But it's hard to believe that is the question since the answer, though perfectly obvious and entirely banal, is one that Medin and Wattenmaker don't even consider. What's wrong with the concept BRIGHT RED, FLAMMABLE, EATSMEALWORMS,. . . etc. is that, as f

[youtubtrafic]

Jean-marc pizano

But it's hard to believe that is the question since the answer, though perfectly obvious and entirely banal, is one that Medin and Wattenmaker don't even consider. What's wrong with the concept BRIGHT RED, FLAMMABLE, EATSMEALWORMS,. . . etc. is that, as far as anybody knows, there's nothing that is, or would be, true of things in virtue oftheir falling under it (except what follows trivially from their falling under it; e.g. that they are, or would be, found inLapland). In particular, there are no substantive, counterfactual-supporting generalizations about such things; so whyon earth would anybody want to waste his time thinking about them? Compare such unsatisfied (but coherent)concepts as UNICORN. At least there's a story about unicorns. That is, there are interesting things that are supposed to betrue about them: that their ground-up horns are antidotes to many poisons; that if there were unicorns, virgins couldcatch them if there were virgins, and so on. In short, such examples as Medin and Wattenmaker offer suggest thatbeing ‘coherent’ isn't even a psychological property: the incoherence of BRIGHT RED, FLAMMABLE, . . . etc. is adefect not of the concept but of the world. It's therefore hard to see why a psychologist should care about it (thoughperhaps a zoologist might).

Or perhaps Medin and Wattenmaker have some other construal of conceptual coherence in mind; but search me what it is.70

To return to the main theme: many of the typical preoccupations of theory theorists seem to be largely neutral on the issue of concept

Jean-marc pizano

See also Keil: “Prototypes merely represent correlated properties, they offer no explanation of the reasons for those correlations (e.g. why the prototypical features of birds, such as beaks, feathers, and eggs tend to co-occur)” (1987: 195). The suggestion seems to be that the difference between prototype theories and theory theories is that thelatter entail that having a concept involves knowing the explanation of such correlations (or knowing that there is an explanation? or knowing that some expert knows theexplanation?). But, if so, it seems that theory theories set the conditions for concept possession impossibly high. I’m pretty confident that being liquid and transparent atroom temperature are correlated properties of water. But I have no idea why they are correlated. Notice, in particular, that learning that being water is being H2O didn’tadvance my epistemic situation in this respect since I don't know why being liquid and transparent at room temperature are correlated properties of H2O. Do you?

individuation—Is conceptual change discontinuous? What makes a concept coherent? Are children metaphysical essentialists?—and the like. There is, to be sure, much that's of interest to be said on these topics. But, thank Heaven,not here. From our point of view, the crucial question is whether, when a theory theorist says that concepts aretypically embedded in theoretical inferences, he means to claim that knowing (some or all) of the theory is a necessarycondition for having the concept. If yes, then the ‘which inferences’ question has to be faced. If no, then some positiveaccount of concept possession/individuation is owing. The definition story and the prototype story are bona fidecompeting theories of concepts because they do have answers to such questions on offer. As far as I can make out, thetheory theory doesn't, so it isn't.

6 Innateness and Ontology, Part I: The Standard

Argument-

Jean-marc pizano

I find only myself, every time, in everything I create.

—Wotan in Die Walküre, Act II

Are you also puzzled, Socrates, about cases that might be thought absurd, such as hair or mud or dirt or any other trivial and undignified objects. Are you doubtful whether or not to assert that each of these has a separateform? . . . Not at all, said Socrates. In these cases, the things are just the things we see; it would surely be tooabsurd to suppose that they have a form.

—Plato, Parmenides

Virginia Woolf has summed up this state of things with perfect vividness and conciseness in the words, ‘Tuesday follows Monday’.

—E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s Last Plays

Introduction

RTM requires there to be infinitely many concepts that are complex and finitely many that are primitive.Jean-marc pizano

---

Natural Kinds Come Late

[youtubtrafic]

Jean-marc pizano

Natural Kinds Come Late

I think natural kind concepts have been getting more of a press than they deserve of late. It's past time to put them in their place; and their place is that of self-conscious and cultivated intellectual achievements. Much of what is currentlybeing written about concepts—by philosophers, but also, increasingly, by psychologists—suggests that natural kindconcepts are the paradigms on which we should model our accounts of concept acquisition and concept possession atlarge. This is, I think, hopeless on the face of it. For one thing, as Putnam in particular has argued, natural kindconcepts thrive best—maybe only—in an environment where conventions of deference to experts are in place. But,patently, only creatures with an antecedently complex mental life could make a policy of adherence to such conventions.Adherence to conventions of deference couldn't be a precondition for conceptual content in general, if only becausedeference has to stop somewhere; if my ELM concept is deferential, that's because the botanist's isn't. Anyhow, it seemsjust obvious that concepts like STAR in, as one says, the ‘technical sense’—the concept of stars that is prepared todefer about the Sun and black dwarfs on the one hand and meteors and comets on the other—come after, andsometimes come to replace, their colloquial counterparts.

As I say, this view flies in the face of the current fashions in developmental cognitive psychology, which stress how early, and how universally, natural kind concepts are available to children. But I find that I'm not much convinced.There is, to be sure, getting to be a lot of evidence (contra Piaget) that young children are deeply into appearance/reality distinctions: they're clear that you can't make a horse into a zebra just by painting on stripes (Keil 1989); andthey're clear that, for some categories (animals but not vases, for example), what's on the inside matters to what kind athing belongs to (Carey 1985). It's usual to summarize such findings as showing that young children are ‘essentialists’,and if you like to talk that way, so be it.5 My point, however, is that being an essentialist in this sense clearly does notimply having natural kind concepts; not even if a cognitivist picture of concept possession is assumed for sake of theargument. What's further required, at a minimum, is the idea that what's ‘inside’ (or otherwise hidden) somehow iscausally responsible for how

Jean-marc pizano

things that belong to the kind appear; for their ‘superficial signs’. It is, of course, an empirical issue, but I don't know of any evidence that children think that sort of thing.

If it's easy to miss the extent to which natural kind concepts are sophisticated achievements, that's perhaps because of a nasty ambiguity in the term. (One that we've already encountered, in fact; it's why I had to pussyfoot about whetherthey had WATER in the Garden). Consider this dialectic:

—Did Homer have natural kind concepts?

Sure, he had the concept WATER (and the like), and water is a natural kind.

But also:

—Did Homer have natural kind concepts?

Of course not. He had no disposition to defer to experts about water (and the like); I expect the notion of an expert about water would have struck him as bizarre. And, of course Homer had no notion that water has ahidden essence, or a characteristic microstructure (or that anything else does); a fortiori, he had no notion thatthe hidden essence of water is causally responsible for its phenomenal properties.

