Comments on François Recanati’s Men- tal Files: Doubts about Indexicality

François Recanati has written a valuable and timely book. The sug-gestion that thought involves the deployment of ‘mental files ’ has been around for some decades, and is becoming increasingly popu-lar, but until now there has been no sustained examination of the idea. Recanati has developed a detailed theory of mental files, and future treatments will take his book as their starting point. I am very much in favour of the general lines of Recanati’s ap-proach. In particular, I fully support his policy of dealing with Frege cases, not by introducing some extra semantic level additional to ref-erential value, but simply by appealing to the possibility that different vehicles of thought can be used to refer to the same entity. Recanati shows convincingly that a multiplication of descriptive senses or ex-tra ‘intensions ’ is quite unnecessary to deal with Frege cases. All we need is the idea that distinct mental files can refer to a single entity. I also fully support Recanati’s decision to focus on the individual rather than the community. Recanati’s mental files are possessed by individuals, and he offers no general account of when different in-dividuals might be said to ‘grasp the same concept’. In this respect his book contrasts with Mark Sainsbury and Michael Tye’s recent Seven Puzzles of Thought (Oxford University Press 2012), which is in many respects consistent with Recanati’s approach, but which seeks primarily to articulate a notion of a public concept rather than that of an individual’s mental file. I myself am very doubtful that any one notion can do justice both to the public and individual dimensions of thought; indeed I remain to be convinced that there is any real work for the idea of a public concept, once we have a good account of in-dividual mental files and the use of words to communicate them. S