So, according to the present proposal, the constituent structure of the mentalrepresentation BACHELOR is something like ‘UNMARRIED MAN’.

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Jean-marc pizano So, according to the present proposal, the constituent structure of the mentalrepresentation BACHELOR is something like ‘UNMARRIED MAN’.

 

The thesis that definition plays an important role in the theory of mental representation will be the main concern in this chapter and the next. According to that view, many mental representations work the way we've just supposed thatBACHELOR does. That is, they correspond to concepts that are expressed by definable words, and they arethemselves structurally complex. This thesis is, to put it mildly, very tendentious. In order for it to be true, it must turnout that there are many definable words; and it must turn out, in many cases, that the MRs that correspond to thesedefinable words are structurally complex. I'm going to argue that it doesn't, in fact, turn out in either of those ways.9

One last preliminary, and then we'll be ready to go. If there are no definable words, then, of course, there are no complex mental representations that correspond to them. But it doesn't follow that if there are many complex mentalrepresentations, then lots of words are definable. In fact, I take it that the view now favoured in both philosophy andcognitive science is that most words aren't definable but do correspond to

complex MRs (to something like prototypes or exemplars). Since the case against definitions isn't ipso facto a case against complex mental representations, I propose the following expository strategy. In this chapter and the next, Iargue that concepts aren't definitions even if lots of mental representations are complex. Chapter 5 will argue that thereare (practically) no complex mental representations at all, definitional or otherwise.26 At that point, atomism will be theoption of last resort.

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If we thus set aside, for the moment, all considerations that don't distinguish the claim that mental representations are typically definitional from the weaker claim that mental representations are typically complex, what arguments have weleft to attend to? There are two kinds: the more or less empirical ones and the more or less philosophical ones. Theempirical ones turn on data that are supposed to show that the mental representations that correspond to definablewords are, very often and simply as a matter of fact, identical to the mental representations that correspond to phrasesthat define the words. The philosophical ones are supposed to show that we need mental representations to bedefinitions because nothing else will account for our intuitions of conceptual connectedness, analyticity, a prioricity, andthe like. My plan is to devote the rest of this chapter to the empirical arguments and all of Chapter 4 to thephilosophical arguments. You will be unsurprised to hear what my unbiased and judicious conclusion is going to be.My unbiased and judicious conclusion is going to be that neither the philosophical nor the empirical arguments fordefinitions are any damned good.

So, then, to business.

Almost everybody used to think that concepts are definitions; hence that having a concept is being prepared to draw (or otherwise acknowledge) the inferences that define it. Prima facie, there's much to be said for this view. In particular,definitions seem to have a decent chance of satisfying all five of the ‘non-negotiable’ conditions which Chapter 2 saidthat concepts have to meet. If the meaning-constitutive inferences are the defining ones, then it appears that:

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—Definitions can be mental particulars if any concepts can. Whatever the definition of ‘bachelor’ is, it has the same ontological status as the mental representation that you entertain when you think unmarried man. That there is such amental representation is a claim to which RTM is, of course, independently committed.

—Semantic evaluability is assured; since all inferences are semantically

i.e. there are no complex mental representations other than those that correspond to concepts that are expressed by phrases; see the preceding footnote. From now on, I’ll take this caveat for granted.

evaluable (for soundness, validity, reliability, etc.), defining inferences are semantically evaluable inter alia.

—Publicity is satisfied since there's no obvious reason why lots of people might not assign the same defining inferences to a given word or concept. They might do so, indeed, even if there are lots of differences in what theyknow/believe about the things the concept applies to (lots of differences in the ‘collateral information’ they have aboutsuch things).

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Aren't you ashamed

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Jean-marc pizano Aren't you ashamed

 

of yourself?

I am definitely sensitive to this criticism. For I'm a Realist about doorknobs, I am. I think there are lots of doorknobs, and I wouldn't consider for a moment holding a metaphysical view which denies that there are. So, one of the mainquestions I want to consider in this chapter is: what, if any, consequences would the (putative) mind-dependence ofdoorknobhood have for issues about Metaphysical Realism? My answer will be ‘none’, and this for two reasons: first,because being mind-dependent is perfectly compatible with being real; and second, and more important, becauseDOORKNOB isn't the general case. If there are lots of our concepts that express mind-dependent properties, there arealso lots of them that don't. Something needs to be said about the metaphysics of that kind of concept too.

Doorknobs Are Real Because Minds Are Real

The first of these considerations is entirely banal. Suppose, per hypothesis, that DOORKNOB expresses a property that things have in virtue of their effects on us. Suppose, in particular, that being a doorknob is just having the property thatminds like ours reliably lock to in consequence of experience with typical doorknobs. Well, then, there are doorknobs iff the propertythat minds like ours reliably lock to in consequence of experience with typical doorknobs is instantiated. Which, ofcourse, it is; every doorknob has it, and there are, as previously remarked, lots of doorknobs.

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Look, there is simply nothing wrong with, or ontologically second-rate about, being a property that things have in virtue of their reliable effects on our minds. For we really do have minds, and there really are things whose effects on ourminds are reliable. If you doubt that we do, or that there are, then whatever is the source of your scepticism, it can't bemetaphysical considerations of the sort that I've been claiming bear on the nature of doorknobhood. Perhaps it's thatyou're worried about evil demons?

Fingers, I suppose, are, hand-dependent: if there were no hands, there could be no fingers; if you had your fingers on your feet they'd be your toes. This is all entirely compatible with the rigorous Metaphysical Realism about fingerswhich, surely, common sense demands. For, since there really are hands, such metaphysical conditions for theinstantiation of fingerhood as its hand-dependence imposes are ipso facto satisfied. Since there are hands, the metaphysicaldependence offingers on hands is not an argumentfor there not being fingers. Similarly, mutatis mutandis, for the case of doorknobs.Since there are minds, the ontological conditions which the mind-dependence of doorknobhood imposes on there beingdoorknobs are ipso facto satisfied. The mind-dependence of doorknobhood is not an argument for there not beingdoorknobs.

I wouldn't be going on about this so, except that it appears to have occasioned much confusion, and some inadvertent comedy, in the cognitive science community. (And in ever so many Departments of English Literature. And in France.)Here, for one example among multitudes, is George Lakoff getting himself into a thorough muddle about Tuesdays:

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If. . . symbols get their meaning only by being associated with things in the world, then weeks must be things in the world. But weeks do not exist in nature . . . Does ‘Tuesday’ refer to an aspect of ‘external reality’—reality external tohuman beings? Obviously not. That reality is constituted by the minds of human beings collectively—it is not an‘external’ reality. [The word] ‘Tuesday’ cannot get its meaning by reference to a reality external to and independentof human minds . . . These realities reside in human minds, not in anything ‘external’. (1988: 135)

I'm unclear exactly what work Lakoff thinks “external” is doing in this passage, and his persistently putting it into shudder-quotes suggests that he is too. But notice the repeated contrast of “constituted by human minds” and the likewith (externally) “real” and the like. The inference that we're being offered is apparently: constituted by minds and sonot (externally) real.

Now, it's true, of course, that Tuesdays are mind-dependent in at least the following pretty straightforward sense: whether today is Tuesday depends on what conventions people adhere to; and that people adhere to the conventionsthat they do, or to any conventions at all, depends on their having minds.Jean-marc pizano

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between dogs and DOG-tokens is reliable that there is a community of dog-thinkers, creatures whose mental processes fall under the intentional laws about dog-thoughts. Just so, epistemologists (have been known to) say that it's thereliability of the media

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between dogs and DOG-tokens is reliable that there is a community of dog-thinkers, creatures whose mental processes fall under the intentional laws about dog-thoughts. Just so, epistemologists (have been known to) say that it's thereliability of the mediation between dogs and one's dog-thoughts that justifies one's knowledge claims about dogs. Thisconvergence of views is all to the good, of course; the requirements that epistemology places upon epistemic warrantought to be ones that the theory of content allows many of one's beliefs actually to meet.

The psychological and physiological mechanisms that mediate the perception of middle-sized events and objects must surely head the list of the mechanisms of semantic access. It's about as reliable as the empirical generalizations ofintentional psychology ever get that if you put a DOG-owner, eyes open, in a dog-filled environment and you turn upthe lights, dog-thoughts will ensue. Or, to say it the way that RTM wants us to, the mechanisms of visual perceptionnormally function to insure that ‘IT'S DOGGING’ gets tokened in the subject's belief box in such well-lit, doggysituations. De facto, our capacities for thinking about dogs, and hence our possibilities for knowing about them, bothdepend heavily on the reliability with which the mechanisms of visual perception do this.

Note, however, that I did not just claim that one's possession of the concept DOG is constituted by the fact that seeing dogs causes tokens of DOG in one's belief box. To the contrary: one's possession of that concept is constituted bythere being the appropriate, meaning-making lawful relations between instantiated doghood and one's neural-cum-mentalstates. It's that your mental structures contrive to resonate to doghood, not how your mental structures contrive toresonate to doghood, that is constitutive of concept possession according to the informational view. This too is all to thegood since it helps with satisfying the publicity constraint on concept possession that was endorsed in Chapter 2. ForHelen Keller, it was not visual perception that sustained the meaning-making dog—DOG relation. Yet she and I, each inour way, can both satisfy the conditions for DOG-possession according to the present account of those conditions.