A ‘natural kind concept’ can be the concept of a natural kind; or it can be the concept of a natural kind as such (i.e. the concept of a natural kind as a natural kind). It's perfectly consistent to claim that Homer had plenty of the first butnone of the second. In fact, I think that's pretty clearly true. So the suggestion is that, in the history of science, and inontogeny, and, for all I know, in phylogeny too, concepts of natural kinds as such only come late. Homer, and children,and animals, have few of them or none. Somehow, concepts of natural kinds as such emerge from a background ofconcepts of mind-dependent properties, and of concepts of natural kinds that aren't concepts of natural kinds as such.Presumably it's because they do somehow emerge from a background of other kinds of concepts that concepts ofnatural kind as such don't have to be innate.

Jean-marc pizano

---

To insist on taking it this way isn't, Ithink, merely persnickety on my part. Unless definitions express semantic equivalences, they can't do the jobs that theyare supposed to do in, for example, theories

[youtubtrafic]

Jean-marc pizano To insist on taking it this way isn't, Ithink, merely persnickety on my part. Unless definitions express semantic equivalences, they can't do the jobs that theyare supposed to do in, for example, theories

 

of lexical meaning and theories of concept acquisition. The idea is that its definition is what you acquire when you acquire a concept, and that its definition is what the word corresponding to the concept expresses. But how could“bachelor” and “unmarried male” express the same concept—viz. UNMARRIED MALE—if it's not even true that“bachelor” and “unmarried male” apply to the same things? And how could acquiring the concept BACHELOR bethe same process as acquiring the concept UNMARRIED MALE if there are semantic properties that the twoconcepts don't share? It's supposed to be the main virtue of definitions that, in all sorts of cases, they reduce problemsabout the defined concept to corresponding problems about its primitive parts. But that won't happen unless eachdefinition has the very same content as the concept that it defines.

I propose now to consider some of the linguistic arguments that are supposed to show that many English words have definitions, where, however, “definitions” means definitions. I think that, when so constrained, none of these argumentsis any good at all. The lexical semantics literature is, however, enormous and I can't prove this by enumeration. WhatI'll do instead is to have a close look at some typical (and influential) examples. (For discussions of some other kinds of‘linguistic’ arguments for definitions, see Fodor 1970; Fodor and Lepore, forthcoming a; Fodor and Lepore,forthcoming b.)

Jackendoff

Jean-marc pizano

Here's a passage from Jackendoff 1992. (For simplification, I have omitted from the quotation what Jackendoff takes to be some parallel examples; and I've correspondingly renumbered the cited formulas.)

The basic insight... is that the formalism for encoding concepts of spatial location and motion, suitably abstracted, can be generalized to many verbs and prepositions in two or more semantic fields, forming intuitively relatedparadigms. [J1 —J4] illustrates [a] basic case

[J1 Semantic field:] [J2 Semantic field:]J3 Semantic field:]

Spatial location and motion: ‘Harry kept the bird in the cage.’ Possession: ‘Susan kept the money.’

Ascription of properties [sic]:29 ‘Sam kept the crowd happy.’

Wherein does this semantic field differ from any other? If I say that Harry kept the bird in the cage, don’t I thereby ascribe a property—viz. the property of keeping the bird in the cage—to Harry? Jackendoff has a lot of trouble deciding what to call his semantic fields. This might well be because they're gerrymandered.

[J4 Semantic field:] Scheduling of activities: ‘Let's keep the trip on Saturday.’ . . .

The claim is that the different concepts expressed by ‘keep’. . . are not unrelated: they share the same functional

structure and differ only in the semantic field feature. (1992: 37—9).

I think the argument Jackendoff has in mind must be something like this: ‘Keep’ is “polysemous”. On the one hand, there's the intuition that the very same word occurs in J1—J4; ‘keep’ isn't ambiguous like ‘bank’. On the other hand,there's the intuition that the sense of ‘keep’ does somehow differ in the four cases. The relation between Susan and themoney in J2 doesn't seem to be quite the same as the relation between John and the crowd in J3. How to reconcilethese intuitions?

Jean-marc pizano

Well, suppose that ‘keep’ sentences “all denote the causation of a state that endures over a period of time” (37).30 That would account for our feeling that ‘keep’ is univocal. The intuition that there's something different, all the same,between keeping the money and keeping the crowd happy can now also be accommodated by reference to thedifferences among the semantic fields, each of which “has its own particular inferential patterns” (39). So Jackendoff“accounts for [the univocality of ‘keep’ in J1—J4] by claiming that they are each realizations of the basic conceptualfunctions” (specified by the putative definition) (37). What accounts for the differences among them is “a semanticfield feature that designates the field in which the Event [to which the analysis of ‘keep’ refers] ... is defined” (38). So ifwe assume that ‘keep’ has a definition, and that its definition is displayed at some level of linguistic/cognitiverepresentation, then we can see how it can be true both that ‘keep’ means what it does and that what it means dependson the semantic field in which it is applied.31

Jean-marc pizano

---

Those of you who have followed the literature on the metaphysics of meaning that FredDretske's book Knowledge and the Flow of Information (1981) inspired will be aware that that question is (ahem!) mootish.But I do want to emphasize one aspect of the iden

[youtubtrafic]

Jean-marc pizano Those of you who have followed the literature on the metaphysics of meaning that FredDretske's book Knowledge and the Flow of Information (1981) inspired will be aware that that question is (ahem!) mootish.But I do want to emphasize one aspect of the identification of meaning with information that is pretty widely agreedon and that impacts directly on any proposal to amalgamate an informational semantics with RTM: if meaning isinformation, then coreferential representations must be synonyms.

 

Just how this works depends, of course, on what sort of causal-cum-nomological covariation content is and what sort of things you think concepts represent (properties, actual objects, possible objects, or whatever). Suppose, for example,that you run the kind of informational semantics that says:

A representation R expresses the property Pin virtue of its being a law that things that are P cause tokenings of R (in, say, some still-to-be-specified circumstances C).

And suppose, for the sake of the argument, that being water and being H2O are (not merely coextensive but) the same property. It then follows that if it's a law that WATER tokens covary with water (in C) it's also a law that WATERtokens covary with H2O (in C). So a theory that says that WATER means water in virtue of there being the first law isalso required to say that WATER means H2O in virtue of there being the second. Parallel reasoning shows that H2Omeans water, hence that WATER and H2O mean the same.

Jean-marc pizano

You may wonder why I want to burden my up to now relatively uncontroversial version of RTM by adding a theory of meaning that has this uninviting consequence; and how I could reasonably suppose that you'll be prepared to share theburden by granting me the addition. Both questions are fair.

As to the first, suppose that coextension is not sufficient for synonymy after all. Then there must be something else to having a concept with a certain content than having a mental representation with the kind of world-to-symbol causalconnections that informational semantics talks about. The question arises: what is this extra ingredient? There is, aseverybody knows, a standard answer; viz. that what concepts one has is determined, at least in part, by what inferences one isprepared to draw or to accept. If it is possible to have the concept WATER and not have the concept H2O, that's becauseit's constitutive of having the latter, but not constitutive of having the former, that you accept such inferences ascontains H2O 0 contains H. It is, in short, received wisdom that content may be constituted in part by informationalrelations, but that unless coreference is sufficient for synonymy, it must also be constituted by inferential relations. I'llcall any theory that says this sort of thing an Inferential Role Semantics (IRS).

