The problem for Russell’s account is that it is too austere to do all the
work that we need a notion of thought to perform. In particular, we surely
think that there can be manydiVerentthoughts about the singer Pavarotti
and the property of fatness. Whereas on Russell’s account there is only one
(not involving any other elements, such as negation – Russell of course
allows that the thought ‘Pavarotti isnotfat’ is diVerent). Thus the thoughts
‘Pavarotti is fat’ and ‘Thatman is fat’ – where thethatis a demonstrative
element, picking out a particular person seen on TV or on the stage – are
surely diVerent. For if I do not know what Pavarotti looks like, I might
believe the one to be false while believing the other to be true. And so those
thoughts would guide my behaviour diVerently too – I would say ‘No’ in
response to a question about theWrst, but would say ‘Yes’ in answer to the
same question about the second. Yet they both involve the very same
Russellian proposition: both ascribe the property of being fat to the very
same man.
Evans and McDowell believe that singular thoughts are individuated, in
part, by the objects they concern. But they allow that thoughts may also
diVer by diVering in the way in which one and the same object is presented.
(It is a consequence of this view that in the absence of an appropriate
individual, there is no singular thought there to be had. So someone who is
merely hallucinating the presence of an individual is incapable of thinking
any singular thought about that – putative – thing. We shall return to this
consequence below.) On this account, then, although a singular thought
contains two diVerent aspects (the object in the world, and its mode of
presentation), these are not supposed to be fully separable. In particular,
there is supposed to be no possibility of the singular mode of presentation
either existing, or being characterisable, independently of the object
presented.
In what follows, we shall focus on the case of singular thought in
particular, for two reasons. TheWrst is that all the issues which concern us
arise here in their sharpest relief. Our main conclusions should generalise
from this relatively simple case to thought about both natural and non-
natural kinds. The second is that the externalist intuitions stimulated by
Twin Earth thought-experiments are usually felt most strongly in the case
of natural kinds like water. Resisting those intuitions is liable to involve
arguments sketching elaborate scenarios – transportation between Earth
and Twin Earth, migrant interplanetary plumbers who may or may not
suVer from amnesia, a Twix Earth where the liquid in the Atlantic is XYZ
while that in the PaciWcisH 2 O, and such like. Diverse variations on the
original thought-experiment may dilute the strength of the intuitions, but
usually allow some way out for the externalist who stubbornly clings to
Putnam’s model of the indexical introduction of natural kind concepts,
Arguments for wide content 135