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Just as I did not say that having perceptual mechanisms that connect dog sightings with DOG-tokens-in-the-belief-box constitutes your having the concept DOG, so I also did not say that the character of these mechanisms determines thecontent of your concept. How a concept achieves semantic access is one thing, what content the concept has is quiteanother. It is a chief virtue of informational semantics to distinguish between these two (just as it was the besetting viceof operationalism to conflate them). You tell that a thing's a dog by, inter alia, looking and listening; dog-shaped sightsand woof-shaped sounds are among the

reliable things to look and listen for. It does not follow either that there are perceptual ‘criteria’ for doghood or that, if there are, these criteria are constitutive of the content of the concept DOG. What's metaphysically pertinent to thecontent of DOG is the same thing that's metaphysically pertinent to your possession of DOG; namely, that it's doghood (andnot, as it might be, cathood) that your DOG tokenings are under the lawful control of.

I've said that, de facto, perceptual mechanisms head the list of the ones that mediate our semantic access to doghood. But I now want to emphasize that that list is very long; in fact, that it's open-ended in a way that is important both forsemantics and for epistemology. Here are some routes, other than perceiving dogs, that do, or might, sustain themeaning-making causal connection between dogs and their mental representations:

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—Dog bells. Someone may rig things so that a bell goes off when the dog shakes its head. If I know how things are rigged, hearing the bell may reliably cause me to think dog.42 Similarly for my hearing the door bell when thedog pushes the button.

In fact, I may myself rig things this way, thereby insuring that if the bell rings, thus indicating that doghood is locally instantiated, I will be caused to think dog, and thus come to be in a cognitive condition that is appropriate to myenvironmental situation.Jean-marc pizano

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If C is literally a part of C, then of course you can't have C,unless you also have C. Notice that this explanation turns on precisely the idea that meaning postulates propose toabandon: viz. that the content-constitutive inferences are the ones that rela

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Jean-marc pizano If C is literally a part of C, then of course you can't have C,unless you also have C. Notice that this explanation turns on precisely the idea that meaning postulates propose toabandon: viz. that the content-constitutive inferences are the ones that relate a concept to its parts.

 

In short, if you are independently convinced both that there are meaning-constitutive inferences and that most lexical concepts behave like primitives, you've got a residuum problem to which meaning postulates may indeed offer asolution. But at a price, since the solution weakens the architecture of your overall theory: it breaks the connectionbetween the structure of a concept and its possession conditions.

Partee has tried bravely to make a virtue of this necessity:

Meaning postulates might be a helpful tool. . . since they make the form [sic] of some kinds of lexical information no different in kind from the form of some kinds of general knowledge. That would make it possible to hypothesizethat the very same ‘fact’—for example, whales are mammals—could be stored in either of two ‘places,’ a storehouseof lexical knowledge or a storehouse of empirical knowledge; whether it's part of the meaning of ‘whale’ or notneed not be fixed once and for all. (1995: 328)

But it is inadvisable for a theory to recognize degrees of freedom that it is unable to interpret. Exactly because meaning postulates break the ‘formal’ relation between belonging to the structure of a concept and being among its constitutiveinferences, it's unclear why it matters which box a given such ‘fact’ goes into; i.e. whether a given inference is treated asmeaning-constitutive. Imagine two minds that differ in that ‘whale ^ mammal’ is a meaning postulate for one but is‘general knowledge’ for theother. Are any further differences between these minds entailed? If so, which ones? Is this wheel attached to anythingat all?

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It's a point Quine made against Carnap that the answer to ‘When is an inference analytic?’ can't be just Whenever I feel like saying that it is’. Definition versions of IR Semantics can hold that an inference is analytic when and only whenit follows from the structure of a concept. If the meaning postulate version has an alternative proposal on offer, it's notone that I've heard of.

Appendix 5B The ‘Theory Theory - of Concepts

The theories of concepts discussed so far all presuppose Inferential Role Semantics, so they all owe an account of which inferences determine conceptual content. The big divides are between holism (which says that all inferences do)and some sort of molecularism (which says that only some inferences do); and, within the latter, between classicaltheories (according to which it is modality that matters to content constitution) and prototype theories (according towhich it's empirical reliability that does). In effect, the various theories of concepts we've reviewed are versions of IRSdistinguished, primarily, by what they say about the problem of individuating content.

Now, a quite standard reading of the history of cognitive science has the reliability-based versions of IRS displacing the modality-based versions and in turn being displaced, very recently, by theory theories.63 But that way of telling the storyis, I think, mistaken. Though theory theories do propose a view about what concepts are (or, anyhow, about whatconcepts are like; or, anyhow, about what a lot of concepts are like), they don't, as far as I can tell, offer a distinctapproach to the content individuation problems. Sometimes they borrow the modality story from definitional theories,sometimes they borrow the reliability story from prototype theories, sometimes they share the holist's despair ofindividuating concepts at all. So, for our purposes at least, it's unclear that theory theories of concepts differsubstantially from the kinds of theories

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I’m not crazy about this terminology, if only because it invites conflation with the quite different issue whether “folk psychology” is a (tacit) theory (see, for example, Gordon 1986). But it's standard in the cognitive science literature so I'll stick with it, and from here on I'll omit the shudder-quotes.

For a relatively clear example of a discussion where theory theories are viewed as alternatives to probabilistic accounts of concepts, see Keil 1987.Jean-marc pizano

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3 The Demise of Definitions, Part I: The Linguist'sTale

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3 The Demise of Definitions, Part I: The Linguist's

Tale

Certain matters would appear to get carried certain distances whether one wishes them to or not, unfortunately. —David Markham, Wittgenstein's Mistress

Introduction

I want to consider the question whether concepts are definitions. And let's, just for the novelty, start with some propositions that are clearly true:

1. You can't utter the expression ‘brown cow’ without uttering the word ‘brown’.

2. You can utter the word ‘bachelor’ without uttering the word ‘unmarried’.

The asymmetry between 1 and 2 will be granted even by those who believe that the “semantic representation” of ‘bachelor’ (its representation, as linguists say, “at the semantic level&rdquo is a complex object which contains, inter alia, thesemantic representation of ‘unmarried’.

Now for something that's a little less obvious:

3. You can't entertain the M(ental) R(epresentation) BROWN COW without entertaining the MR BROWN.

4. You can't entertain the M(ental) R(epresentation) BACHELOR without entertaining the MR UNMARRIED.

I'm going to take it for granted that 3 is true. I have my reasons; they'll emerge in Chapter 5. Suffice it, for now, that anybody who thinks that 3 and the like are false will certainly think that 4 and the like are false; and that 4 and the likeare indeed false is the main conclusion this chapter aims at. I pause, however, to remark that 3 is meant to betendentious. It claims not just what everyone admits, viz. that anything that satisfies BROWN COW inter alia satisfiesBROWN, viz. that brow cows are ipso facto brown.

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Proposition 3 says, moreover, that to think the content brown cow is, inter alia, to think the concept BROWN, and that would be false if the mental representation that expresses brown cow is atomic; like, for example, BROWNCOW.

What about 4? Here again there is a way of reading what's being claimed that makes it merely truistic: viz. by not distinguishing concept identity from content identity. It's not, I suppose, unreasonable (for the present illustrativepurposes, I don't care whether it's true) to claim that the content bachelor and the content unmarried man are one and thesame. For example, if concepts express properties, then it's not unreasonable to suppose that BACHELOR andUNMARRIED MAN express the same property. If so, and if one doesn't distinguish between content identity andconcept identity, then of course it follows that you can't think BACHELOR without thinking UNMARRIED (unlessyou can think UNMARRIED MAN without thinking UNMARRIED. Which let's just concede that you can't).1

However, since we are distinguishing content identity from concept identity, we're not going to read 4 that way. Remember that RTM is in force, and RTM says that to each tokening of a mental state with the contentso-and-so therecorresponds a tokening of a mental representation with the content so-and-so. In saying this, RTM explicitly means toleave open the possibility that different (that is, type distinct) mental representations might correspond to the samecontent; hence the analogy between mental representations and modes of presentation that I stressed in Chapter 2. Inthe present case, the concession that being a bachelor and being an unmarried man are the same thing is meant toleave open the question whether BACHELOR and UNMARRIED MAN are the same concept.

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RTM also says that (infinitely many, but not all) mental representations have constituent structure; in particular that there are both complex

mental representations and primitive mental representations, and that the former have the latter as proper parts. We are now in a position to make expository hay out of this assumption; we can rephrase the claim that is currently beforethe house as:

5. The M(ental) R(epresentation) UNMARRIED, which is a constituent of the MR UNMARRIED MAN, islikewise a constituent of the MR BACHELOR.