I don't want content to be constituted, even in part, by inferential relations. For one thing, as we just saw, I like Turing's story that inference (qua mental process) reduces to computation; i.e. to operations on symbols. For fear of circularity, Ican't both tell a computational story about what inference is and tell an inferential story about what content is. Primafacie, at least, if I buy into Inferential Role Semantics, I undermine my theory of thinking.

Jean-marc pizano

For a second thing, I am inclined to believe that an inferential role semantics has holistic implications that are both unavoidable and intolerable. A main reason I love RTM so much is that the computational story about mental processesfits so nicely with the story that psychological explanation is subsumption under intentional laws; viz. under laws thatapply to a mental state in virtue of its content. Since computation is presumed to respect content, RTM can maybeprovide the mechanism whereby satisfying the antecedent of an intentional law necessitates the satisfaction of itsconsequent (see Fodor 1994: ch. 1). But I think it's pretty clear that psychological explanation can't be subsumptionunder intentional laws if the metaphysics of intentionality is holistic. (See Fodor and Lepore 1992.)

For a third thing, as previously noted, the main point of this book will be to argue for an atomistic theory of concepts. I'm going to claim, to put it very roughly, that satisfying the metaphysically necessary conditions forhaving one concept never requires satisfying the metaphysically necessary conditions for having any other concept.(Well, hardly ever.Jean-marc pizano

---

I first heard this objection to Putnam's proposal from Jerry Katzwhen we were both graduate students. It struck me then as conclusive, and it continues to do so now.

[youtubtrafic]

Jean-marc pizano I first heard this objection to Putnam's proposal from Jerry Katzwhen we were both graduate students. It struck me then as conclusive, and it continues to do so now.

 

So, then, the notion of a one-criterion term does nothing to clarify the metaphysics of analyticity. But I think it can perhaps be co-opted for a less ambitious purpose. Because I'm into atomistic informational semantics, I have to tell astory that explains what the object of our soi-disant intuitions of analyticity and intrinsic conceptual connectedness is,and explains why we have such intuitions, without admitting that there are analytic truths or intrinsically connectedconcepts. Since, moreover, the robustness of the intuitions seems undeniable, I want my story to make them intuitionsof something real. Being a one-criterion concept is a godsend for my purpose; it's my candidate for Factor X. Notice thatsince what I'm aiming for is not an account of the individuation of meanings, but just a diagnosis of some faultyintuitions, telling my story doesn't presuppose a prior or a principled account of the individuation of criteria. UnlikePutnam, I can make do with what I imagine everyone will grant: that for some concepts there are, de facto, lots of waysof telling that they apply and for other concepts there are, de facto, very few.

Auntie (back again): I'm back again. Tell me just why am I supposed to grant that for some concepts there are lots of ways of telling that they apply and that for others there are very few. Isn't it rather that if there's any way at all to tell,there's sure to be a lot? If I can tell that the dog is at the door by listening for the bell to ring, then I can tell that the dogis at the door by getting Jones to listen for the bell to ring. And if I can tell that the dog is at the door by getting Jonesto listen for the bell to ring, then I can tell that the dog is at the door by getting Jones to ask Smith to listen for the bellto ring . . . And so on. There aren't, even de facto, any one-criterion terms according to my way of counting.

Jean-marc pizano

—: Yes, all right, but not a sympathetic reading. What Putnam must have had in mind, and what I too propose to assume, is that some ways of telling pretty clearly depend on others. It'sthe latter—the pretty clearly /»dependent ones—that you are supposed to count when you decide whether something'sa one-criterion concept, or a cluster concept, or whatever. In your example, one's own listening for the bell to ring ispretty clearly at the bottom of the heap.

Auntie. Why do you keep saying ‘pretty clearly’ in that irritating way?

—: Because I want to emphasize that the kind of dependence I have in mind isn't metaphysical, or conceptual, or even nomic, but just epistemic. What rationalizes your asking Jones to ask Smith to listen for the bell is your knowledge thatSmith has ways of telling that don't depend on his asking Jones to listen for the bell. Compare the sort of contrast casesthat Putnam had in mind: the so-called cluster concepts. You can tell, pretty reliably, whether stuff is water by, forexample, how it looks, how it tastes, where it's located, its specific heat, its specific gravity, what it says on the bottle,which tap it came from, and so on and on. No doubt, the fact that all these ways of telling work depends on a bundleof metaphysical and nomic necessities; but your employing the tests doesn't depend on, and isn't usually rationalizedby, your knowing that this is so; pretty clearly, the various tests for being water are largely epistemically independent.

Jean-marc pizano

I agree that this is all quite loose and unprincipled; but, as remarked, it's not required to bear much weight. All I need it for is to explain away some faulty intuitions. Can I proceed?

Auntie. You may try.

Then here's my story in a nutshell: suppose you think the only epistemic route from the concept C to the property that it expresses depends on drawing inferences that involve the concept C*.Jean-marc pizano

---

I rush past the implausibility of claiming that infants have to have that much ontology (in particular,that much dubious ontology) in order to learn quotidian object-concepts like CHAIR. I'm a nativist too, after all. Themore pressing problem for a theory

[youtubtrafic]

Jean-marc pizano I rush past the implausibility of claiming that infants have to have that much ontology (in particular,that much dubious ontology) in order to learn quotidian object-concepts like CHAIR. I'm a nativist too, after all. Themore pressing problem for a theory theorist is: if that's what ‘object’ means in the infant's rule, in what sense are therediscontinuities in the development of the infant's object-concept? On this reading of the text, it looks like what the infanthas—right from the start and right to the finish—is a concept of an object that's much like Locke's: objects areunobservable kinds of things that cause experiences. Correspondingly, cognitive development consists of learningmore and more about things of

 

this kind (e.g. that when you turn your back on one, it ceases to cause appearances in you . . . etc.).69 What, then, has become of the discontinuity of the object-concept? In particular, what's become of the incommensurability of the infant'sobject-concept with grown-up Gopnik's? It turns out that Gopnik can, after all, say exactly what (according to hertheory) the infant's earliest concept of an object is: it's the concept ofa theoretical entity which explains sequences of. . . etc.. ..

and which ceases to cause appearances in you when you turn your back on it... etc.

I suppose what Gopnik really ought to say, if she wants to be true to the implicit definition picture, is that the concept of an object is that of ‘AN X WHICH ... ’, and that cognitive development consists in adding more and more relativeclauses. But it's hard to see why such a thesis would count as construing concept development as discontinuous. And,anyhow, it's hard to see how it could be swallowed by a meaning holist. Isn't meaning holism, by definition, committedto there not being a notion of content identity that tolerates the addition of new information to the same old concept?

Jean-marc pizano

The local moral, to repeat, is that maybe you can make sense of concept introduction as implicit theoretical definition, and maybe you can make sense of meaning holism. But it's very unclear that you can make sense of both at the sametime. The general moral is that, if the theory theory has a distinctive and coherent answer to the ‘What's a concept?’question on offer, it's a well-kept secret.

