Jean-marc pizano C. Smart who, it seems to me, got more of this right than he is these days given credit for: “This account of secondary qualities explains their unimportance in physics.For obviously the discriminations . . . made by a very complex neurophysiological mechanism are hardly likely to correspond to simple and nonarbitrary distinctions innature” (1991: 172). My point is: this is true not just of colours, but of doorknobs too.
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30
So, then, which appearance properties are sensory properties? Here’s a line that one might consider: £ is a sensory property only if it is possible to have an experience of which £-ness is the intentional object (e.g. an experience (as) of red) even though one hasn’t got the concept £ Here the test of having the concept £ would be something like beingable to think thoughts whose truth conditions include … £ … (e.g. thoughts like that’s red). I think this must be the notion of ‘sensory property’ that underlies the Empiricistidea that RED and the like are learned ‘by abstraction’ from experience, a doctrine which presupposes that a mind that lacks RED can none the less have experiences (as) ofredness. By this test, DOORKNOB is presumably not a sensory concept since, though it is perfectly possible to have an experience (as) of doorknobs, I suppose only a mindthat has the concept DOORKNOB can do so.‘But how could one have an experience (as) of red if one hasn’t got the concept RED?’ It‘s easy: in the case of redness, but notof doorknobhood, one is equipped with sensory organs which produce such experiences when they are appropriately stimulated. Redness can be sensed, whereas the perceptualdetection of doorknobhood is always inferential. Just as sensible psychologists have always supposed.
31
The present discussion parallels what I regard as a very deep passage in Schiffer 1987 about being a dog. Schiffer takes for granted that ‘dog’ doesn’t name a species, and (hence?) that dogs as such don’t have a hidden essence. His conclusion is that there just isn’t (except pleonastically) any such property as being a dog My diagnosis is thatthere is too, but it’s mind-dependent.
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32
Reminder: ‘the X stereotype’ is rigid. See n. 12 above.
33
Except in the (presumably never encountered) case where all the X s are stereotypic. In that case, there’s a dead heat.
34
In principle, they are also epistemically independent in both directions. As things are now, we find out about the stereotype by doing tests on subjects who are independentlyidentified as having the corresponding concept. But I assume that if we knew enough about the mind/brain, we could predict a concept from its stereotype and vice versa. Ineffect, given the infinite set of actual and possible doorknobs, we could predict the stereotype from which our sorts of minds would generalize to it; and given the doorknobstereotype, we could predict the set of actual and possible objects which our kinds of minds would take to instantiate doorknobhood.
35
Compare Jackendoff: “Look at the representations of, say, generative phonology… It is strange to say that English speakers know the proposition, true in the world independent of speakers [sic ], that syllable-initial voiceless consonants aspirate before stress … In generative phonology . . . this rule of aspiration is regarded as a principle of internalcomputation, not a fact about the world. Such semantical concepts as implication, confirmation, and logical consequence seem curiously irrelevant” (1992: 29). Note that,though they are confounded in his text, the contrast that Jackendoff is insisting on isn’t between propositions and rules/principles of computation; it’s between phenomena of thekind that generative phonology studies and facts about the world. But that ‘p’ is aspirated in ‘Patrick’ is a fact about the world. That is to say: it’s a fact. And of course the usuallogico-semantical concepts apply. That ‘p’ is aspirated in ‘Patrick’ is what makes the claim that ‘p’ is aspirated in ‘Patrick’ true; since ‘p’ is aspirated in ‘Patrick’, something in‘Patrick’ is aspirated . . . and so forth.
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36
In just this spirit, Keith Campbell remarks about colours that if they are “integrated reflectances across three overlapping segments clustered in the middle of the total electromagnetic spectrum, then they are, from the inanimate point of view, such highly arbitrary and idiosyncratic properties that it is no wonder the particular colors we arefamiliar with are manifest only in transactions with humans, rhesus monkeys, and machines especially built to replicate just their particular mode of sensitivity to photons”(1990: 572—3). (The force of this observation is all the greater if, as seems likely, even the reflectance theory underestimates the complexity of colour psychophysics.)See alsoJ. J.Jean-marc pizano
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19
Just as it’s possible to dissociate the idea that concepts are complex from the claim that meaning-constitutive inferences are necessary, so too it’s possible to dissociate the idea that concepts are constituted by their roles in inferences from the claim that they are complex. See Appendix 5A.