Here's a standard view: the concept BACHELOR is expressed by the word “bachelor”, and the word “bachelor” is definable; it means the same as the phrase “unmarried man”. In the usual case, the mental representation thatcorresponds to a concept that corresponds to a definable word is complex: in particular, the mental representation thatcorresponds to a definable word usually has the same constituent structure as the mental representation thatcorresponds to its definition.Jean-marc pizano

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If, however, scepticism really is the skeleton in Dummett's closet, the worry seems to me to be doubly misplaced: first because the questions with which theories of meaning are primarily concerned are metaphysical rather than epistemic.This is as it shoul

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If, however, scepticism really is the skeleton in Dummett's closet, the worry seems to me to be doubly misplaced: first because the questions with which theories of meaning are primarily concerned are metaphysical rather than epistemic.This is as it should be; understanding what a thing is, is invariably prior to understanding how we know what it is. And,secondly, because there is no obvious reason why behaviourally grounded inferences to attributions of concepts,meanings, mental processes, communicative intentions, and the like should be freer from normal inductive risk than,as it might be, perceptually grounded attributions of tails to cats. The best we get in either case is “strong but fallibleevidence”. Contingent truths are like that as, indeed, Hume taught us some while back. This is, no doubt, the veryattitude that Dummett means to reject as inadequate to the purposes for which we “philosophically” require a theoryof meaning. So much the worse, perhaps, for the likelihood that philosophers will get from a theory of meaning whatDummett says thatthey require. I, for one, would not expect a good account of what concepts are to refute scepticism about other mindsany more than I'd expect a good account of what cats are to refute scepticism about other bodies. In both cases, I amquite prepared to settle for theories that are merely true.

Methodological inhibitions flung to the wind, then, here is how I propose to organize our trip. Very roughly, concepts are constituents of mental states. Thus, for example, believing that cats are animals is a paradigmatic mental state, andthe concept ANIMAL is a constituent of the belief that cats are animals (and of the belief that animals sometimes bite, etc.I'm leaving it open whether the concept ANIMAL is likewise a constituent of the belief that some cats bite, we'll raise thatquestion presently). So the natural home of a theory of concepts is as part of a theory of mental states. I shall supposethroughout this book that RTM is the right theory of (cognitive) mental states. So, I'm going to start with an expositionof RTM: which is to say, with an exposition of a theory about what mental states and processes are. It will turn out thatmental states and processes are typically species of relations to mental representations, of which latter concepts aretypically the parts.

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To follow this course is, in effect, to assume that it's OK for theorizing about the nature of concepts to precede theorizing about concept possession. As we've been seeing, barring a metaphysical subtext, that assumption should beharmless; individuation theories and possession theories are trivially intertranslatable. Once we've got RTM in place,however, I'm going to argue for a very strong version of psychological atomism; one according to which what conceptsyou have is conceptually and metaphysically independent of what epistemic capacities you have. If this is so, thenpatently concepts couldn't be epistemic capacities.

I hope not to beg any questions by proceeding in this way; or at least not to get caught begging any. But I do agree that if there is a knock-down, a priori argument that concepts are logical constructs out of capacities, then my view abouttheir ontology can't be right and I shall have to give up my kind of cognitive science. Oh, well. If there's a knock-down,a priori argument that cats are logical constructs out of sensations, then my views about their ontology can't be righteither, and I shall have to give up my kind of biology. Neither possibility actually worries me a lot.

So, then, to begin at last:

RTM

RTM is really a loose confederation of theses; it lacks, to put it mildly, a canonical formulation. For present purposes, let it be the conjunction of the following:

First Thesis: Psychological explanation is typically nomic and is intentional through and through. The laws that

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psychological explan ations invoke typically express causal relations among mental states that are specified under intentional description; viz. among mental states that are picked out by reference totheir contents. Laws about causal relations among beliefs, desires, and actions are the paradigms.

I'm aware there are those (mostly in Southern California, of course) who think that intentional explanation is all at best pro tem, and that theories of mind will (or anyhow should) eventually be couched in the putatively purely extensionalidiom of neuroscience.Jean-marc pizano

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So I'm not saying what Quine said; though it may Empiricism. I often have the feeling that I'm just

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So I'm not saying what Quine said; though it may Empiricism. I often have the feeling that I'm just

well be what he should have said, and would have said but for his saying what Quine would have said but for his Empiricism.88

I am also, unlike Quine, not committed to construing locking in terms of a capacity for discriminated responding (or, indeed, of anything epistemological). Locking reduces to nomic connectedness. (I hope.) See Fodor 1990; Fodor forthcoming b.

7 Innateness and Ontology, Part II: Natural Kind

Concepts

[It is] a matter quite independent of . . . wishing it or not wishing it. There happens to be a definite intrinsic propriety in it which determines the thing and which would take me long to explain.

—Henry James, The Tragic Muse

Here's how we set things up in Chapter 6: suppose that radical conceptual atomism is inevitable and that, atomism being once assumed, radical conceptual nativism is inevitable too. On what, if any, ontological story would radicalconceptual nativism be tolerable?

However, given the preconceptions that have structured this book, we might just as well have approached the ontological issues from a different angle. I've assumed throughout that informational semantics is, if not self-evidentlythe truth about mental content, at least not known to be out of the running. It's been my fallback metaphysicswhenever I needed an alternative to Inferential Role theories of meaning. But now, according to informationalsemantics, content is constituted by some sort of nomic, mind—world relation. Correspondingly, having a concept(concept possession) is constituted by being in some sort of nomic, mind—world relation. It follows that, ifinformational semantics is true, then there must be laws about everything that we have concepts of. But how could therebe laws about doorknobs?

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The answer, according to the present story, is that there is really only one law about doorknobs (qua doorknobs); viz. that we lock to them in consequence of certain sorts of experience.89 And this law isn't really about doorknobs because,of course, it's really about us. This is quite a serious point. I assume that the intuition that there aren't laws aboutdoorknobs (equivalently, for present purposes, the intuition that doorknobs aren't a ‘natural kind&rsquo comes down to thethought that there's nothing in the worldwhose states are reliably connected to doorknobs qua doorknobs except our minds. No doubt, some engineer mightconstruct a counter-example—a mindless doorknob detector; and we might even come to rely on such a thing whengroping for a doorknob in the dark. Still, the gadget would have to be calibrated to us since there is nothing else in nature thatresponds selectively to doorknobs; and, according to the present account, it's constitutive of doorknobhood that this is so.The point is: it's OK for there to be laws about doorknobs that are really laws about us. Doorknobs aren't a naturalkind, but we are.

What with one thing and another, I've been pushing pretty hard the notion that properties like being a doorknob are mind-dependent. I needed to in Chapter 6 because, if doorknobs aren't mind-dependent, there is only one way I canthink of to explain why it's typically doorknob-experiences from which the concept DOORKNOB is acquired: viz. thatDOORKNOB is learned inductively. And I didn't want that because the Standard Argument shows that only nonprimitive concepts can be learned inductively. And it's been the main burden of this whole book that all theevidence—philosophical, psychological, and linguistic—suggests that DOORKNOB is primitive (unstructured); and,for that matter, that so too is practically everything else. Likewise, in this chapter, I need being a doorknob to be mind-dependent because there is only one way I can think of to reconcile informational semantics, which wants there to belaws about doorknobs, with the truism that doorknobs aren't a natural kind; viz. to construe what appear to be lawsabout doorknobs as really laws about “our kinds of minds”.

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But all this stuff about the mind-dependence of doorknobhood invites a certain Auntie-esque complaint. Viz.:

I get it; the good news is that DOORKNOB isn't innate; the bad news is that there aren't any doorknobs.Jean-marc pizano

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Accordingly, it's possible to have the concept WATER but not the concept HYDROGEN, andit's possible to have the concept TWO but not the concept PRIME. All of that is perfectly OK as far as informationalsemantics is concerned. It's perfectly consistent to

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Jean-marc pizano Accordingly, it's possible to have the concept WATER but not the concept HYDROGEN, andit's possible to have the concept TWO but not the concept PRIME. All of that is perfectly OK as far as informationalsemantics is concerned. It's perfectly consistent to claim that concepts are individuated by the properties they denote,and that the properties are individuated by their necessary relations to one another, but to deny that knowing about thenecessary relations among the properties is a condition for having the concept.

 

Whether it is a virtue of informational semantics that it proposes to distance the metaphysics of modality from the metaphysics of concept possession is a large issue; one that I don't propose to discuss here at all. Clearly, if you thinkthere's any serious chance that part/whole relations among concepts might explain what makes propositions necessary,then informational semantics isn't likely to be your dish; qua atomistic, informational semantics denies that the reasoncats have to be animals is that ANIMAL is a constituent of CAT. As the reader will have gathered, I doubt thatexplanations of that sort will be forthcoming, but I won't argue the general issue here. Suffice it that the differencebetween mere necessity (which informational semantics is perfectly happy about) and

conceptual necessity (over which informational semantics weeps) is that the latter, but not the former, constrains concept possession.

Second Assumption: Semantic Access

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So far we have it, by assumption, that ‘dog’ and DOG mean dog because ‘dog’ expresses DOG, and DOG tokens fall under a law according to which they reliably are (or would be) among the effects of instantiated doghood. I now add theconsiderably less tendentious assumption that if there are such meaning-making laws, they surely couldn't be basic. Or,to put it another way, if there is a nomic connection between doghood and cause-of-DOG-tokeninghood, then there must be acausal process whose operation mediates and sustains this connection. Or, to put it a third way, if informationalsemantics is right about the metaphysics of meaning, there must be mechanismsin virtue of which certain mental (-cum-neural) structures ‘resonate’ to doghood and Tuesdayhood4 Or, to put it a last way, informational semantics is untenableunless there's an answer to questions like: ‘how does (or would) the instantiation of doghood cause tokenings of DOG?’ Ipropose to call whatever answers such a question a mechanism of ‘' semanticaccesi. Mechanisms of semantic access arewhat sustain our ability to think about things.

