Are there epistemic conditions necessary for demonstrative thought?

Does singular thought have an epistemic essence?

“…What we scrutinise are not epistemic subjects but channels of rationally entitled belief formation. And this is why-as we have just seen-R&R can accommodate the example that Barkasi (2021) argues cannot be accommodated by epistemic theories of singular thought. Having identified such a channel, we simply ask: does it provide rational entitlement for the subject to form beliefs (with respect to each of the situationally relevant <Φ>) which, so-formed, would be true (unless something intervened for which the subject could not be rationally blamed for failing to notice)?…”

“…Insofar as it does, the response given to Barkasi's (2021) case ( §5) illustrates that the epistemic character of the explanation is very thin indeed, and so any distinctively epistemic explanation of how aboutness-fixing works will be correspondingly thin. The sleeping subject essentially receives a perceptual signal attributing F-ness and this gives the subject pro tanto rational entitlement to form a corresponding belief.…”

“…To say of perceptual attention that it enables singular thought because it possesses this virtue is not obviously more illuminating than to say that it is an informational channel (an 'epistemically rewarding link' (Recanati 2012: 35)) with some caveats about rationality to guard against non-rewarding features of otherwise good cases (such as Case 1). This is why it can accommodate Barkasi's (2021) purportedly anti-epistemic stimulus-incorporating dream case.…”

“…In this paper, I will first provide an approachable summary of the framework presented in Dickie's (2015) rich, insightful, and difficult book ( §2), before arguing that the way it officially proposes implementing its broadly epistemic picture of aboutness has bad consequences for either rationality or the scope of singular thought ( §3). After considering two unsuccessful replies ( §4), I offer a precisification of Dickie's framework in §5 and also suggest that it can circumvent an objection presented in Barkasi (2021). Yet I will conclude that, under all this careful examination, it is not clear that Dickie's framework can deliver on one of its principal ambitions: to elucidate 3 what it is, in epistemic terms, about the aboutness-fixing relations we know and love that makes them aboutness-fixing.…”

“…Once we have come this far, I think we can see that the framework is less stringently 'epistemic' than it is sometimes taken as being. Barkasi (2021) criticises Dickie's (2015) view on the basis of the epistemic character of its requirements on singular thought. According to Barkasi, it does not matter if a perceptual link is generally reliable or justification-affording.…”