I should add, in minimal fairness, that it's not clear that theory theorists are really all that interested in what concepts are. Certainly it's often hard to tell whether they are from what they say. For example, Medin and Wattenmaker (1987;see also Murphy and Medin 1985) undertake to “review evidence that suggests concepts should be viewed asembedded in theories” (34—5), a thesis which they clearly regard as tendentious, but which, as it is stated, it's hard toimagine that anyone could disagree with. What I suppose they must have in mind is that concepts are somehowconstituted (their identity is somehow determined) by the theories in which they are embedded. But that claim, thoughtendentious enough, doesn't amount to a new account of conceptual content; unless the ‘somehows’ are somehowcashed, it just reiterates IRS.

The situation in Medin and Wattenmaker is especially confusing because its so hard to figure out what they think that the theory theory is a theory of; they are explicit that it's supposed to provide an account of the

If “object” means thing that causes appearances then, of course, the rule isn’t that objects disappear when you turn your back on them; it’s just that they cease, for the nonce, to cause you to experience them.

Jean-marc pizano

“coherence” of concepts, but it's far from clear what they think conceptual coherence is. At one point, having suggested that the theory theory should provide “guidelines concerning which combinations of features form possibleconcepts and which form coherent ones” (1987: 30), they offer, as an example of an incoherent concept, “bright red,flammable, eats mealworms, found in Lapland, and used for cleaning furniture”. So it sounds as though the questionabout conceptual coherence that the theory theory answers is: What's wrong with this and other such concepts?

Jean-marc pizano

---

Then came the Snake.What the Snake Said

[youtubtrafic]

Jean-marc pizano

Then came the Snake.

What the Snake Said

‘I have here,’ the Snake said, ‘some stuff that will no doubt strike you, in your Innocence, as a sample of bona fide, original, straight off the shelf, X-ness. But come a little closer—come close enough to see how the stuff is puttogether—and you'll see that it isn't X after all. In fact, it's some kind of Y

—‘Sucks to how it's put together,’ we replied, in our Innocence. ‘For a thing to strike us as of a kind with paradigm Xs just is for that thing to be an X. X-ness just is the property of being the kind of thing to which we do (or would)extrapolate from appropriate experience with typical Xs. Man is the measure; vide doorknobs.’

—‘That,’ the Snake replied, ‘depends. Since we're assuming from the start that Xs and Ys are, for practical purposes, indistinguishable in their effects on you, it follows that thinking of both Xs and Ys as Xs will do you no practical harm.For example, for purposes of longevity, reproductive efficiency, and the like, it's all one whether you ingest only Xsunder the description ‘X or you ingest both Xs and Ys under that description. But that is ingest; I am in earnest. Ifyou want to carve Nature at the joints, if you want to know how the world seems to God, you will have to learn sometimesto distinguish between Xs and Ys even though they taste (and feel, and look, and sound, and quite generally strike youas) much the same. It's entirely up to you of course. Far be it from me to twist your arm. (Sign here, please. In blood.)’

Jean-marc pizano

We fell for that, and it was, on balance, a fortunate Fall. The trouble with being Innocent is that, although how God made things sometimes shows up in broad similarities and differences in the way that they strike us (trees reliably strikeus as quite different from rocks; and they are), sometimes it only shows up in similarities and differences in the waythings

strike us in very highly contrived, quite unnatural environments; experimental environments, as it might be. For it's sometimes only in terms of a taxonomy that classifies things by similarities and differences among the ways that theydo (or would) behave in those sorts of environments, that we can specify the deep generalizations that the world obeys.We are, after all, peculiar and complicated sorts of objects. There is no obvious reason why similarity in respect of theway that things affect us should, in general, predict similarity in the way that they affect objects that are less peculiarthan us, or less complicated than us, or that are peculiar and complicated in different ways than us.36

Unless, however, we contrive, with malice aforethought, that things should strike us as alike only if they are alike in respect of the deep sources of their causal powers: that they should strike us as alike only if they share their hiddenessences. So, for example, we can set things up so that the chemicals in the bottles will both turn the paper red (andthereby strike us as similar) if, but only if, they are both acids. Or, we can set things up so that both meters will registerthe same (and thereby strike us as similar) if, but only if, there's the same amount of current in both the circuits; and soon. The moral is that whereas you lock to doorknobhood via a metaphysical necessity, if you want to lock to a natural kindproperty, you have actually to do the science.

Jean-marc pizano

So much for the fairy tale. It's intuitively plausible, phylogenetically, ontogenetically, and even just historically, to think of natural kind concepts as late sophistications that are somehow constructed on a prior cognitive capacity forconcepts of mind-dependent properties. But intuitively plausible is one thing, true is another. So, is it true? And, whatdoes “doing the science” amount to? How, having started out as Innocents with no concepts of natural kinds, could wehave got to where we are, with natural kind concepts like WATER? I turn to these questions in, more or less, thatorder.

Jean-marc pizano

---

I appeal to expert testimony; here's Susan Careyconcluding a review of the literature on the role of definitions (‘conceptual decompositions’, as one says) in cognitivedevelopment: “At present, there simply is no good evidence that a wor

[youtubtrafic]

Jean-marc pizano I appeal to expert testimony; here's Susan Careyconcluding a review of the literature on the role of definitions (‘conceptual decompositions’, as one says) in cognitivedevelopment: “At present, there simply is no good evidence that a word's meaning is composed, component bycomponent, in the course of its acquisition. The evidence for component-by-component acquisition is flawed evenwhen attention is restricted to those semantic domains which have yielded convincing componential analyses” (1982:369). (I reserve the right to doubt that there are any such domains; see below.)

 

So it goes. Many psychologists, like many philosophers, are now very sceptical about definitions. This seems to be a real case of independent lines of enquiry arriving at the same conclusions for different but compatible reasons. Thecognitive science community, by and large, has found this convergence pretty persuasive, and I think it's right to do so.Maybe some version of inferential role semantics will work and will sustain the thesis that most everyday concepts arecomplex; but, on the evidence, the definitional version doesn't.

I'd gladly leave it here if I could, but it turns out there are exceptions to the emerging consensus that I've been reporting. Some linguists, working in the tradition called ‘lexical semantics’, claim that there is persuasive distributional(/intuitional) evidence for a level of linguistic analysis at which many words are represented by their definitions. It maybe, so the argument goes, that these linguistic data don't fit very well with the results in philosophy and psychology; ifso, then that's a problem that cognitive scientists should be worrying about. But, assuming that you're prepared to takedistributional/intuitional data seriously at all (as, no doubt, you

Jean-marc pizano

I am playing very fast and loose with the distinction between concepts and their structural descriptions (see n. 1 above). Strictu dictu, it can’t both be that the concept BACHELOR abbreviates the concept UNMARRIED MAN and that the concept BACHELOR is the concept UNMARRIED MAN. But not speaking strictly makes theexposition easier, and the present considerations don't depend on the conflation.

should be) then the evidence that there are definitions is of much the same kind as the evidence that there are nouns.

