans became Indians. 88. If they were descriptive, we would not seek the referent by following the path of communication. Instead we would search for a best-fi t individual. 89. Alex Radulescu points out that we may retain both an earlier and a later way of having the same individual in mind even aft er the later presentation of the individual is recognized. When a long lost acquaintance returns, dramatically changed, he may be recognized as the person you once knew without extinguishing either the new or the old persona as separate ways of having him in mind. Rather than assimilating one to the other, one accepts an identity between them. 90. Th is seems to be the thrust of Kripke's "A Puzzle about Belief " (1979). But these matt ers are subtle. Because they are not the central thrust of this paper I will not continue to pursue the argument. 91. Even in the name-free environment that I have imagined, one might echo Donnellan's apt remark that it is the omniscient observer of history (knowing the correct description from ( 174 ) David Kaplan ALMOG-Chapter 08-Revised Proof 174 November 29, 2011 6:36 PM above) who holds the answers to questions about the realities of reference (including cases of communicative disorders). 92. 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