20
More precisely, only with respect to conceptualy necessary inferences. (Notice that neither nomological nor metaphysical necessity will do; there might be laws about brown cows per se, and (who knows?) brown cows might have a proprietary hidden essence.) I don’t know what a Classical IRS theorist should say if it turns out that conceptuallynecessary inferences aren’t ipso facto definitional or vice versa. That, however, is his problem, not mine.
21
They aren’t the only ones, of course. For example, Keil remarks that “Theories . . . make it impossible … to talk about the construction of concepts solely on the basis ofprobabilistic distributions of properties in the world” (1987: 196). But that’s true only on the assumption that theories somehow constitute the concepts they contain. DittoKeil’s remark that “future work on the nature of concepts . . . must focus on the sorts of theories that emerge in children and how these theories come to influence thestructure of the concepts that they embrace” (ibid.).
22
There are exceptions. Susan Carey thinks that the individuation of concepts must be relativized to the theories they occur in, but that only the basic ‘ontological’commitments of a theory are content constitutive. (However, see Carey 1985: 168: “I assume that there is a continuum of degrees of conceptual differences, at the extremeend of which are concepts embedded in incommensurable conceptual systems.”) It’s left open how basic ontological claims are to be distinguished from commitments ofother kinds, and Carey is quite aware that problems about drawing this distinction are depressingly like the analytic/synthetic problems. But in so far as Carey has an accountof content individuation on offer, it does seem to be some version of the Classical theory.
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23
This point is related, but not identical, to the familiar worry about whether implicit definition can effect a ‘qualitative change’ in a theory’s expressive power: the worry thatdefinitions (implicit or otherwise) can only introduce concepts whose contents are already expressible by the host theory. (For discussion, see Fodor 1975.) It looks to methat implicit definition is specially problematic for meaning holists even if it’s granted that an implicit definition can (somehow) extend the host theory’s expressive power.
24
I don’t particularly mean to pick on Gopnik; the cognitive science literature is full of examples of the mistake that I’m trying to draw attention to. What’s unusual aboutGopnik’s treatment is just that it’s clear enough for one to see what the problem is.
25
As usual, it’s essential to keep in mind that when a de dicto intentional explanation attributes to an agent knowledge (rules, etc.), it thereby credits the agent with the conceptsinvolved in formulating the knowledge, and thus incurs the burden of saying what concepts they are. See the ‘methodological digression’ in Chapter 2.
26
This chapter reconsiders some issues about the nativistic commitments of RTMs that I first raised in Fodor 1975 and then discussed extensively in 1981^. Casual familiaritywith the latter paper is recommended as a prolegomenon to this discussion.I’m especially indebted to Andrew Milne and to Peter Grim for having raised (essentially thesame) cogent objections to a previous version.
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27
For discussions that turn on this issue, see Fodor 1986; Antony and Levine 1991; Fodor 1991.
28
Actually, of course, DOORKNOB isn’t a very good example, since it’s plausibly a compound composed of the constituent concepts DOOR and KNOB. But let’s ignorethat for the sake of the discussion.
29
Well, maybe the acquisition of PROTON doesn’t; it’s plausible that PROTON is not typically acquired from its instances. So, as far as this part of the discussion is concerned, you are therefore free to take PROTON as a primitive concept if you want to. But I imagine you don’t want to.Perhaps, in any case, it goes without saying thatthe fact that the d/D effect is widespread in concept acquisition is itself contingent and a posteriori.
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Jean-marc pizano To theextent that we have some grasp on what concepts terms like ‘S’, ‘NP’, ADJ’ express, the theory that children learn by syntactic boostrapping is at least better defined thanPinker’s. (And to the extent that we don’t, it’s not.)