Just how radical is this disagreement between the linguist's claim that definition is a central notion in lexical semantics and the otherwise widely prevalent view that there are, in fact, hardly any definitions at all? That's actually less clearthan one might at first suppose. It is entirely characteristic of lexical semanticists to hold that “although it is anempirical issue [linguistic evidence] supports the claim that the number of primitives is small, significantly smaller thanthe number of lexical items whose lexical meanings may be encoded using the primitives” (Konrfilt and Correra 1993).Now, one would have thought that if there are significantly fewer semantic primitives than there are lexical items, thenthere must be quite a lot of definable words (in, say, English). That would surprise philosophers, whose experience hasbeen that there are practically none. However, having made this strong claim with one hand, lexical semanticists oftenhedge it with the other. For, unlike bona fide (viz. eliminative) definitions, the lexical semanticist's verb“decompositions . . . intend to capture the core aspects of the verb meanings, without implying that all aspects of themeanings are represented” (ibid.: 83).

Jean-marc pizano

Whether the definition story about words and concepts is interesting or surprising in this attenuated form depends, of course, on what one takes the “core aspects” of meaning to be. It is, after all, not in dispute that some aspects of lexicalmeanings can be represented in quite an exiguous vocabulary; some aspects of anything can be represented in quite anexiguous vocabulary. ‘Core meaning’ and the like are not, however, notions for which much precise explication getsprovided in the lexical semantics literature. The upshot, often enough, is that the definitions that are put on offer areisolated, simply by stipulation, from prima facie counter-examples.10

This strikes me as a mug's game, and not one that I'm tempted to play. I take the proper ground rule to be that one expression defines another only if the two expressions are synonymous; and I take it to be a necessary condition fortheir synonymy that whatever the one expression applies to, the other does too.Jean-marc pizano

---

Putnam's idea was that, out at the edge of the web, and hence connected to nothing very much, there is a fringe of ‘one-criterion’ concepts. Criteria are ways of telling, so you're a one-criterion concept only if there is just one way to tellt

[youtubtrafic]

Jean-marc pizano

Putnam's idea was that, out at the edge of the web, and hence connected to nothing very much, there is a fringe of ‘one-criterion’ concepts. Criteria are ways of telling, so you're a one-criterion concept only if there is just one way to tellthat you apply. BACHELOR qualifies because the only way to tell whether Jones is a bachelor is by finding out if he'san unmarried man. TUESDAY qualifies because the only way to tell that it's

Tuesday is by finding out if it's the second day of the week. And so on. Well, according to Putnam, if a concept has, in this sense, only one criterion, then it is conceptually necessary (viz. constitutive of the content of the concept) that ifthe criterion is satisfied then the concept applies. So there is, after all, an epistemic clause in the theory of conceptconstitutivity. Old timers will recognize this treatment of BACHELOR and the like as close kin to the then-populartheory that DOG, CAUSE, PAIN, FORCE, WATER, INFLUENZA, and the like are “cluster” concepts. In effect, acluster concept is one for whose application there are lots of criteria.

So, then, according to Putnam, analyticity just is one-criterionhood. The problems with this account by now seem pretty obvious; we'll return to them in a moment. First, however, a word or two in its praise.

To begin with, it deconfounds analyticity from centrality, thereby freeing embarrassed Quineans from having to assimilate bachelors are unmarried to F = MA. It also deconfounds analyticity from mere necessity in a way that intuitionapplauds. As I remarked above, it's necessary that bachelors are unmarried, and it's again necessary that two is prime,but only the first seems to be a good candidate for a conceptual necessity since one isn't much tempted by the thoughtthat not having the concept PRIME entails not having the concept TWO. Putnam's story works very well here. It isprecisely because two is enmeshed in a rich—indeed an infinite—network of necessities that one hesitates to chooseamong them the ones that constitute the content of the concept. Given the plethora of necessary inferences that TWOcan mediate, who's to say which ones your having the concept requires that you acknowledge? Similarly with the logicalparticles. And similarly, too, for FORCE and DOG (though the necessities that embed these concepts arecharacteristically metaphysical and/or nomic rather than mathematical or logical). In short, the less work a conceptdoes, the stronger the analyticity intuitions that it is able to support; just as Putnam's account of conceptualconnectedness predicts.

Jean-marc pizano

And since being well connected to the web, like being near the web's centre, is a matter of degree, Putnam's story explains straight off why intuitions of analyticity are graded. Nobody seriously doubts that bachelors being unmarriedis a better candidate for analyticity than dogs being animals, which is in turn a better candidate than F's being MA,which is in turn at least as bad a candidate as two's being prime. The gradedness of analyticity intuitions suggests somesort of epistemic construal if the alternative explanation is that they arise from such structural relations amongconcepts as containment. Containment, unlike criteriality, doesn't plausibly come in more or less.

So there are nice things to be said for Putnam's account of analyticity, and I suppose that Quine's sympathizers would have jumped at it exceptthat it is, alas, hopelessly circular. Putnam's ‘one criterion’ test does no work unless a way to count criteria is supplied.But you can't count what you can't individuate, and there looks to be no principle of individuation for criteria thatdoesn't presuppose the notion of analyticity. Does ‘bachelor’ have one criterion (viz. unmarried man) or two (viz. unmarriedman and not married man)? That depends, inter alia, on whether “unmarried man” and “not married man” are synonyms.But if there are troubles about understanding analyticity there are the same troubles about understanding synonymy,the two being trivially interdefinable (as Quine rightly remarked in “Two dogmas&rdquo. So, it looks as though Putnam'sconstrual of analytic connection in terms of one-criterion concept leaves us back where we started; in a tight circle ofinterdefined semantic-cum-conceptual vocabulary.Jean-marc pizano

---

Notoriously, however, it's an inadequate species. The essential problem in this area is to explain how thinking manages reliably to preserve truth; and Associationism, as Kant rightly pointed out to Hume, hasn't the resources to do so. Theproblem isn't th

[youtubtrafic]

Jean-marc pizano

Notoriously, however, it's an inadequate species. The essential problem in this area is to explain how thinking manages reliably to preserve truth; and Associationism, as Kant rightly pointed out to Hume, hasn't the resources to do so. Theproblem isn't that association is a causal relation, or that it's a causal relation among symbols, or even that it's a causalrelation among mental symbols; it's just that their satisfaction conditions aren't among the semantic properties thatassociates generally share. To the contrary, being Jack precludes being Jill, being salt precludes being pepper, being redprecludes being green, and so forth. By contrast, Turing's account of thought-as-computation showed us how tospecify causal relations among mental symbols that are reliably truth-preserving. It thereby saved RTM from drowningwhen the Associationists went under.

