Mental files, blown up by indexed files

Abstract

Our paper discusses Recanati’s application of the mental files apparatus to reports of beliefs and other attitudes. While mental files appear in Recanati’s work on belief-reports early on (e.g. Recanati 1993), Recanati's latest book introduces the concept of indexed files (a.k.a. vicarious files) and puts it to work to explain how we can report other people's attitudes and to account for opacity phenomena. Our goal is twofold: we shall show that the approach in Recanati 2012 departs significantly from his earlier proposals (1993, 2000) as well as from the very spirit of truth-conditional pragmatics (2010), and we shall argue that the indexed files approach, qua an attempt to provide a semantics for beliefreports, is untenable.