According to critics of the Strawsonian standard, linking folders allows information to circulate between them, rather than remaining confined within each folder. It therefore produces the same result as merging, but has the advantage of being a reversible operation. Another advantage of linking over merging is that the possession of two distinct (linked) folders makes it easier to espouse the perspective of, and communicate with, other non-identity-conscious subjects. I can teach someone that Hesperus (the so-called evening star) is none other than Phosphorus (the so-called morning star), since it is in fact the planet Venus. How could I do this if I myself no longer had two separate files ? More generally, how could I, independently of any attempt at communication, represent the subject's perspective in a Fegean case and attribute to him, for example, the belief that Hesperus is visible in the evening whereas Phosphorus is not, if I no longer had two distinct mental files, the HESPERUS file and the PHOSPHORUS file ?
To take this objection into account, we need to enrich the theory with a new distinction between two types of mental folders : the subject's own mental folders, through which he represents external reality (the world) and the entities that are part of it ; and the mental folders that the subject deploys by proxy and which serve to represent not, or not directly, reality, but the way in which other subjects represent reality, or more precisely, reality as seen by these other subjects. These mental files are " indexed " to the other subjects from whom they are borrowed, and whose point of view they reflect or simulate.