I propose to swallow the Turing story whole and proceed. First, however, there's an addendum I need and an aside I can't resist. 1 2

Addendum: if computation is just causation that preserves semantic values, then the thesis that thought is computation requires of mental representations only that they have semantic values and causal powers that preserve them. I nowadd a further constraint: many mental representations have constituent (part/whole) structure, and many mental processesare sensitive to the constituent structure of the mental representations they apply to. So, for example, the mentalrepresentation that typically gets tokened when you think . . . brown cow. . . has, among its constituent parts, the mentalrepresentation that typically gets tokened when you think . . . brown . . . ; and the computations that RTM says getperformed in processes like inferring from . . . brown cow. . . to . . . brown . . . exploit such part/whole relations. Noticethat this is an addendum (though it's one that Turing's account of computation was designed to satisfy). It'suntendentious that RTM tolerates the possibility of conceptual content without constituent structure since everybodywho thinks that there are mental representations at all thinks that at least some of them are primitive.3 4

Jean-marc pizano

The aside I can't resist is this: following Turing, I've introduced the notion of computation by reference to such semantic notions as content and representation; a computation is some kind of content-respecting causal relationamong symbols. However, this order of explication is OK only if the notion of a symbol doesn’t itselfpresuppose the notion of acomputation. In particular, it's OK only if you don't need the notion of a computation to explain what it is for somethingto have semantic properties. We'll see, almost immediately, that the account of the semantics of mental representationsthat my version of RTM endorses, unlike the account of thinking that it endorses, is indeed non-computational.

Suppose, however, it's your metaphysical view that the semantic properties of a mental representation depend, wholly or in part, upon the computational relations that it enters into; hence that the notion of a computation is prior to thenotion of a symbol. You will then need some other way of saying what it is for a causal relation among mentalrepresentations to be a computation; some way that does not presuppose such notions as symbol and content? It may be possible tofind such a notion of computation, but I don't know where. (Certainly not in Turing,who simply takes it for granted that the expressions that computing machines crunch are symbols; e.g. that they denotenumbers, functions, and the like.) The attempts I've seen invariably end up suggesting (or proclaiming) that every causalprocess is a kind of computation, thereby trivializing Turing's nice idea that thought is.

Jean-marc pizano

So much for mental processes.

Fourth Thesis: Meaning is information(more or less).

There actually are, in the land I come from, philosophers who would agree with the gist of RTM as I've set it forth so far. Thesis Four, however, is viewed as divisive even in that company. I'm going to assume that what bestows contenton mental representations is something about their causal-cum-nomological relations to the things that fall underthem: for example, what bestows upon a mental representation the content dog is something about its tokenings beingcaused by dogs.

I don't want to pursue, beyond this zero-order approximation, the question just which causal-cum-nomological relations are content-making.Jean-marc pizano

---

expresses the property that things have when they seem to us to be of the same kind as instances of the doorknob stereotype; and we had the concept HOLE, which expresses the property that things have when they seem to us to beof the same kind as instances

[youtubtrafic]

Jean-marc pizano

expresses the property that things have when they seem to us to be of the same kind as instances of the doorknob stereotype; and we had the concept HOLE, which expresses the property that things have when they seem to us to beof the same kind as instances of the hole stereotype; and we had the concept A NICE DAY, which expresses theproperty that things have when they seem to us to be of the same kind as instances of the nice day stereotype . . . etc.(Also, I suppose we had logico-mathematical concepts; about which, however, the present work has nothing to say.)

Because the concepts we had back in the Garden were all concepts of mind-dependent properties, there was, back then, a kind of appearance/reality distinction that we never had to draw. We never had to worry about whether theremight be kinds of things which, though they satisfy the DOORKNOB stereotype, nevertheless are not doorknobs. Wenever had to worry that there might be something which, as it might be, had all the attributes of a doorknob but was, inits essence, a Twin-doorknob. Or, who knows, a giraffe.91

But also, because we were Innocent, we didn't have the concept WATER, or the concept CONSONANT, or the concept LEVER, or the concept STAR. Perhaps we had concepts that were (extensionally) sort of like these; perhapswe used to wonder who waters the plants. But, if so, these concepts were importantly different from the homophoniccounterparts that we have now. For it's compatible with the real concept WATER that there should be stuff that strikesus as being of the very same kind as instances of the water stereotype but that isn't water because it has the wrong kindof hidden essence (XYZ, perhaps). And it's compatible with the real concept STAR that there should be things thatstrike us as very different from paradigm stars, but which do have the right kind of hidden essences and are thereforestars after all (a black dwarf, perhaps; or the Sun). And it's compatible with the concept CONSONANT that we havenow that there should be sorts of things that strike us as neither clearly consonants nor clearly not consonants butwhich, because they have the right kinds of hidden essences, really are consonants whether or not we think they are (lsand rs, perhaps).

Jean-marc pizano

I'll presently have much more to say about what concept of water we could have had in the Garden; and about how it would have been different

There were, to be sure, faux doorknobs, fake doorknobs, trompe l'œil doorknobs, and the like; these were particulars which looked, at first glance, to satisfy the doorknob stereotype but, on closer examination, turned out not to do so. Doorknob vs. trompe l œildoorknob is a distinction within mind-dependent properties; hence quite differentfrom the difference between doorknob and, as it might be, water. (In consequence, drawing an appearance/reality distinction is not all there is to being a metaphysicalessentialist. See n. 92 .)

I don’t, myself, advise it. Grant that children think that properties that don’t appear can matter to whether a thing is a horse. It isn’t implied that they think what a bona fide essentialist should: that there are properties (other than being a horse) that necessitate a thing’s being a horse. But, for present purposes, nevenever mind.

from the concept of water that we have now. And about how to square that difference with what an atomistic and informational semantics says about the individuation of concepts. But this will do to be getting on with: back in theGarden, when we were Innocent, we never thought about kinds of things which, though they are much the same intheir effects on us, are not much the same in their effects on one another. Or about kinds of things which, though theyare much the same in their effects on one another, are strikingly different in their effects on us. Back in the Garden,when we were Innocent, we took it for granted that there isn't any difference between similarity for us and similarity sansphrase, between the way we carve the world up and the way that God does.

Jean-marc pizano

---

Two of these are particularly relevant. The first is familiar and quite general (see Chapter 1 andFodor and Lepore 1992) and I won't go on about it here. Suffice it that if the individuation of concepts is literallyrelativized to whole belief systems, the

[youtubtrafic]

Jean-marc pizano Two of these are particularly relevant. The first is familiar and quite general (see Chapter 1 andFodor and Lepore 1992) and I won't go on about it here. Suffice it that if the individuation of concepts is literallyrelativized to whole belief systems, then no two people, and no two time slices of a given person, are ever subsumed bythe same intentional generalizations, and the prospects for robust theories in intentional psychology are negligible.

 

But I do want to say a word or so about the second objection, which is that holism about content individuation doesn't square with key principles of the theory theory itself. Consider, in particular, the idea that new concepts get introduced,in the course of theory change, by a kind of implicit theoretical definition. In all the examples I've heard of, a theorycan be used to effect the implicit definition of a new term only if at least some of its vocabulary is isolated from meaningchanges of the sorts that holists say that concept introduction brings about. That's hardly surprising. Intuitively, implicitdefinition determines the meaning of a new term by determining its inferential relations to terms in the host theorythat are presumed to be previously understood. It is, to put it mildly, hard to see how this could work if introducing a newconcept into a theory ipso facto changes what all the old terms mean. For then the expressions by reference to which theneologism is introduced aren't ‘previously understood’ after all: they are just homophones of the previously understoodexpressions.23

Jean-marc pizano

Consider, for a familiar example, the introduction by implicit definition of a logical constant like ‘A’. The idea is that to determine that ‘A’ has the same sense as the (truth conditional, inclusive) English ‘or’, it's sufficient to stipulate that:

But the plausibility of claiming that these stipulations determine that ‘A’ means ‘or’ depends on supposing that they preserve the standard interpretations of ‘’ (= conjunction), ‘D(= negation), and ‘^’ (= truth-functional implication).That, however, implies that the interpretation of ‘’, H, and ‘^’ must be assumed to be isolated from whatever meaningchanges adding ‘A’ to the host theory is supposed to bring about; an assumption that is contrary, apparently, to theholist thesis that the semantic effects of theory change reverberate throughout the vocabulary of the theory. (I say thatit's ‘apparently contrary to the holist thesis because I know of no formulation of semantic holism that is preciseenough to yield unequivocal entailments about which changes of theory effect which changes of meaning.)