What such mechanism might there be in the case of dogs? Unsurprisingly, the sort of inventory that suggests itself looks a lot like what you'd get if you asked for the mechanisms that mediate our epistemic access to dogs. Unsurprisinglybecause there can be no epistemic access without semantic access; what you can't think about, you can't know about.41Informational semantics says that it's because the mediation

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40

I borrow J. J. Gibson’s phrase (see e.g. 1966) but not his metaphysics. Roughly, informational semantics is Gibsonian semantics, but without the ban on mental processes; just as, roughly, it is Skinnerian semantics without the behaviourism. (See below and Fodor 1990.)

Cf. Antony (1995: 433): “no device can be said to have epistemic access to any aspect of its environment unless it is a device that represents its environment”. This doesn't go the other way around, of course: semantic access doesn't guarantee epistemic warrant. With any luck, all of this ought to come out right if your semantics is informationaland your theory of knowledge is reliabilist. Since content supervenes on purely nomic relations—that is, on certain lawful relations among properties—and since lawfulrelations can presumably hold among properties that are, de facto, uninstantiated, the metaphysical conditions for content can in principle be met entirely counterfactually:no actual tokens of DOG have actually to be caused by dogs for the counterfactuals that its content supervenes on to be in place. Epistemic warrant, by contrast, has to dowith the causal history of one or another actual belief token: the warranted belief has to have been acquired by reliable means. So it should turn out that the conditions forepistemic access include, but aren't exhausted by, the conditions that semantic access imposes.

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That, however, can't be what the lexicalsemanticist is proposing. To have ‘RED’ in the definition of ‘red’ would make ‘COLOUR’ redundant, since if ‘RED’means red, it thereby entails ‘COLOUR’. If

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Jean-marc pizano That, however, can't be what the lexicalsemanticist is proposing. To have ‘RED’ in the definition of ‘red’ would make ‘COLOUR’ redundant, since if ‘RED’means red, it thereby entails ‘COLOUR’. If the definition of ‘red’ includes RED, that's all it includes, so in effect theproposal that it does concedes the concept to atomism.

 

It might be possible to treat such cases as mere curiosities specific to sensory concepts. It's sometimes suggested that they illustrate the presence of an “iconic” element in concepts likeRED (see the discussion above of Jackendoff 1992). Maybe ‘red’ means something like ‘similar in respect of colour tothis’ where the ‘this’ ostensively introduces a red sample. The trouble with taking this line, however, is that the patternRED and the like exemplify actually appears to be quite general: lots of lexical concepts for which definitions are veryhard to find nevertheless appear to enter into the same sort of “one way” entailments that hold between ‘red’ and‘colour’. It's plausible that ‘dog’ means animal, but there doesn't seem to be any F (except DOG) such that ‘F +ANIMAL’ means dog ‘Chair’ means furniture, but what and FURNITURE means chair? Notice that it won't do toappeal to ‘iconic elements’ in these non-sensory cases. Maybe ‘red’ means ‘similar in colour tothiibut ‘dog’ doesn't mean‘similar in X tothii for any X that I can think of except doghood. It appears that, contrary to traditional Empiricistdoctrine, many lexical items are not independent but not definable either; ‘red’ entails ‘colour’ but can't be defined interms of it.

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A natural way to accommodate the residuum problem is to allow that some content-constitutive inferences don't arise from definitions after all. It's not that RED entails COLOUR because the definition of ‘red’ is COLOUR F; rather,RED just entails COLOUR full stop. Following the historical usage, I'll call a principle of inference that institutes a‘one way relation of entailment between lexical concepts a “meaning postulate”. Rules of lexically governed inferencethat happen to be biconditional, like ‘bachelor x unmarried man’, have no special status according to the theory thatmeaning postulates are what license lexically governed inferences. This version of Inferential Role Semantics istherefore weaker than the definitional account; the latter allows a lexical concept to enter into constitutive inferentialrelations only if it is definable.

From our perspective, the important consequence of this liberalization is that it disconnects the question whether an inference from C to Cx is content-constitutive from the question whether Cx is a syntactic part of C. Notice that it wasonly because definitions were required to be biconditional that they could be viewed as exhibiting the structuraldescription of a concept. UNMARRIED MAN can't be the structural description of BACHELOR unless‘BACHELOR and ‘UNMARRIED MAN denote the same concept. But BACHELOR and UNMARRIED MANcan't be the same concept unless ‘BACHELOR x UNMARRIED MAN ’ is true.

Detaching the question whether RED entails COLOUR from the question whether COLOUR is a constituent of RED has its virtues, to be sure. We've been seeing how weakly the empirical evidence supports claims for the internalstructure of lexical concepts. Meaning postulates allowone to give up such claims while holding onto both “red' means colour is analytic' and ‘you don't have RED unless youknow that red is a colour’. On the meaning postulate story, RED ^ COLOUR could be meaning-constitutive even ifneither RED nor COLOUR have any internal structure; i.e. even if it's atomic.

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But no free lunch, of course. We started out this chapter by remarking that one of the nicest things about the definition story was that it explains an otherwise striking and perplexing symmetry between the metaphysics of meaning and themetaphysics of concept possession: the very inferences that are supposed to define a concept are also the ones you have to accept inorder to possess the concept. This really is striking and perplexing and not at all truistic; remember, it isn't (can't be) true ofall necessary inferences—or even of all a priori inferences—that they determine the conditions for possessing theconcepts involved in them. Well, the theory that concepts are definitions gets this symmetry for free; it follows fromthe fact that definitions relate concepts to their constituents.Jean-marc pizano

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Frege to the contrary notwithstanding, it looks as though practically any linguisticdifference between prima facie synonymous expressions, merely syntactic differences distinctly included, can berecruited to block their substitution in some Mates context

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Jean-marc pizano Frege to the contrary notwithstanding, it looks as though practically any linguisticdifference between prima facie synonymous expressions, merely syntactic differences distinctly included, can berecruited to block their substitution in some Mates context or other. In thecurrent jargon, the individuation of the propositional attitudes apparently slices them about as thin as the syntacticindividuation of forms of words, hence not only thinner than reference can, but also thinner than sense can.

 

The other obstacle to saving the Frege programme was that it took for granted that the semantic question ‘How can coreferential concepts fail to be synonyms?’ gets the same answer as the psychological question ‘How can there bemore than one way of grasping a referent?’ The postulation of senses was supposed to answer both questions. Iargued, however, that given Frege's Platonism about senses, it's by no means obvious why his answer to the firstwould constitute an answer to the second; in effect, Frege simply stipulates their equivalence. I supposed the moral tobe that Frege's theoretical architecture needs to be explicitly psychologized. Modes of presentation need to be ‘in thehead’.

The short form is: the Frege programme needs something that is both in the head and of the right kind to distinguish coreferential concepts, and the Mates cases suggest that whatever is able to distinguish coreferential concepts is apt forsyntactic individuation. Put all this together and it does rather suggest that modes of presentation are syntacticallystructured mental particulars. Suggestion noted.

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The other research programme from which my budget of constraints on theories of concepts derived is the attempt, in cognitive science, to explain how a finite being might have intentional states and capacities that are productive andsystematic. This productivity/systematicity problem again has two parts: ‘Explain how there can be infinitely manypropositional attitudes each with its distinctive propositional object (i.e. each with its own content)’ and: ‘Explain howthere can be infinitely many propositional attitudes each with its distinctive causal powers (i.e. each with its own causalrole in mental processes).’ Here I have followed what Pylyshyn and I (Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988) called the ‘Classical’computational tradition that proceeds from Turing: mental representations are syntactically structured. Theirconditions of semantic evaluation and their causal powers both depend on their syntactic structures; the formerbecause mental representations have a compositional semantics that is sensitive to the syntactic relations among theirconstituents; the latter because mental processes are computations and are thus syntactically driven by definition. So theClassical account of productivity/systematicity points in much the same direction as the psychologized Fregeprogramme's account of the individuation of mental states: viz. towards syntactically structured mental particularswhose tokenings are matched, case for case, with tokenings of the de dicto propositional attitudes.

Syntactically structured mental particulars whose tokenings are matched, case for case, with tokenings of the de dicto propositionalattitudes are, of course, exactly what RTM has for sale. So RTM seems to be what both the Frege/Mates problems andthe productivity/systematicity problems converge on. If beliefs (and the like) are relations to syntactically structuredmental representations, there are indeed two parameters of belief individuation, just as Frege requires: Morning Starbeliefs have the same conditions of semantic evaluation as Evening Star beliefs, but they implicate the tokening ofdifferent syntactic objects and are therefore different beliefs with different causal powers. That believing P andbelieving Q may be different mental states even if ‘P and Q have the same semantic value shows up in the Matescontexts. That believing P and believingQ may have different causal powers even if ‘P and ‘Q have the same semanticvalue shows up in all those operas where the soprano dies of mistaken identity.

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So RTM looks like a plausible answer to several questions that one might have supposed to be unrelated. I hope that isn't an accident. This book runs on the assumption that it isn't, hence that we need RTM a lot. RTM, in turn, needs atheory of concepts a lot since compositionality says that the contents and causal powers of mental representations areboth inherited, eventually, from the contents and causal powers of their minimal constituents; viz. from the primitiveconcepts that they contain. RTM is simply no good without a viable theory of concepts.