15
When Pinker’s analyses are clear enough to evaluate, they are often just wrong. For example, he notes in his discussion of causatives that the analysis PAINTvtr = cover withpaint is embarrassed by such observations as this: although when Michelangelo dipped his paintbrush in his paint pot he thereby covered the paintbrush with paint,nevertheless he did not, thereby, paint the paintbrush. (The example is, in fact, borrowed from Fodor 1970.) Pinker explains that “stereotypy or conventionality of mannerconstrains the causative . . . This might be called the ‘stereotypy effect’ ” (1984: 324). So it might, for all the good it does. It is possible, faut de mieux, to paint the wall withone’s handkerchief; with one’s bare hands; by covering oneself with paint and rolling up the wall (in which last case, by the way, though covering the wall with the paintcounts as painting the wall, covering oneself with the paint does not count as painting oneself even if one does it with a paintbrush; only as getting oneself covered withpaint).Whether you paint the wall when you cover it with paint depends not on how you do it but on what you have in mind when you do it: you have to have in mind notmerely to cover the wall with paint but to paint the wall. That is, “painty” apparently can’t be defined even in terms of such closely related expressions as “painty”. Or, if itcan, none of the decompositional analyses suggested so far, Pinker’s included, comes even close to showing how.
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16
Sober (1984: 82) makes what amounts to the converse point: “In general, we expect theoretical magnitudes to be multiply accessible ; there should be more than one way of finding out what their values are in a given circumstance. This reflects the assumption that theoretical magnitudes have multiple causes and effects. There is no such thing asthe only possible effect or cause of a given event; likewise, there is no such thing as the only possible way of finding out whether it occurred. I won’t assert that this issomehow a necessary feature of all theoretical magnitudes, but it is remarkably widespread.” Note the suggestion that the phenomena in virtue of which a “theoreticalmagnitude” is multiply epistemically accessible are naturally construed as its “causes and its effects”. In the contrasting case, when there is only one access path (or, anyhow,only one access path that one can think of) the intuition is generally that the magnitude at issue isn’t bona fide theoretical, and that its connection to the criterion isconceptual rather than causal.
17
Terminological conventions with respect to the topics this chapter covers are unsettled. I’ll use ‘stereotype’ and ‘prototype’ interchangeably, to refer to mental representations of certain kinds of properties. So, ‘the dog stereotype’ and ‘the dog prototype’ designate some such (complex) concept as: BEING A DOMESTIC ANIMAL WHICHBARKS, HAS A TAIL WHICH IT WAGS WHEN IT IS PLEASED, . . . etc. I’ll use ‘exemplar’ for the mental representation of a kind, or of an individual, that instantiatesa prototype; so ‘sparrows are the exemplars of birds’ and ‘Bambi is Smith’s exemplar of a deer’ are both well-formed. ‘Sparrows are stereotypic birds’ (/‘Bambi is aprototypic deer’) are also OK; they mean that a certain kind (/individual) exhibits certain stereotypic (/prototypic) properties to a marked degree.
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18
Elanor Rosche, who invented this account of concepts more or less single-handed, often speaks of herself as a Wittgensteinian; and there is, of course, a family resemblance. But I doubt that it goes very deep. Rosche’s project was to get modality out of semantics by substituting a probabilistic account of content-constituting inferences. Whereas Isuppose Wittgenstein’s project was to offer (or anyhow, make room for) an epistemic reconstruction of conceptual necessity. Rosche is an eliminativist where Wittgenstein is areductionist. There is, in consequence, nothing in Rosche’s theory of concepts that underwrites Wittgenstein’s criteriology, hence nothing that’s of use for bopping scepticswith.
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Jean-marc pizano Couldn’t it be that the very same concept that is expressed by a single word in English gets expressed by a phrase in Bantu, or vice versa?Notice, however, that this could happen only if the English word in question is definable; viz. definable in Bantu. Since it’s going to be part of my story that most words areundefinable—not just undefinable in the language that contains them, but undefinable tout court —I’m committed to claiming that this sort of case can’t arise (very often).The issue is, of course, empirical. So be it.