This isn't just a technical problem; texts that flout it tend to defy coherent exegesis. Consider, for one example among very many, Gopnik's suggestion24 that

An ‘object’ is a theoretical entity which explains sequences of what (for lack of a better term) we might call object-appearances at the evidential level... At the very earliest stage infants seem to have a few rules about the relations between their own actions and object-appearances, for example, infants seem to know that objects disappear whenyou turn away from them and reappear when you turn back to them. (1988: 205)

Jean-marc pizano

(and so forth, mutatis mutandis, for further ‘rules’ that the child gets later).

How are we to interpret this passage? Notice the tell-tale aporia (where are you, Jacques Derrida, now that we need you?). The rule with which the infants are credited is said to be about “relations between their own actions and object-appeamncei’ (my emphasis). But, when an instance of such a rule is offered, it turns out to be that “objects [my emphasis]disappear when you turn away from them”. Question: what does ‘objects’ mean in this rule? In particular, what does itmean to the infant who, we're supposing, learns the concept OBJECT by a process that involves formulating andadopting the rule?25 If it means object-appearances, then (quite aside from traditional worries about how an appearancecould reappear) it doesn't do what Gopnik wants; since it specifies a relation among object-appearances, it doesn't givethe infant information about the relation between objects and object-appearances.

So, maybe ‘object’ means theoretical entity which explains sequences of what (for lack of a better term) we might call object-appearances at the evidential level.Jean-marc pizano

---

—It's a general problem for theories that seek to construe content in terms of inferential role, that there seems to be no way to distinguish the inferences that constitute concepts from other kinds of inferences that concepts enter into. Thepresent

[youtubtrafic]

Jean-marc pizano

—It's a general problem for theories that seek to construe content in terms of inferential role, that there seems to be no way to distinguish the inferences that constitute concepts from other kinds of inferences that concepts enter into. Thepresent form of this general worry is that there seems to be no way to distinguish the inferences that define conceptsfrom the ones that don't. This is, of course, old news to philosophers. Quine shook their faith that ‘defining inference’is well defined, and hence their faith in such related notions as analyticity propositions true in virtue of meaning alone,and so forth. Notice, in particular, that there are grounds for scepticism about defining inferences even if you suppose(as, of course, Quine does not) that the notion of necessary inference is secure. What's at issue here is squaring thetheory of concept individuation with the theory of concept possession. If having a concept requires accepting theinferences that define it, then not all necessities can be definitional. It is, for example, necessary that 2 is a primenumber; but surely you can have the concept 2 and not have the concept of a prime; presumably there were millenniawhen people did. (Similarly, mutatis mutandis, for the concept WATER if it's necessary that water is H2O. I'll come backto this sort of point in Chapter 4.)

It is often, and rightly, said that Quine didn't prove that you can't make sense of analyticity definition, and the like. But so what? Cognitive science doesn't do proofs; it does empirical, non-demonstrative inferences. We have, as things nowstand, no account of what makes an inference a defining one, and no idea how such an account might be devised.That's a serious reason to suppose that the theory of content should dispense with definitions if it can.

Jean-marc pizano

—Although in principle definitions allow us to reduce all sorts of problems about concepts at large to corresponding problems about concepts in the primitive basis (see above), this strategy quite generally fails in practice. Even if thereare definitions, they seem to play no very robust role in explaining what happens when people learn concepts, or whenthey reason with concepts, or when they apply them. Truth to tell, definitions seem to play no role at all.

For example, suppose that understanding a sentence involves recovering and displaying the definitions of the words that the sentence contains. Then you would expect, all else equal, that sentences that contain words with relativelycomplex definitions should be harder to understand than sentences that contain words with relatively simpledefinitions. Various psychologists have tried to get this effect experimentally; to my knowledge, nobody has eversucceeded. It's an iron law of cognitive science that, in experimental environments, definitions always behave exactly asthough they weren't there.

In fact, this is obvious to intuition. Does anybody present really think that thinking BACHELOR is harder than thinking UNMARRIED? Or that thinking FATHER is harder than thinking PARENT? Whenever definition is bygenus and species, definitional theories perforce predict that concepts for the former ought to be easier to think thanconcepts for the latter. Intuition suggests otherwise (and so, by the way, do the experimental data; see e.g. Paivio 1971).

Jean-marc pizano

Hold-outs for definitions often emphasize that the experimental failures don't prove that there aren't any definitions. Maybe there's a sort of novice/expert shift in concept acquisition: (defining) concepts like UNMARRIED MAN get‘compiled’ into (defined) concepts like BACHELOR soon after they are mastered. If experiments don't detectUNMARRIED MAN in ‘performance’ tasks, maybe that's because

BACHELOR serves as its abbreviation.27 Maybe. But I remind you, once again, that this is supposed to be science, not philosophy; the issue isn't whether there might be definitions, but whether, on the evidence, there actually are some.Nobody has proved that there aren't any little green men on Mars; but almost everybody is convinced by repeatedfailures to find them.

Much the same point holds for the evidence about concept learning. The (putative) ontogenetic process of compiling primitive concepts into defined ones surely can't be instantaneous; yet developmental cognitive psychologists find noevidence of a stage when primitive concepts exist uncompiled.Jean-marc pizano

---

RTM says that there is no believing-that-P episode without a corresponding tokening-of-a-mental-representation episode, and it contemplates no locus of original intentionality except the contents of mental representations. Inconsequence, so far as RTMs ar

[youtubtrafic]

Jean-marc pizano

RTM says that there is no believing-that-P episode without a corresponding tokening-of-a-mental-representation episode, and it contemplates no locus of original intentionality except the contents of mental representations. Inconsequence, so far as RTMs are concerned, toexplain what it is for a mental representation to mean what it does is to explain what it is for a propositional attitude tohave the content that it does. I suppose that RTM leaves open the metaphysical possibility that there could be mentalstates whose content does not, in this sense, derive from the meaning of corresponding mental representations. But ittakes such cases not to be nomologically possible, and it provides no hint of an alternative source of propositional objectsfor the attitudes.

Finally, English inherits its semantics from the contents of the beliefs, desires, intentions, and so forth that it's used to express, as per Grice and his followers. Or, if you prefer (as I think, on balance, I do), English has no semantics. LearningEnglish isn't learning a theory about what its sentences mean, it's learning how to associate its sentences with thecorresponding thoughts. To know English is to know, for example, that the form of words ‘there are cats’ is standardlyused to express the thought that there are cats; and that the form of words ‘it's raining’ is standardly used to expressthe thought that it's raining; and that the form of words ‘it's not raining’ is standardly used to express the thought thatit's not raining; and so on for in(de)finitely many other such cases.