So be it, then. Let's see what there might be on offer.

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None of this could be much comfort to a disconsolate Empiricist, since none of it is supposed to deny, even for a moment, that a lot of stuff that's domain specific or species specific or both has to be innate in order that we shouldcome to have the conce

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None of this could be much comfort to a disconsolate Empiricist, since none of it is supposed to deny, even for a moment, that a lot of stuff that's domain specific or species specific or both has to be innate in order that we shouldcome to have the concept DOORKNOB (or for that matter, the concept RED). But the issue isn't whether acquiringDOORKNOB requires a lot of innate stuff; anybody with any sense can see that it does. The issue is whether itrequires a lot of innate intentional stuff, a lot of innate stuff that has content. All the arguments I know that say thatinnate intentional stuff has to mediate concept acquisition depend on assuming either that concept acquisition isinductive or that the explanation of the d/D effect is psychological or both. Well, where a primitive concept expressesa mind-dependent property, it is very unclear that either of these kinds of argument will work.

Maybe there aren't any innate ideas after all.

Appendix 6A Similarity

‘Hey, aren't you just saying that all that has to be innate in a DOORKNOB-acquisition device is the capacity to learn to respond selectively to things that are relevantly similar to doorknobs? And didn’t Quine say that years ago?’

No, I'm not and no, he didn't. Not quite.

There are two ways to understand the claim that the process of acquiring DOORKNOB recruits an innate ‘similarity metric’. One is platitudinous, the other is committed to innate ideas—in effect, to the innateness of the conceptSIMILAR TO A DOORKNOB. The geography around here is pretty familiar, so we can settle for a quick tour.

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On the first way of running it, the similarity story is just the remark that, given appropriate experience of doorknobs, creatures like us converge on a capacity to respond selectively to things that are like doorknobs in respect of theirdoorknobhood. This is perfectly self-evidently true; nobody reasonable could wish to deny it. It doesn't, however, explainthe fact that we learn DOORKNOB from doorknobs; it just repeats the fact that we do. So construed, the similaritystory is completely neutral on the issues this chapter is concerned with, viz. whether the structures in virtue of whichwe are able to converge on selective sensitivity to doorknobhood need to be innate, and whether they need to beintentional.

On the other, unplatitudinous, way of running the similarity theory, it is itself a version of concept nativism: it's the thesis that what's innate is the concept SIMILAR TO A DOORKNOB. There seems, to put it mildly, to be no reasonto prefer that view to one that has DOORKNOB itself be innate. (Indeed, the first would seem to imply the second;since the concept SIMILAR TO A DOORKNOB is, on the face of it, a construct out of the concept DOORKNOB,it's hard to imagine how anyone could think the one concept unless he could also think the other.) None of thisbothers Quine much, of course, because he pretty explicitly assumes the Empiricist principle that the innatedimensions of similarity, along which experience generalizes, are sensory. But Empiricism isn't true, and it is time toput away childish things.

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Quine's story is that learning DOORKNOB is learning to respond selectivity to things that are similar to doorknobs. What the story amounts to depends, in short, on how beingsimilar to doorknobs is construed. Well, there's a dilemma: ifbeing similar to doorknobs is elucidated by appeal to doorknobhood, then the story is patently empty; ‘How is the conceptthat expresses doorknobhood acquired?’ is the very question that it was supposed to be the answer to. If, on the otherhand, being similar to

doorknobs is spelled out by reference to properties other than doorknobhood, Quine has to say which properties these are, where the concepts of these properties come from, and how radical nativism with respect to them is to be avoided.

Like Quine, I've opted for the second horn of the dilemma. But, unlike Quine, I'm no Empiricist. Accordingly, I can appeal to the doorknob stereotype to say what ‘similarity to doorknobs’ comes to, and—since ‘the doorknobstereotype’ is independently defined—I can do so without invoking the concept DOORKNOB and thereby courtingplatitude.

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By contrast,informational semantics contemplates the metaphysical possibility that there should be something that a conceptmeans (e.g. a property that it expresses) even though the concept enters into no constitutive inferential relations at all. Myadvice

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Jean-marc pizano By contrast,informational semantics contemplates the metaphysical possibility that there should be something that a conceptmeans (e.g. a property that it expresses) even though the concept enters into no constitutive inferential relations at all. Myadvice is, therefore: if you want to say what compositionality appears to require you to—that what a conceptcontributes to its hosts is what it means—you'd better mean by ‘what it means’ not its inferential role but somethinglike the information that it carries, where, by assumption, RED carries information about redness.

 

Inferential role semantics is bankrupt. Because cognitive science has swallowed Inferential Role Semantics whole, its treatment of concepts is bankrupt too; it keeps writing cheques on a theory of meaning that isn't there. It is very naughtyto write cheques that you can't cash, and it's past time for cognitive science to kick the habit. Chapters 6 and 7 will beabout that.

Appendix 5A Meaning Postulates

Prototypes dissociate two issues that definition theories treat together: What is the structure of a lexical concept? and What modal inferences do you have to accept to have the lexical concept X? On the definition story, both these questions get answeredby reference to the relations between concepts and their parts: lexical concepts typically have constituent structure,much like phrasal concepts; and if the concept C is a constituent of the concept X, then you don't have X unless youbelieve that Xs are necessarilyCs. The argument between definitions and prototypes is over the second of these claims.

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But it's worth noting that the question whether lexical concepts have constituent structure can be dissociated from both the question whether inferences constitute content and whether what makes an inference content-constitutive issomething about its modality. Inferential role semantics doesn't have to claim that lexical concepts are structurally complex if itdoesn't want to. In particular, it doesn't have to claim that the

inferences which constitute a concept's content are defined over its constituent structure.

There may be several motivations for separating the question whether (and which) inferences constitute content from the question whether typical lexical concepts are structurally complex. Some philosophers do so because they want tohold on to intuitions of analyticity in face of the mounting empirical evidence that lexical concepts generally behave likeatoms by either linguistic or psychological criteria. And there's an independent, semantical argument as well; it's knownin the lexical semantics literature as the ‘residuum problem’.

In the most familiar cases, lexically governed inferences are supposed to follow from definitions by an analogue to simplification of conjunction. Thus, ‘bachelor’ entails unmarried because its definition is ‘male andunmarried and the ‘and’works in the usual truth-conditional way. This treatment fits naturally with the idea that concepts are bundles ofsemantic features, each of which express a property of the (actual or possible) things that the concept subsumes.

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Now, it's natural to assume that if there is a property corresponding to the feature bundle Fp F2, . . . , F’, then there should also be a property corresponding to the bundle ‘F1, F2, . . . , Fn-1’. So, for example, what's left when you take theunmarried out of the definition of ‘bachelor’ is the definition of ‘male’; and what's left when you take the male out of thedefinition of ‘bachelor’ is the definition of ‘unmarried’. Just as the result of simplifying a conjunctive predicate is alwaysitself a predicate, so the result of simplifying a feature bundle is always itself a feature bundle.

But there are cases of lexically governed entailment which appear not to follow this model; ‘red ^ colour’ is a paradigm. According to the definition story, this inference should be the simplification of a complex concept (thedefinition of ‘red&rsquo which has the form: Fj,. . . , COLOUR, ... ’; but, on reflection, it's hard to see what could go in forthe Fj’. A male is something that is just like a bachelor but not necessarily married; but what is just like red but notnecessarily a colour? If you take the ‘COLOUR’ out of the definition of ‘red’, what you're left with doesn't seem to be apossible meaning, the residuum of ‘red ^ coloured’ is apparently a surd. Or, to put it the other way round, it looks likethe only thing that could combine with ‘COLOURED’ to mean red is ‘RED’.Jean-marc pizano

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A classic case of getting off lightly by pleading to the lesser charge.

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Jean-marc pizano A classic case of getting off lightly by pleading to the lesser charge.

 

for an ontology of mental dispositions rather than an ontology of mental particulars. This sort of situation will be familiar to old hands; proposing dispositional analyses in aid of ontological reductions is the method of criticalphilosophy that Empiricism taught us. If you are down on cats, reduce them to permanent possibilities of sensation. Ifyou are down on electrons and protons, reduce them to permanent possibilities of experimental outcomes. And so on.There is, however, a salient difference between reductionism about cats and reductionism about concepts: perhapssome people think that they ought to think that cats are constructs out of possible experiences, but surely nobodyactually does think so; one tolerates a little mauvaisefoi in metaphysics. Apparently, however, lots of people do think thatconcepts are constructs out of mental (specifically epistemic) capacities. In consequence, and this is a considerationthat I take quite seriously, whereas nobody builds biological theories on the assumption that cats are sensations, muchof our current cognitive science, and practically all of our current philosophy of mind, is built on the assumption thatconcepts are capacities. If that assumption is wrong, very radical revisions are going to be called for. So, at least, I'llargue.

To sum up so far: it's entirely plausible that a theory of what concepts are must likewise answer the question ‘What is it to have a concept?’ and, mutatis mutandis, that a theory of meaning must answer the question ‘What is it to understand alanguage?’ We've been seeing, however, that this untendentious methodological demand often comports with asubstantive metaphysical agenda: viz. the reduction of concepts and meanings to epistemic capacities.

