Octavian A. Busuioc (Queen's University, Kingston ON Canada)
“Thinking of Particulars in a Conceptual World”
A notion of particulars permeates much philosophy of language and philosophy of mind in both recent and past literature. The following paper explores this notion of particulars as it is related to a distinction between conceptual and nonconceptual thought content. In the literature, this relation is discussed in terms of a distinction between de re thought (thought of particulars) and de dicto thought (general thought). I focus on this distinction as it is related to two different interpretations of Fregean sense: one that treats sense as descriptive and the other that recognizes a distinction between modes of presentation and senses and thus recognizes that sense is not descriptive in character. I argue that the descriptive interpretation of Frege leads one to postulate nonconceptual content, a position which I argue is untenable. I then propose that the nondescriptive interpretation of sense provides an escape from an uncomfortable oscillation between a view that treads closely on idealism because it leaves no room for particulars, and a view that is realist in character but leaves us with an odd notion of nonconceptual mental content.