This is a post by Valentine Simpson (University of Valencia).
You would be blameless for believing that a thought is a shareable thing. Indeed, it seems that subjects do a lot of thinking together, that they regularly exchange thoughts in communicating with each other, and that much (if not all) of what we accomplish as a society owes to our ability to pass information on to one another, in the form of my getting you to think that which I also think. Plausibly, this capacity is underpinned by our further sharing of a public language, with words and meanings that are also common to all.
Philosophical orthodoxy has long had it that such sharing is possible and in fact widespread. This orthodoxy may be traced as far back as John Locke, who established a firm connection between uses of words and the conveying of thought, and is well-known to have been championed by Gottlob Frege, who famously defended that senses, or the particular way which our thoughts capture the objects they are about, were a very public thing and not private ideas in the mind of every individual. But orthodoxy can in fact be blamed for a certain naïveté. Upon closer inspection, it may turn out that thoughts are a fickle thing, individuated in endlessly fine-grained ways which may preclude the situation of two subjects ever sharing the exact same thought.
Sharing Thoughts gives voice to thinkers on both sides of the spectrum (and all spaces between). From the pages of this volume multiple dialogues emerge around the nature of individual thought, intersubjective thought, and communication as the stage in which these two meet (if, indeed, they do). The core dialogue of the volume is that between two rival positions in the account of rationality and communication: firstly, Fregeanism, typically (although not always) representing the orthodox position on the possibility of thought sharing; and secondly, Relationism, a recent family of views inspired by the work of Kit Fine and which propose dealing with age-old philosophical puzzles of rationality and meaning in a novel way; (and with the occasional appearance of a Russellian third!).
At the core of both views is an interest in accounting for coordination, the situation where thoughts or expressions are represented as being about the same, and are not merely accidentally or unknowingly so. This is most clearly the case when a subject cannot both believe and disbelieve, of some object, that they have some property F (there is no ignorance of identity), as forbidden by Frege’s famous constraint. Where the Fregean sees matches in the (intrinsic) representational features of subjects’ thoughts as explanatory of coordination, i.e. senses or modes of presentation, the Relationist demands that these thoughts hold certain relations between them (regardless of whether their fine-grained contents are strictly the same). Any account of coordination must forcibly explain its presence and its absence. Problem cases such as Kripke’s famous (anti-Fregean) Paderewski case are of special interest, and contributors to Sharing Thoughts are happy to discuss them at length.
The chapters by Simon Prosser, Rachel Goodman, and Laura and François Schroeter all contain attacks aimed at the Fregean’s sense matching criteria. The first then presents an alternative Relationist account, especially focusing on how it can explain the action-guiding nature of egocentric (indexical) thoughts. Goodman, instead, opts for a newer version of the well-know Russellian position, after challenging, not only Fregeanism, but Relationism too. Andrea Onofri joins Goodman in defending a revamped Russellian account (in his case paired with information theoretical resources). The Schroeters, in turn, develop a version of Relationism they call the connectedness model, based on chains of uses of expressions conforming wide speaker traditions. François Recanati, on his part, launches a (pessimistic) exploration into the Fregean’s possibilities for a sense-based account of phenomena beyond the “Fregean boundary”, such as diachronic episodes of thought, or communication between speakers. Manuel García-Carpintero’s chapter serves as the Fregean’s counter to many of these attacks. While in keeping with the Fregean spirit, his presuppositions-based view departs from the aforementioned orthodoxy in allowing thoughts to vary somewhat while still being coordinated. The same conclusion is reached from the other end by Aidan Gray, who puts forward a Relationist model that allows for intransitive coordination relations, which in turn entails that no such same-thinking is possible, only “same-ish” thinking.
Another well-known spectrum concerns the contention between semantic externalists and internalists. Here, Joey Pollock and Sarah Sawyer engage in a direct dialogue across chapters in an attempt to one up each other’s accounts of disagreement, a form of radical holism defended by the first, and an externalist view of shared concepts by the second.
Isolated discussions in the volume range from explorations about music’s power to communicate emotional states (Christopher Peacocke), to the effects of psychological frames on the rationality of a subject’s preferences (José Luis Bermúdez), the question of whether communication is essentially a knowledge-transmitting activity or whether it can involve significant luck (Imogen Dickie), and the activity proper of collective or joint thinking, beyond the sharing of individual thoughts (Guy Longworth).
As with any substantial philosophical debate, it seems blame is easy to come by. The long standing tradition of taking communication, and human coordination more generally to rest on a simple model of thought sharing has its faults, as chapters in the second part of the volume highlight. But it is not clear that revision is absolutely necessary, either. Chances are that either the Fregean, the Russellian, or the Relationist herself can concoct a strategy that allows for thought sharing in a strong sense. As the discussion in the book highlights, there is still much to be said on whether we share thoughts, in the strictest sense, or we coordinate them in a looser way, or whether it is a thought we both share, instead of a relevantly similar pair of individual, slightly differing ones. Sharing Thoughts is, if anything, a good place to wonder.
You can find more information about the book and its authors here.
Valentine Simpson is a PhD candidate with the Valencia Philosophy Lab (University of Valencia). His research interests lie in the philosophy of language, with an emphasis on the conditions for shared meaning and successful communication.
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