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Thus Michael Dummett (1993a: 4), for one illustrious example, says that “any theory of meaning which was not, or did not immediately yield, a theory of understanding, would not satisfy the purpose for which, philosophically, we require atheory of meaning”. There is, as previously remarked, a reading on which this is true but harmless since whateverontological construal of the meaning of an expression we settle on will automatically provide a corresponding construal ofunderstanding the expression as grasping its meaning. It is not, however, this truism that Dummett is commending. Rather,he has it in mind that an acceptable semantics must explicate linguistic content just by reference to the “practical”capacities that users of a language have qua users of that language. (Correspondingly, a theory that explicates the notionof conceptual content would do so just by reference to the practical capacities that having the concept bestows.)Moreover, if I read him right, Dummett intends to impose this condition in a very strong form: the capacities uponwhich linguistic meaning supervenes must be such as can be severally and determinately manifested in behaviour. “Anaxiom earns its place in the

theory [of meaning] . . . only to the extent that it is required for the derivation of theorems the ascription of an implicit knowledge of which to a speaker is explained in terms of specific abilities which manifest that knowledge (1993b: 38; myemphasis).

I don't know for sure why Dummett believes that, but I darkly suspect that he's the victim of atavistic sceptical anxieties about communication. Passages like the following recur in his writings:

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What . . . constitutes a subject's understanding the sentences of a language . . . ? [I]s it his having internalized a certain theory of meaning for that language? . . . then indeed his behaviour when he takes part in linguisticinterchange can at best be strong but fallible evidence for the internalized theory. In that case, however, the hearer'spresumption that he has understood the speaker can never be definitively refuted or confirmed. (1993c: 180; noticehow much work the word ‘definitively5 is doing here.)

So, apparently, the idea is that theories about linguistic content should reduce to theories about language use; and theories about language use should reduce to theories about the speaker's linguistic capacities; and theories about thespeaker's linguistic capacities are constrained by the requirement that any capacity that is constitutive of the knowledgeof a language is one that the speaker's use of the language can overtly and specifically manifest. All this must be in aidof devising a bullet-proof anti-scepticism about communication, since it would seem that for purposes other thanrefuting sceptics, all the theory of communication requires is that a speaker's utterances reliably cause certain ‘innerprocesses’ in the hearer; specifically, mental processes which eventuate in the hearer having the thought that thespeaker intended him to have.

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Which, according to me, is also the conclusion that we should draw from theavailable nonphilosophical evidence. Convergence is bliss.

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Jean-marc pizano Which, according to me, is also the conclusion that we should draw from theavailable nonphilosophical evidence. Convergence is bliss.

 

This story I'm about to tell you needs, however, some heavy duty assumptions whose status is itself much in dispute. I propose to set these out in a relatively leisurely and extended way, hoping thereby to illuminate several aspects ofconceptual atomism as well as the present issues about the nature of analyticity intuitions. I claim for my assumptionsonly that none of them is known to be false. Beyond that, it's the usual methodological situation: if my story is plausible,that argues for my assumptions; if my assumptions are plausible, that argues for my story. For the moment, all I ask isthe temporary suspension of your disbelief.

First Assumption: Informational Semantics

I continue to take for granted, as I've been doing all along of course, that semantic facts are somehow constituted by nomic relations. To a zero'th approximation, the fact that DOG means dog (and hence the fact “dog” does) isconstituted by a nomic connection between two properties of dogs; viz. being dogs and being causes of actual and possibleDOG tokenings in us.3 As those of you who follow the literature on informational semantics will be aware, it's a littletricky to get the details of this nomological story about content just right. Never mind. My point will be the modestone that if informational semantics can be sustained, that would give us a leg up on accounting for such intuitions asthat it's analytic that bachelors are unmarried and that Tuesdays come before Wednesdays.

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I hope you will find even this modest claim surprising. It's generally thought that, because informational semantics is inherently atomistic, intuitions of intrinsic conceptual connectedness are among its chief embarrassments.Informational semantics denies that “dog” means dog because of the way that it is related to other linguisticexpressions (“animal” or “barks”, as it might be). Correspondingly, informational semantics denies that the conceptDOG has its content in virtue of its position in a network of conceptual relations. So, then, the intuition that there areother concepts that anybody who has DOG must also have is

Since “dog” means dog, informational semantics requires that there be such a property as being a dog Mutatis mutandis, since “Tuesday” means Tuesday, informational semantics requires that there be such a property as being a Tuesday (a highly mind-dependent, highly relational property, presumably, of certain segments of space-time). Isympathize if you’re inclined to gag on this rich ontology. But that one should do the ontology last is among my religious principles, so please hold on till Chapter 6.

one that informational semantics can make no sense of. Intuitions of conceptual connection are the bane of informational semantics; so goes the usual account of the geography. But, I want to redraw the map a little: it's one question whetherinformational semantics rules out conceptual connections that are constitutive of concept possession. It does, andtherefore so do I. But it's quite a different question whether informational semantics rules out there being intuitions asof such conceptual connections. It doesn't, and I don't either. In fact, I think that there clearly are such intuitions andthat informational semantics helps explain them.

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I pause, while I'm at it, to rub in a distinction that keeps coming up, and that's once again germane. What surely doesn't embarrass informational semantics, not even prima facie, is the intuition that there is a necessary connection between beinga dog and being an animal, or between being a bachelor and being unmarried, or between being a Tuesday and being the day beforeWednesday. For informational semantics is a theory of content, and these necessities might all be viewed as metaphysicalrather than semantic. (For example, they might be supposed to arise out of property identities.)

The problem for informational semantics comes not from intuitions that the connection between being Tuesday and coming before Wednesday is necessary, but from intuitions that it's constitutive in the sense that one can't have one of theconcepts unless one has the other. Compare water is H2O and two is prime. Presumably though both are necessary,neither is constitutive.Jean-marc pizano

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Idealism followed, of course.

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Jean-marc pizano Idealism followed, of course.

 

It is possible to feel that these various ways of motivating IRS, historically effective though they clearly were, are much less than overwhelmingly persuasive. For example, on reflection, it doesn't seem that languages are a lot like gamesafter all: queens and pawns don't mean anything, whereas ‘dog’ means dog. That's why, though you can't translate thequeen into French (or, a fortiori, into checkers), you can translate ‘dog’ into ‘chien’. It's perhaps unwise to insist on ananalogy that misses so glaring a difference.

Phonemes don't mean anything either, so prima facie, pace Saussure, “having a phonological value” and “having a semantic value” would seem to be quite different sorts of properties. Even if it were right that phonemes areindividuated by their contrasts and equivalences—which probably they aren't—that wouldn't be much of a reason toclaim that words or concepts are also individuated that way.

If, in short, one asks to hear some serious arguments for IRS, one discovers, a bit disconcertingly, that they are very thin upon the ground. I think that IRS is most of what is wrong with current theorizing in cognitive science and themetaphysics of meaning. But I don't suppose for a minute that any short argument will, or should, persuade you toconsider junking it. I expect that will need a long argument; hence this long book. Long arguments take longer thanshort arguments, but they do sometimes create conviction.

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Accordingly, my main subject in what follows will be not the history of

IR semantics, or the niceties of its formulation, or its evidential status, but rather its impact on empirical theories of concepts. The central consideration will be this: If you wish to hold that the content of a concept is constituted by theinferences that it enters into, you are in need of a principled way of deciding which inferences constitute which concepts. Whatprimarily distinguishes the cognitive theories we'll consider is how they answer this question. My line will be that,though as far as anybody knows the answers they offer exhaust the options, pretty clearly none of them can be right.Not, NB, that they are incoherent, or otherwise confused; just that they fail to satisfy the empirical constraints ontheories of concepts that I've been enumerating, and are thus, almost certainly, false.

At that point, I hope that abandoning IRS in favour of the sort of atomistic, informational semantics that I tentatively endorsed in Chapter 1 will begin to appear to be the rational thing to do. I'll say something in Chapter 6 about whatthis sort of alternative to IRS might be like.

So much for the first of my two concluding addenda. Here is the second:

I promised you in Chapter 1 that I wouldn't launch yet another defence of RTM; I proposed—aside from my admittedly tendentious endorsement of informational semantics—simply to take RTM for granted as the context inwhich problems about the nature of concepts generally arise these days. I do mean to stick to this policy. Mostly. But Ican't resist rounding off these two introductory chapters by remarking how nicely the pieces fit when you put them alltogether. I'm going to exercise my hobby-horse after all, but only a little.

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In effect, in these introductory discussions, we've been considering constraints on a theory of cognition that emerge from two widely different, and largely independent, research enterprises. On the one hand, there's the attempt to savethe architecture of a Fregean—viz. a purely referential—theory of meaning by taking seriously the idea that conceptscan be distinguished by their ‘modes of presentation’ of their extensions. It's supposed to be modes of presentationthat answer the question ‘How can coreferential concepts be distinct?’ Here Frege's motives concur with those ofInformational Semantics; since both are referential theories of content, both need a story about how thinking about theMorning Star could be different from thinking about the Evening Star, given that the two thoughts are connected withthe same ‘thing in the world’.

The project of saving the Frege programme faces two major hurdles. First, ‘Mates cases’ appear to show that modes of presentations can't be senses.Jean-marc pizano

Похожие записи:

1. 3 The Demise of Definitions, Part I: The Linguist'sTale

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And, given the intimate relation between intrinsic conceptual connections and definitions, perhapswe had also better not take for granted that there are none of the latter.

