Are mental files constitutive of singular thought?

We defend the liberal view that mental files always generate singular thoughts. We begin with the definition of singular thought as thoughts directly about objects. This grounds the view that mental files are constitutive of singular thought, since mental files are understood to be a cognitive mechanism for representing objects. We adopt the substance-attribute definition of the object-property distinction which defines objects are bearers of properties. We observe that this implies that properties also exist as objects, instantiating higher-order properties. We draw the conclusion that thoughts about properties also count as thoughts about objects thus qualifying as singular thoughts. This implies that general thoughts are a subset of singular thoughts. This, together with the liberal view we defend, implies that all thoughts are achieved by tokening of mental files. We defend this conclusion against the criticism that it stretches the concept of mental file to the point of being too wide to be meaningful, by maintaining that there is still an informative distinction to be made between thoughts that represent properties as entries in a file and thoughts that represent properties with files of their own. We suggest that the fact that the latter case is far less common accounts for the strong intuition that only the former are “genuine” cases of mental files. We conclude that the liberal view is tenable, but requires a revised conception of singular thought, which only partially satisfies the desiderata traditionally associated with singular thought.