Superplurality in thought

We have, plausibly, singular thoughts about objects: thoughts about particular objects. It also seems plausible that we have plural thoughts about objects. For example, my thought that those are differently sized, while attending to the phone and the one euro coin on my desk, is an example. If one likes the above examples given in the previ- ous, then one can just take the thoughts they express to be examples of superplural thoughts.

But those examples are undoubtedly somewhat hard to analyse: they are suffi- ciently recherché that I wouldn’t blame the reader if she lacked strong feelings one

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way or another about them. So I’d like to present another argument in favour of the existence of superplural reference in thought, which turns on our capacity to refer to something despite being mistaken about it.

In particular, imagine the following scenario. We are faced with what looks like an alien: a mess of tentacles and such like. We think: ugh, that’s gross, and go about our daily business. In fact, it’stwocreatures. My claim is that in such a scenario, one has plurally referred, even though one doesn’t know that one has.

Here’s the argument. It’s widely held that knowing the sortal under which an object falls isn’t necessary for being able to think about that object. That would place too many constraints on typical thinkers. It would be unfair, for example, to say that a child (or indeed an uninformed adult) can’t think thoughts about the venus flytrap in their garden because they’re uncertain whether it’s a plant or a somewhat stationary animal, or perhaps a postmodern sculpture.

So one doesn’t need to know a sortal. But knowing the sortal is to know the criterion for sameness and difference of two purportedly different objects. So it’s not necessary to know that criterion for reference. But now the only reason I can think for saying that one hasn’t managed plurally to refer, given the fact that one is faced with several things, is because one is mistaken about the number. But to be mistaken about the number is to be mistaken about the criterion of identity and difference of the objects before one. But that, I’ve just suggested, is not a mistake which makes any difference to one’s referential capacities. So the thing to say is one has managed to plurally refer, despite one’s thinking one is singularly referring, just as it’s possible to refer to a plant despite thinking it’s an animal.

But if this is so, then a very minor modification of the case will get us to one that involves superplural reference. One day, another similar looking mess of tentacles and such comes by, and comes to be located by the first mess. You perceptually judge that they’re of unequal heights, thinking that there’s two thing before you. In fact, there are four. It strikes me that if you’re happy to say in the original case one has unbeknown plural reference, so in this one it should be unbeknown superplural reference. This is because in the first case, there is one case of unbeknown plural reference going on, but in the second, there is two cases.

One could also argue for this, although I grant it’s controversial, from truth condi- tions. For one could argue that one can only get the right truth conditions provided the predicate has a superplural interpretation. In particular, it can’t have a distribu- tive reading: it’s nonsense to say of each creature that it’s unequal height. It also can’t be a collective plural predication: it’s false, plausibly, that the whole group are of un- equal heights, since each pair, which one incorrectly thinks of as a single creature, is the same height. It seems that it should be a collective plural predication: one which takes several plurals as argument and holds of them, if it holds, together.

How might one reply to this? Here’s one thought. One might think that what one should do is attribute to a speaker grasp of a non-standard concept, roughly like team. Let’s call the actual creatures (of whom there are four in the example we are considering)squirms. And let’s introduce the conceptsquirmywith the following stip- ulation: something is a squirmy iff it is two closely located squirms. We then attribute to the speaker the concept of squirmies, rather than squirms. In the original case, her judgement would be that that squirmy is gross; in the latter, that those squirmies are of unequal height. Plausibly these are both true judgements.

I think the reply to this is just a variation on an externalist theme we encountered in chapter three. People before the existence of chemistry believed that water is H20, because water is H20, and they believed water is water. What they referred to didn’t

change when they became chemically enlightened. Arthritic Alf had false beliefs about arthritis, but he still picked out arthritis. When he comes to be corrected, he doesn’t acquire a new concept. In the same way, once our thinker learns that there are two things before her, and thus that she’s plurally referring, the content of her belief doesn’t change. In each case, the content of our belief is just what’s there. If we have to attribute to her the false belief that what is before her is one thing, then so be it: it is a false belief. We shouldn’t change that by giving her deviant concepts. In short, I propose number externalism, in addition to my earlier posit of metaphysical externalism. And again, the underlying justification for this is just the same: that’s how metasemantics works.