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Jean-marc pizano And, given the intimate relation between intrinsic conceptual connections and definitions, perhapswe had also better not take for granted that there are none of the latter.

 

There is quite a lot that one might say here, both on matters of exegesis and on matters of substance. I am, myself, inclined to think it's pretty clear after all how Quine's main argument against analyticity is supposed to run: namely, thatnobody has been able to draw a serious and unquestion-begging distinction between conceptual connections that arereliable because they are intrinsic/constitutive and conceptual connections that are reliable although they aren't; andthat it would explain the collapse of this project if there were, in fact, no such distinction. Moreover, since I supposeinformational semantics to be more or less true, I think we can now see why Quine was right about there not being ananalytic/synthetic distinction. Informational semantics is atomistic; it denies that the grasp of any interconceptualrelations is constitutive of concept possession. (More on this below)

I don't, however, propose to refight these old battles here. Rather, I want to concentrate on the argument that the very fact that we have intuitions of analyticity makes a formidable case for there being intrinsic conceptual connections. I amsympathetic to the tactics of this argument. First blush, it surely does seem plausible that bachelors are unmarried is adifferent kind of truth from, as it might be, it often rains in January; and it's not implausible, again first blush, that thedifference is that the first truth, but not the second, is purely conceptual. I agree, in short, that assuming thatthey can't be otherwise accounted for, the standard intuitions offer respectable evidence for there being cases ofintrinsic conceptual connectedness. Sheer goodness of heart prompts me also to concede the stipulation that if aconceptual connection is constitutive, then it constrains concept possession. (Note that it doesn't follow, and that I don'tconcede, that if a conceptual connection is necessary it constrains concept possession. More about this presently too.)

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I also agree that the standard deflationary account of analyticity intuitions, viz. Quine's appeal to ‘theoretical centrality,’ is unpersuasive for many cases. If ‘F = MA strikes one as true by definition, that may be because so much of one'sfavourite story about the mechanics of middle-sized objects depends on it. But appeal to centrality doesn't seem nearlyso persuasive to explain why we're conservative about bachelors being unmarried and Tuesdays coming beforeWednesdays. Quite the contrary; if one is inclined to think of these as ‘merely’ conceptual truths, that's preciselybecause nothing appears to hang on them. It is, to speak with the vulgar, just a matter of what you mean by ‘bachelor’and by ‘Tuesday’.

So, here's what I take the geography to be: on the one hand, concepts can't be definitions unless some sense can be made of intrinsic conceptual connection, analyticity, and the like; and there are the familiar Quinean reasons to doubt that anysense can be. But, on the other hand, there are lots of what would seem to be intuitions of intrinsic conceptualconnectedness, and that's a prima face argument that perhaps there are intrinsic conceptual connections after all. Ifthere are, then a crucial necessary condition for concepts to be definitions is in place. If there aren't, then what areusually taken to be intuitions of intrinsic conceptual connectedness must really be intuitions of something else and theywill have to be explained away. As between these options, you pay your money and you place your bets.

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I propose, in the rest of this chapter, to try to explain the intuitions away. I'll sketch an account of them which, like Quine's story about centrality, is loosely epistemic, but which seems to me to work well just where appealing tocentrality doesn't. The next to the bottom line will be that soi-disant intuitions of conceptual connectedness are perhapsa mixed bag, sometimes to be explained by appealing to centrality, sometimes to be explained by appealing to myFactor X, but rarely, if ever, to be explained by appealing to the constitutive conditions for concept possession. Thebottom line will be that the existence of the putative intuitions of analyticity offers no very robust evidence thatconceptual connectedness can be made sense of, so probably the Quinean arguments hold good, so probably notionslike definition can't be sustained, so probably the conclusion that we should draw from the available philosophicalevidenceis that concepts aren't definitions.Jean-marc pizano

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Butso long as IRS is common ground for everyone concerned, this is an argument that the classical theorists are bound towin. That's because, except for definitional inferences, inferential roles themselves don’t compose.

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Jean-marc pizano Butso long as IRS is common ground for everyone concerned, this is an argument that the classical theorists are bound towin. That's because, except for definitional inferences, inferential roles themselves don’t compose.

 

Compositionality says that, whatever content is, constituents must yield theirs to their hosts and hosts must derive theirs from their constituents. Roughly, the first half is required because whatever is true of cows as such or of brownthings as such is ipso facto true of brown cows. And the second half is required because, if the content of BROWNCOW is not fully determined by the content of BROWN and the content of COW (together with syntactic structure),then grasping BROWN and COW isn't sufficient for grasping BROWN COW, and the standard explanation ofproductivity is undone.

Now, complying with the first half of this constraint is easy for IRS since BROWN contributes to BROWN COW not only its content-constitutive inferences (whichever those may be), but every inference that holds of brown things ingeneral.60 If whatever is a cow is an animal, then brown cows are animals a fortiori. If whatever is brown is square,then, a fortiori, every brown cow is a square cow

But the second half of the compositionality constraint is tricky for an

If all of BROWN’s inferential role is content-constitutive, so be it; BROWN contributes its whole inferential role to BROWN COW, so compositionality isn’t violated. Holism is compatible with compositionality. As far as I know, that’s its only virtue.

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IRS. If nothing can belong to the content of BROWN COW except what it inherits either from BROWN or from COW, then the content of BROWN COW can't be its whole inferential role. For, of course, all sorts of inferences canhold of brown cows (not qua brown or qua cows but) simply as such. That's because all sorts of things can be true ofbrown cows that aren't true either of brown things in general or of cows in general; that they are brown cows is anegregious example.

If an X-kind of inference is required to be such that constituents contribute all their X-inferences to their hosts, and hosts inherit their X-inferences only from their constituents, then only defining inferences will do as candidates for X:the inferential role of a complex concept is exhaustively determined by the inferential roles of its constituents only withrespect to its defining inferences.20 That statistical inferences fail to compose is just a special case of this general truth.The pet fish problem is therefore not a fluke. Either the classical, definitional version of IRS is right, or no version canbe.

So here's the impasse: prototypes are public (i.e. they are widely shared) and they are psychologically real, so they do meet two of the non-negotiable conditions that concepts are required to meet; but they aren't compositional.Definitions would be compositional if there were any, but there aren't, so they're not. As things stand, there is no version ofthe inferential role theory of conceptual content for which compositionality and psychological reality can both be clamed. I think theremust be something wrong with inferential role theories of content.

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X modest proposal:

—“All right, all right; but if constituent concepts don't contribute their definitions or their prototypes to their complex hosts, what do they contribute?”

—Duck soup. They contribute what they mean; e.g. the properties that they express. What PET contributes to PET FISH is the property of being a pet, what FISH contributes to PET FISH is the property of being a fish. It's because PETcontributes pet to PET FISH and FISH contributes fish to PET FISH that PET FISH entails PET and FISH. And it'sbecause pet and fish exhaust the content of PET FISH that PET, FISH entails PET FISH. There are, to be sure, hardcases for this sort of analysis (what do RISING and TEMPERATURE contribute to THE RISING

TEMPERATURE?), but they are just the cases that are hard for compositionality on any known view.

—“Oh bother, why didn't I think of that?”

—Presumably because the metaphysics that you had in mind says that meaning is constituted by inferential roles; in which case, the present proposal is no better off than the ones that we've just been discussing.Jean-marc pizano

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The model, to repeat, is being red: all that's required for us to get locked to redness is that red things should reliably seem to us as they do, in fact, reliably seem to the visually unimpaired. Correspondingly, all that needs to be innate for REDto be

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The model, to repeat, is being red: all that's required for us to get locked to redness is that red things should reliably seem to us as they do, in fact, reliably seem to the visually unimpaired. Correspondingly, all that needs to be innate for REDto be acquired is whatever the mechanisms are that determine that red things strike us as they do; which is to say thatall that needs to be innate is the sensorium. Ditto, mutatis mutandis, for DOORKNOB if being a doorknob is like being red:what has to be innately given to get us locked to doorknobhood is whatever mechanisms are required for doorknobs tocome to strike us as such. Put slightly differently: if the locking story about concept possession and the mind-dependence story about the metaphysics of doorknobhood are both true, then the kind of nativism about DOORKNOBthat an informational atomist has to put up with is perhaps not one of concepts but of mechanisms. That consequence maybe some consolation to otherwise disconsolate Empiricists.

I suppose the philosophically interesting question about whether there are innate ideas is whether there are innate ideas. It is, after all, the thought that the ‘initial state’ from which concept acquisition proceeds must be specified inintentional terms (terms like ‘content’, ‘belief’, etc.) that connects the issues about concept innateness with theepistemological issues about a prioricity and the like. (By contrast, I suppose the ethologically interesting question is notwhether what's innate is strictly speaking intentional, but whether it is domain specific and/or species specific. Perhapsyou find the ethologically interesting question more interesting than the philosophically interesting question. Andperhaps you're right to do so. Still, they are different questions.) Correspondingly, the ‘innate sensorium’ model suggeststhat the question how much is innate in concept acquisition can be quite generally dissociated from the questionwhether any concepts are innate. The sensorium is innate by assumption, and there would quite likely be no acquiringsensory concepts but that this is so. But, to repeat, the innateness of the sensorium isn't the innateness of anything thathas intentional content. Since the sensorium isn't an idea, it is a fortiori not an innate idea. So, strictly speaking, theinnate sensorium model of the acquisition of RED doesn't require that it, or any other concept, be innate.