10
It’s important to distinguish the idea that definitions typically capture only the core meaning of a univocal expression from the idea that definitions typically capture only one sense of an ambiguous expression. The latter is unobjectionable because it is responsive to pretheoretic intuitions that are often pretty emphatic: surely ‘bank’ has more thanone meaning. But who knows how many “aspects” the meaning of an un ambiguous word has? A fortiori, who knows when a theory succeeds in capturing some but not allof them?
11
Examples of this tactic are legion in the literature. Consider the following, from Higginbotham 1994. “jT]he meanings of lexical items systematically infect grammar. Forexample … it is a condition of object-preposing in derived nominal constructions in English that the object be in some sense ‘affected’ in the events over which the nominalranges: that is why one has (1) but not (2)” (renumbered):1.
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algebra’s discovery (by the Arabs)
2. *algebra’s knowledge (by the Arabs).
Note that ‘in some sense’ is doing all the work. It is what distinguishes the striking claim that preposing is sensitive to the meanings of verbs from the rather less dramatic thought that you can prepose with some verbs (including ‘discover’) and not with others (including ‘know’). You may suppose you have some intuitive grasp of what ‘affecting’amounts to here, but I think it’s an illusion. Ask yourself how much algebra was affected by its discovery? More or less, would you say, than the light bulb was affected byEdison’s inventing it?
12
Fodor and Lepore (forthcoming a) provides some independent evidence for the analysis proposed here. Suppose, however, that this horse won’t run, and the asymmetryPinker points to really does show that ‘keep’ is polysemous. That would be no comfort to Jackendoff, since Jackendoff’s account of the polysemy doesn’t predict theasymmetry of entailments either: that J2 but not J3 belongs to the semantic field “possession” in Jackendoff’s analysis is pure stipulation.But I won’t stress this. Auntie says Ishould swear off ad hominems.
13
Auntie’s not the only one with this grumble; Hilary Putnam has recently voiced a generalized version of the same complaint. “[O]n Fodor’s theory . . . the meaning of . . .words is not determined, even in part, by the conceptual relations among the various notions I have mastered—e.g., between ‘minute’ and my other time concepts—butdepends only on ‘nomic relations’ between the words (e.g. minute) and the corresponding universals (e.g. minutehood). These ‘universals’ are just word-shaped objects whichFodor’s metaphysics projects out into the world for the words to latch on to via mysterious ‘nomic relations’; the whole story is nothing but a ‘naturalistic’ version of theMuseum Myth of Meaning” (1995: 79; italics and scare-quotes are Putnam’s). This does seem to me to be a little underspecified. Since Putnam provides no furtherexposition (and, endearingly, no arguments at all), I’m not sure whether I’m supposed to worry that there aren’t any universals, or only that there aren’t the universals that mysemantics requires. But if Putnam thinks saying “ ‘takes a minute’ expresses the property of taking a minuté’ all by itself puts me in debt for a general refutation ofnominalism, then he needs to have his methodology examined.Still, it’s right that informational semantics needs an ontology, and that the one it opts for had better not begthe questions that a semantic theory is supposed to answer. I’ll have a lot to say about all that in Chapters 6 and 7.
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14
For an account of language acquisition in which the horse and cart are assigned the opposite configuration—syntax bootstraps semantics—see Gleitman 1990.Jean-marc pizano
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intuition is very strong that there is only one way to have that concept. In particular, that there is no concept of a round square that one could have without also having ROUND and SQUARE. If you share the intuition that there is thisasymmetry, between RED SQUARE and ROUND SQUARE, then you should be very happy with IA. IA explains theasymmetry because it entails that there can be no primitive concept without a corresponding property for it to lock to.
1
And/or among states of entertaining them. I’ll worry about this sort of ontological nicety only where it seems to matter.
2
Why relations that depend on merely mechanical properties like frequency and contiguity should preserve intentional properties like semantic domain was whatAssociationists never could explain. That was one of the rocks they foundered on.
3
Connectionists are committed, willy-nilly, to all mental representations being primitive; hence their well-known problems with systematicity, productivity, and the like. Moreon this in Chapter 5.
