Lowe claims that having knowledge of the essence of an object is a precondition for thinking about it. Lowe supports this claim with roughly the following argument: you cannot think about something unless you know what you are thinking about; and to know what it is that you are thinking about just is to know its essence. I will argue that this line of reasoning fails because of an equivocation in the expression ‘what a thing is’ (and similar ones), which can be used to indicate the essence of the thing but also, more commonly, some description of that thing which is useful in the context to identify it. I will then consider some possible variations of the argument, both in its premises and in its conclusion, and I will argue that they either fail to produce a sound argument or they weaken the conclusion too much to preserve the philosophical interest of the result.

中文翻译：

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思考某事是否需要本质知识？

Lowe 声称了解一个对象的本质是思考它的先决条件。Lowe 大致通过以下论点支持这一说法：除非你知道自己在想什么，否则你无法思考；知道你在想什么就是知道它的本质。我会争辩说，这种推理方式之所以失败，是因为“事物是什么”（以及类似的事物）这个表达方式含糊不清，它可以用来表明事物的本质，但更常见的是，对事物的一些描述这在上下文中很有用，可以识别它。然后我将考虑论证的一些可能变化，包括前提和结论，