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To be sure, RED and DOORKNOB could both be innate for all I've said so far. But the main motivation for saying that they are is either that one finds inductivist theories of concept acquisition intrinsically attractive, or that noticingthe d/D effect has convinced one that some such theory must be true whether or not it's attractive. Well, SA blocksthe first motivation. And, as we've been seeing, it may be that the explanation of the d/D effect is metaphysical ratherthan psychological. In which case, unless I've missed something, there isn't any obvious reason why the initial state forDOORKNOB acquisition needs to be intentionally specified. A fortiori, there isn't any obvious reason whyDOORKNOB needs to be innate. NOT EVEN IF IT'S PRIMITIVE. The moral of all this may be that though therehas to be a story to tell about the structural requirements for acquiring DOORKNOB, intentional vocabulary isn'trequired to tell it. In which case, it isn't part of cognitive psychology.

Not even of “cognitive neuropsychology”, if there is such a thing (which I doubt). Suppose we were able to specify, in neurological vocabulary, the initial state from which DOORKNOB acquisition proceeds. The question would thenarise whether the neurological state so specified is intentional—whether it has conditions of semantic evaluation (and,if so, what they are). So far, we haven't found a reason for supposing that it does. To be sure, it is an innate, possiblyquite complicated, state from which DOORKNOB may be acquired, given experience of e.g. doorknobs. But this is allneutral as to whether the initial state is an intentional state; it's all true whether or not the initial state is an intentional state.So it's all true whether or not the initial state for DOORKNOB acquisition is in the domain of cognitiveneuropsychology (as opposed, as it were, to neuropsychology tout court).

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Concept X isjust: whatever it is that having the concept X consists in having. Moreover, the new consensus is that you really must take thingsin that order; the sanctions incurred if you go the other way round are said to be terrific. (Similarly, mutatis

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Jean-marc pizano Concept X isjust: whatever it is that having the concept X consists in having. Moreover, the new consensus is that you really must take thingsin that order; the sanctions incurred if you go the other way round are said to be terrific. (Similarly, mutatis mutandis forbeing the meaning of a word vs. knowing the meaning of a word. Here and elsewhere, I propose to move back and forth prettyfreely between concepts and word meanings; however it may turn out in the long run, for purposes of the presentinvestigation word meanings just are concepts.)

 

You might reasonably wonder how there possibly could be this stark methodological asymmetry. We've just been seeing that the link between ‘is an X and ‘has an X is conceptual; fix one and you thereby fix the other. How, then,could there be an issue of principle about which you should start with? The answer is that when philosophers take astrong lineon a methodological issue there's almost sure to be a metaphysical subtext. The present case is not an exception.

On the one side, people who start in the traditional way by asking ‘What are concepts?’ generally hold to a traditional metaphysics according to which a concept is a kind of mental particular. I hope that this idea will get clearer and cleareras we go along. Suffice it, for now, that the thesis that concepts are mental particulars is intended to imply that having aconcept is constituted by having a mental particular, and hence to exclude the thesis that having a concept is, in anyinteresting sense, constituted by having mental traits or capacities.2 You may say, if you like, that having concept X ishaving the ability to think about Xs (or better, that having the concept Xis being able to think about Xs ‘as such&rsquo. But,though that's true enough, it doesn't alter the metaphysical situation as traditionally conceived. For thinking about Xsconsists in having thoughts about Xs, and thoughts are supposed to be mental particulars too.

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On the other side, people who start with ‘What is concept possession?’ generally have some sort of Pragmatism in mind as the answer. Having a concept is a matter of what you are able to do, it's some kind of epistemic ‘know how’. Maybehaving the concept X comes to something like being reliably able to recognize Xs and/ or being reliably able to draw sound inferences about Xness..3 In any case, an account that renders having concepts as having capacities is intended to preclude anaccount that renders concepts as species of mental particulars: capacities aren't kinds of things, a fortiori, they aren'tkinds of mental things.

So, to repeat, the methodological doctrine that concept possession is logically prior to concept individuation frequently manifests a preference

2 I want explicitly to note what I’ve come to think of as a cardinal source of confusion in this area. If concept tokens are mental particulars, then having a concept is being in arelation to a mental particular. This truism about the possession conditions for concepts continues to hold whatever doctrine you may embrace about how concepts tokens getassigned to concept types. Suppose Jones’s TIGER-concept is a mental token that plays a certain (e.g. causal) role in his mental life. That is quite compatible with supposingthat what makes it a token of the type TIGER-concept (rather than a token of the type MOUSE-concept; or not a token of a concept type at all) is something dispositional;viz. the dispositional properties of the token (as opposed, say, to its weight or colour or electric charge).The discussion currently running in the text concerns the relationbetween theories about the ontological status of concepts and theories about what it is to have a concept. Later, and at length, we’ll consider the quite different question howconcept tokens are typed.

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3 Earlier, less sophisticated versions of the view that the metaphysics of concepts is parasitic on the metaphysics of concept possession were generally not merely pragmatistbut also behaviourist: they contemplated reducing concept possession to a capacity for responding selectively. The cognitive revolutions in psychology and the philosophy ofmind gagged on behaviourism, but never doubted that concepts are some sort of capacities or other.Jean-marc pizano

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1. Idealism followed, of course.

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In succeeding chapters, I'll consider three stories about what concepts are; viz. that they are definitions; that they are prototypes/ stereotypes; and (briefly)something called the ‘theory theory’ which says, as far as I can make out, that co

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Jean-marc pizano In succeeding chapters, I'll consider three stories about what concepts are; viz. that they are definitions; that they are prototypes/ stereotypes; and (briefly)something called the ‘theory theory’ which says, as far as I can make out, that concepts are abstractions from beliefsystems. I'll argue that each of these theories violates at least one of the non-negotiable constraints; and that it does so,so to speak, not a little bit around the edges but egregiously and down the middle. We will then have to consider what,if any, options remain for developing a theory of concepts suitable to the purposes of an RTM.

 

Before we settle down to this, however, there are a last couple of preliminary points that I want to put in place.

Here is the first: although I'm distinguishing three theories of concepts for purposes of exposition and attack, and though supporters of each of these theories have traditionally wanted to distance themselves as much as possible fromsupporters of the others, still all three theories are really versions of one and the same idea about content. I want tostress this since I'm going to argue that it is primarily because of what they agree about that all three fail.

The theories of concepts we'll be considering all assume a metaphysical thesis which, as I remarked in Chapter 1, I propose to reject: namely, that primitive concepts, and (hence) their possession conditions, are at least partlyconstituted by their inferential relations. (That complex concepts—BROWN COW, etc.—and their possessionconditions are exhaustively constituted by their inferential relations to their constituent concepts is not in dispute; tothe contrary, compositionality requires it, and compositionality isn't negotiable.) The current near-universal acceptanceof Inferential Role Semantics in cognitive science marks a radical break with the preceding tradition in theories aboutmind and language: pre-modern theories typically supposed that primitive concepts are individuated by their (e.g.iconic or causal) relations to things in the world. The history of the conversion of cognitive scientists to IR semanticswould make a book by itself; a comedy, I think, though thus far without a happy ending:

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—In philosophy, the idea was pretty explicitly to extend the Logicist treatment of logical terms into the non-logical vocabulary; if IF and SOME can be identified with their inferential roles, why not TABLE and TREE as well?

—In linguistics, the idea was to extend to semantics the Structuralist notion that a level of grammatical description is a ‘system of differences’: if their relations of equivalence and contrast are what bestow phonological values on speechsounds, why shouldn't their relations of implication and exclusion be what bestow semantic values on forms of words?

—In AI, the principle avatar of IRS was ‘procedural semantics’, a deeply misguided attempt to extend the principle of ‘methodological solipsism’ from the theory of mental processes to the theory of meaning: if a mental process (thinking,perceiving, remembering, and the like) can be ‘purely computational’ why can't conceptual content be purelycomputational too? If computers qua devices that perform inferences can think, why can't computers qua devices thatperform inferences mean?

—I don't know how psychology caught IRS; perhaps it was from philosophy, linguistics, and AI. (I know one eminent developmental psychologist who certainly caught it from Thomas Kuhn.) Let that be an object lesson in the danger ofmixing disciplines. Anyhow, IRS got to bethe fashion in psychology too. Perhaps the main effect of the “cognitive revolution” was that espousing some or otherversion of IRS became the received way for a psychologist not to be a behaviourist.

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So, starting around 1950, practically everybody was saying that the “ ‘Fido”—Fido fallacy’ is fallacious,24 and that concepts (/words) are like chess pieces: just as there can't be a rook without a queen, so there can't be a DOG withoutan ANIMAL. Just as the value of the rook is partly determined by its relation to the queen, so the content of DOG ispartly determined by its relation to ANIMAL. Content is therefore a thing that can only happen internal to systems ofsymbols (or internal to languages, or, on some versions, internal to forms of life). It was left to ‘literary theory’ toproduce the reductio ad absurdum (literary theory is good at that): content is constituted entirely by intra-symbolicrelations; just as there's nothing ‘outside’ the chess game that matters to the values of the pieces, so too there's nothingoutside the text that matters to what it means.Jean-marc pizano