4
Not, of course, that there is anything wrong with just allowing ‘symbol’ and ‘computation’ to be interdefined. But that option is not available to anyone who takes the theory that thought is computation to be part of a naturalistic psychology; viz. part of a programme of metaphysical reduction. As Turing certainly did; and as do I.
5
More precisely: it’s never conceptually necessary unless either the inference from Fa to a — b or the inference from Fb to a — b is itself conceptually necessary. (Forexample, let Fa be: ‘a has the property of being identical to b ’.)
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6
Or, if there is more than one way to grasp a MOP, then all of the different ways of doing so must correspond to the same way of thinking its referent. I won’t pursue thisoption in the text; suffice it that doing so wouldn’t help with the problem that I’m raising. Suppose that there is more than one way to grasp a MOP; and suppose that acertain MOP is a mode of presentation of Moe. Then if, as Frege requires, there is a MOP corresponding to each way of thinking a referent, all the ways of grasping theMoe-MOP must be the same way of thinking of Moe. I claim that, precisely because 5.3 is in force, Frege’s theory has no way to ensure that this is so.
7
See also Smith, Medin, and Rips: “what accounts for categorization cannot account for stability [publicity] . . . [a]s long as stability of concepts is equated with sameness of concepts . . . But there is another sense of stability, which can be equated with similarity of mental contents . . . and for this sense, what accounts for categorization may at least partiallyaccount for ‘stability’ ”(1984: 268). Similar passages are simply ubiquitous in the cognitive science literature; I’m grateful to Ron Mallon for having called this example to my
8
Alternatively, a similarity theory might suppose that what we share when our PRESIDENT concepts are similar are similar beliefs about the probabilities of certain propositions: you believe that p(presidents are CICs) = 0.98; I believe that p(presidents are CICs) = 0.95; Bill believes that p(Presidents are CICs) = 0.7; so, all else equal,your PRESIDENT concept is more like mine than Bill’s is.But this construal does nothing to discharge the basic dependence of the notion of content similarity on thenotion of content identity since what it says makes our beliefs similar is that they make similar estimates of the probability of the very same proposition; e.g. of the proposition thatpresidents are CICs. If, by contrast, the propositions to which our various probability estimates relate us are themselves supposed to be merely similar, then it does not followfrom these premisses that ceteris paribus your PRESIDENT concept is more like mine than like Bill’s.
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9
It’s common ground that—idioms excepted—MRs that correspond to phrases (for example, the one that corresponds to “brown cow”) are typically structurally complex, so I’ve framed the definition theory as a thesis about the MRs of concepts that are expressed by lexical items. But, of course, this way of putting it relativizes the issue to thechoice of a reference language.Jean-marc pizano
Jean-marc pizano But maybe that’s wrong; and, if it is, then maybe if we were to stop saying that philosophy isconceptual analysis, that would leave philosophers without a defensible metatheory. Well, if so, so be it. We wouldn’t beworse off in that respect than doctors, lawyers, dentists, artists, physicists, chicken sexers, psychologists, drivinginstructors, or the practitioners of any other respectable discipline that I can think of. Why should philosophers beexempt from this practically universal predicament? There are many classes of performances in which intelligence isdisplayed, but the rules or criteria of which are unformulated. Efficient practice precedes the theory of it;methodologies presuppose the application of the methods, of the critical investigation of which they are theproducts . . . It is therefore possible for people intelligently to perform some sorts of operations when they are not yetable to consider any propositions enjoining how they should be performed.
But, bless me, it seems that I am quoting from The Concept of Mind9 I’m sure that means that it’s time for me to stop.
I want briefly to consider an ontological worry about IA that’s relatively independent of the main issues that this chapter is concerned with.
It seems pretty clear that IA is going to have to say that it’s metaphysically impossible for there to be a primitive concept of a self-contradictory property; e.g. a primitive concept ROUND SQUARE. (Remember that “ROUND SQUARE”is a name, not a structural description. The notation leaves it open whether the corresponding
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Ryle 1949.
concept is atomic.) How the argument goes will depend on the details of IA’s formulation. But, roughly: IA says that concepts have to be locked to properties. Maybe it‘s OK for a concept to lock to a property that exists but happens notto be instantiated (like being a gold mountain), but presumably there isn’t any property of being a round square for thenecessarily uninstantiated concept ROUND SQUARE to lock to.
That’s all right if ROUND SQUARE is assumed to be complex; it’s pretty plausible that there really isn’t anything to having ROUND SQUARE beyond the inferential dispositions that its compositional semantics bestows (viz. thedisposition to infer ROUND and SQUARE). But the corresponding primitive concept would have neither content(there’s no property for it to lock to) nor compositional structure (it has no constituents), so there could be nothing tohaving it at all. The objection is that it’s not obvious that it‘s metaphysically necessary that ROUND SQUARE couldn’tbe primitive.
A possible reply is that it’s also not obvious that it could, so all you get is a hung jury. But I think maybe we can do a little better. Consider a non-self-contradictory property like being ared square. It’s common ground for any RTM thatthere is a complex concept of this property (constructed from the concepts RED and SQUARE). But it’s built intoinformational versions of RTM that it also allows there to be a simple concept of this property; viz. a primitive mentalrepresentation REDSQUARE (sic.; this is intended to be a structural description) that is locked to being red and square.Presumably, one could acquire REDSQUARE ostensively. That is, one could get locked to being red and square (not byfirst getting locked to being red and being square, but) by learning that redsquares (sic) are the things that look like those. SoInformational Atomism acknowledges the metaphysical possibility of having the concept of a red square withouthaving either the concept RED or the concept SQUARE. (You won’t, of course, admit that RED SQUARE could be,in this sense, primitive if you boggle at concepts without conceptual roles. But if you boggle at concepts withoutconceptual roles you can‘t accept a pure informational semantics at all, so why should you care what a pureinformational semantics says about concepts of self-contradictory properties?)
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If, on the other hand, you find it intuitively plausible that there are two ways of having a concept of a red square (viz. RED SQUARE, which you can’t have unless you’ve got RED and SQUARE, and REDSQUARE, which you canbecause it’s primitive) then everything is OK about IA’s treatment of the concept ROUND SQUARE.Jean-marc pizano
Jean-marc pizano On one hand, everybody knows, deep down, thatInferential Role Semantics makes the problem of concept individuation intractable. And, on the other hand, everybodygags on Informational Atomism. (Well, practically everybody does.) And nobody seems to be able to think of any otheralternatives. Probably that’s because those are all the alternatives that there are.
It’s my view that we’re eventually going to have to swallow Informational Atomism whole. Accordingly, I’ve been doing what I can to
sweeten the pill. It seemed to me, for a long while, that a cost of atomism would be failing to honour the distinction between theoretical concepts and the rest. For, surely, theoretical concepts are ones that you have to believe a theory inorder to have? And, according to conceptual atomism, there are no concepts that you have to believe a theory in orderto have. But it doesn’t seem to me that way now. A theoretical concept isn’t a concept that’s defined by a theory; it’s justa concept that is, de facto, locked to a property via a theory. Informational Atomism doesn’t mind that at all, so long asyou keep the “de facto” in mind.
Likewise, it used to seem to me that atomism about concepts means that DOORKNOB is innate. But now I think that you can trade a certain amount of innateness for a certain amount of mind-dependence. Being a doorknob is just:striking our kinds of minds the way that doorknobs do. So, what you need to acquire the concept DOORKNOB“from experience” is just: the kind of mind that experience causes to be struck that way by doorknobs. The price ofmaking this trade of innateness for mind-dependence is, however, a touch of Wotan’s problem. It turns out that muchof what we find in the world is indeed “only ourselves”. It turns out, in lots of cases, that we make things be of a kind bybeing disposed to take them to be of a kind.
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But not in every case; not, in particular, in the case of kinds of things that are alike in respect of the hidden sources of their causal powers, regardless of their likeness in respect of their effects on us. To describe it in terms of those sorts ofsimilarities is to describe the world the way that God takes it to be. Doing science is how we contrive to causeourselves to have the concepts that such descriptions are couched in. Not philosophy but science is the way to getWotan out of his fly-bottle. That story seems to me plausibly true; and it is, as we’ve seen, compatible with aninformational and atomistic account of the individuation of concepts. But dear me, speaking of fly-bottles, howWittgenstein would have loathed it; and Wagner and Virginia Woolf too, for that matter. Well, you can’t pleaseeveryone; I’ll bet it would have been all right with Plato.
That’s really the end of my story; but a word about what I think of as the Luddite objection to conceptual atomism is perhaps in order.
It‘s natural, pace Appendix 5A, to suppose that conceptual atomism means that there are no conceptual truths, hence that there are no analytic truths. And, if there are no analytic truths, I suppose that there are no such things asconceptual analyses. And it would be worrying if ‘noanalyticity’ entailed not just ‘no analyses’ but ‘no analytic philosophy’ as well. Technological unemployment would thenbegin to threaten.
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But I guess I’m not inclined to take that prospect very seriously; certainly I’m not one of those end-of-philosophy philosophers. If, there aren’t any conceptual analyses, the moral isn’t that we should stop doing philosophy, or eventhat we should start doing philosophy in some quite different way. The moral is just that we should stop saying thatconceptual analysis is what philosophers do. If analytic philosophers haven’t been analysing concepts after all, at leastthat explains why there are so few concepts that analytic philosophers have analysed.
I guess what I really think is that philosophy is just: whatever strikes minds like ours as being of the same kind as the prototypical examples.Jean-marc pizano
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Aha, but how do you go about constructing a true theory of the essence of such-and-suches and convincingyourself that it is true? How do you do it in, say, the case of being water?
Oh, well, you know: you have to think up a theory of what water is that both explains why the superficial signs of being water are reliable and has the usual theoretical virtues: generality, systematicity, coherence with your other theories, andso forth. You undertake to revise the theory when what it says about water isn’t independently plausible (e.g.independently plausible in light of experimental outcomes); and you undertake to revise your estimates of what’sindependently plausible (e.g. your estimates of the construct validity of your experimental paradigms) when theyconflict with what the theory says about water. And so on, round and round the Duhemian circle.
In short, you do the science. I suppose the Duhemian process of scientific theory construction is possible only for a kind of creature that antecedently has a lot of concepts of properties that are mind-dependent, and a lot of natural kindconcepts that aren’t concepts of natural kinds as such. And it’s also only possible for a kind of creature that is able topursue policies with respect to the properties that it locks its concepts to. Probably, we’re the only kind of creaturethere is that meets these conditions. Which explains, I suppose, why we’re so lonely.
As I remarked in Chapter 6, I rather suspect that these, together with the concepts of natural kinds as such, exhaust the sorts of concepts that there are; but I don’t know how to argue that they do.Notice, in any case, that this is a mixed taxonomy. The distinction between concepts of mind-dependent properties and the rest is ontological;mind-dependence is a property of the property that a concept expresses. By contrast, the distinction between natural-kind-as-such concepts and the rest is about how aconcept is attached to a property, not what kind of property the concept is attached to.
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A natural kind enters into lots of nomic connections to things other than our minds. We can validate a theory of the kind with respect to those connections because the theory is required to predict and explain them. You can’t follow thisDuhemian path in the case of DOORKNOB, of course, because there is nothing to validate a theory of doorknobsagainst except how things strike us. In effect, what strikes us as independently plausibly a doorknob is a doorknob; themind-dependence of doorknobhood is tantamount to that. The more we learn about what water is, the more we learnabout the world; the more we learn about what doorknobs are, the more we learn about ourselves. The presenttreatment implies this and, I think, intuition agrees with it. At least, Realist intuition does.
We do science when we want to lock our concepts to properties that aren’t constituted by similarities in how things strike us. We do science when we want to reveal the ways that things would be similar even if we weren’t there. Idealists tothe contrary not withstanding, there’s no paradox in this. We can, often enough, control for the effects of our presenceon the scene in much the same ways that we control for the effects of other possibly confounding variables. To besure, here as elsewhere, the design of well-confirmed theories is hard work and often expensive. And the onlyrecompense is likely to be the cool pleasure of seeing things objectively; seeing them as they are when you’re notlooking. Objectivity is an educated taste, much like Cubism. Maybe it‘s worth what it costs and maybe it’s not. It‘sentirely your choice, of course. Far be it from me to twist your arm.
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So much, then, for how we got from the Garden to the laboratory. It is, as I say, quite a familiar story.
You aren’t actually required to believe any of what’s in this chapter or the last; I have mostly just been exploring the geography that reveals itself if conceptual atomism is taken seriously. Still, I do think our cognitive science is in crisis,and that we’re long overdue to face the dilemma that confronts it.Jean-marc pizano
Jean-marc pizano And it’s quite true in such cases that, givennormal experience, the creatures end up locked to the properties that these concepts express. So, as far asinformational semantics is concerned, they therefore end up having concepts that have these properties as theircontents. But, in fact, the innate endowment that they exploit in doing so is quite rudimentary. Male sticklebacks getlocked to conspecific rivalhood via not much more than an innate ability to detect red spots. To do so, they exploit a certain(actually rather fragile) ecological regularity: there’s normally nothing around that wears a red spot except conspecificrivals.
This is nomologically necessary (anyhow, it’s counterfactual supporting) in the stickleback’s ecology, and nomological necessity is transitive. So sticklebacks end up locked to conspecific rivalhood via one of its reliable appearances.
To repeat: informational semantics suggests that, so far as the requisite innate endowment is concerned, if the world co-operates you can get concepts of natural kinds very cheap. That’s what the sticklebacks do; it’s what Homer did; it’swhat children do; it’s what all of us grown-ups do too, most of the time. By contrast, for you to have a natural kindsconcept as such is for your link to the essence of the kind not to depend on its inessential properties. This is a late andsophisticated achievement, historically, ontogenetically, and phylogenetically, and there is no reason to take it as aparadigm for concept possession at large. I suppose you start to get natural kind concepts in this strong sense onlywhen it occurs to you that, if generality and explanatory power are to be achieved, similarity and difference in respectof how things affect minds like ours has sometimes got to be ignored in deciding what kinds of things they are;perhaps, de facto, this happens only in the context of the scientific enterprise.
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Well, what about the ‘technical’ concept WATER? Does that have to be innate if it’s primitive?
Of course not. For one thing, on the present view, there really is no ‘technical concept water’; there’s just, as it were, the technical way of having the concept WATER. Once you’ve got a concept that’s locked to water via its (locallyreliable) phenomenological properties, you can, if you wish, make a project of getting locked to water in a way thatdoesn’t depend on its superficial signs. The easy way to do this is to get some expert to teach you a theory thatexpresses the essence of the kind. To be sure, however, that will only work if the natural kind concept that you’rewanting to acquire is one which somebody else has acquired already. Things get a deal more difficult if you’re startingab initio; i.e. without any concepts which express natural kinds as such. It’s time for me to tell my story about howconcepts of natural kinds might “emerge” in a mind that is antecedently well stocked with concepts of other kinds.Actually, it’s a perfectly familiar story and not at all surprising.
Suppose you have lots of concepts of mind-dependent properties, and lots of logico-mathematical concepts, and lots of concepts of natural kindswhich, however, aren’t concepts of natural kinds as such.93 Then what you need to do to acquire a natural kind conceptas a natural kind concept ab initio is: (i) construct a true theory of the hidden essence of the kind; and (ii) convinceyourself of the truth of the theory. If the theory is true, then it will say of a thing that it is such-and-such when and onlywhen the thing is such-and-such; and if you are convinced of the truth of the theory, then you will make it a policy toconsider that a thing is such-and-such when and only when the theory says that it is. So your believing the theory locksyou to such-and-suches via a property that they have in every metaphysically possibly world; namely, the property ofbeing such-and-suches; the property that makes the theory true. The upshot is that, if the moon is blue, and everythinggoes as planned, you will end up with a full-blown natural kind concept; the concept of such-and-suches as such.
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ceasuridemina 