Jean-marc pizano

Since, according to RTM, the content of linguistic expressions depends on the content of propositional attitudes, and the content of propositional attitudes depends on the content of mental representations, and since the intended senseof ‘depends on’ is asymmetric, RTM tolerates the metaphysical possibility of thought without language; for that matter,it tolerates the metaphysical possibility of mental representation without thought. I expect that many of you won't likethat. I'm aware that there is rumoured to be an argument, vaguely Viennese in provenance, that proves that ‘original’,underived intentionality must inhere, not in mental representations nor in thoughts, but precisely in the formulas ofpublic languages. I would be very pleased if such an argument actually turned up, since then pretty nearly everything Ibelieve about language and mind would have been refuted, and I could stop worrying about RTM, and about whatconcepts are, and take off and go sailing, a pastime that I vastly prefer. Unfortunately, however, either nobody canremember how the argument goes, or it's a secret that they're unprepared to share with me. So I'll forge on.

Third Thesis: Thinking is computation.

A theory of mind needs a story about mental processes, not just a story about mental states. Here, as elsewhere, RTM is closer in spirit to Hume than it is to Wittgenstein or Ryle. Hume taught that mental states are relations to mentalrepresentations, and so too does RTM (the main difference being, as we've seen, that RTM admits, indeed demands,mental

Jean-marc pizano

representations that aren't images). Hume also taught that mentalprocesses (including, paradigmatically, thinking) are causal relations among mental representations..5 So too does RTM. In contrast to Hume, and to RTM, the logical behaviourism ofWittgenstein and Ryle had, as far as I can tell, no theory of thinking at all (except, maybe, the silly theory that thinkingis talking to oneself). I do find that shocking. How could they have expected to get it right about belief and the likewithout getting it right about belief fixation and the like?

Alan Turing's idea that thinking is a kind of computation is now, I suppose, part of everybody's intellectual equipment; not that everybody likes it, of course, but at least everybody's heard of it. That being so, I shall pretty much take it asread for the purposes at hand. In a nutshell: token mental representations are symbols. Tokens of symbols are physicalobjects with semantic properties. To a first approximation, computations are those causal relations among symbolswhich reliably respect semantic properties of the relata. Association, for example, is a bona fide computational relationwithin the meaning of the act. Though whether Ideas get associated is supposed to depend on their frequency,contiguity, etc., and not on what they're Ideas of, association is none the less supposed reliably to preserve semanticdomains: Jack-thoughts cause /ill-thoughts, salt-thoughts cause pepper-thoughts, red-thoughts cause green-thoughts, andso forth.6 So, Hume's theory of mental processes is itself a species of RTM, an upshot that pleases me.

Jean-marc pizano

---

But not, according to the present view, on one's having any particular perceptual capacity (remember HelenKeller). Nor could the dependence of concept possession upon perceptual capacities turn out to be principled.Informational semantics says that a (cer

[youtubtrafic]

Jean-marc pizano But not, according to the present view, on one's having any particular perceptual capacity (remember HelenKeller). Nor could the dependence of concept possession upon perceptual capacities turn out to be principled.Informational semantics says that a (certain kind of) nomic relation between DOGs and doghood, however mediated,suffices for content. But ‘however mediated’ should be read to include, in principle, nomic relations that aren'tmediated at all. There is nothing in informational semantics that stops content-making laws from being basic. For thatmatter, I suppose there's nothing in metaphysics that stops any law from being basic; it's just a fact about the world thatthe ones that are and the ones that aren't aren't. That being so, the centrality of perceptual mechanisms in mediatingthe meaning-making laws is also just a fact about the world, and not a fact about the metaphysics of content.Presumably God's thoughts could have immediate semantic access to dogs: The law according to which His DOG-tokens are controlled by instantiated doghood could be basic for all that informational theology cares.

 

I pause to underline this last point: it is, I think, a great virtue of informational semantics that, unlike any version of Empiricism, it denies a constitutive status to the relation between content and perception. If you try to list the sorts ofperceptual environments in which dog-thoughts are likely to arise in a perceiver if he has the concept DOG at all, youwill find that the list is, on the one hand, open-ended and, on the other hand, closely dependent on what the perceiverhappens to know about, believe about, or want from, dogs. And if you try to list the sorts of perceptual environmentsin which dog-thoughts must arise if a creature has the concept DOG, you will find that there aren't any: no landscape iseither so barren, or so well lit, that it is metaphysically impossible to fail to notice whether it contains a dog. That, in somecircumstances, perception primitively compels one to think of dogs is a psychophysical fact of capital significance:perception is one of the core mechanisms by which one's semantic access to dogs is sustained. But the necessity of theconnection between having the concept and having perceptually driven dog-thoughtsis itself empirical, not metaphysical. It entails no constitutive constraints either on the content of one's concept, or onthe conditions for possessing it. If informational semantics is anywhere near to being right, Empiricism is dead.

Jean-marc pizano

OK; kindly hold onto all that. There's one more ingredient I want to add.

‘One-Criterion’ Concepts

Back in 1983, Putnam wrote a paper about analyticity that one can see in retrospect to have been motivated by many of the same considerations that I've been discussing here. Putnam was an early enthusiast for Quine's polemic againstanalyticities, definitions, constitutive conceptual connections, and the like. But he was worried about bachelors beingunmarried and Tuesdays coming before Wednesdays. These struck Putnam as boringly analytic in a way that F = MA,or even dogs are animals, is not. So Putnam had trouble viewing Tuesday before Wednesday and the like as bona fide cases oftheoretical centrality; and, as remarked above, theoretical centrality was all Quine had on offer to explain why sometruths seem to be conceptual. Putnam therefore proposed to tidy up after Quine.

Strictly speaking, according to Putnam, there are definitions, analyticities, and constitutive conceptual connections after all. But that there are isn't philosophically interesting since they won't do any of the heavy duty epistemological ormetaphysical work that philosophers have had in mind for them, and that they won't is intrinsic to the nature ofconceptual connection. According to Putnam's story, analyticity works only for concepts that lack centrality; only forconcepts that fail to exhibit any substantial intricacy of attachment to the rest of the web of belief; in short, only forconcepts that lack precisely what philosophers care about about concepts. The very facts that permit there to beconceptual truths about bachelors and Tuesdays prohibit there being such truths in the case of more amusing conceptslike DOG, CAUSE, or TRIANGLE; to say nothing of PHYSICAL OBJECT, GOD, PROTON, or GOOD. So,anyhow, Putnam's story was supposed to make it turn out.

Jean-marc pizano

---

So: no minds, no Tuesdays. But it does notfollow that there are no Tuesdays; the minor premiss is missing. Nor does it follow that there is no fact of the matter aboutwhether today is Tuesday (or about whether it is true that today is Tuesday). Nor does i

[youtubtrafic]

Jean-marc pizano So: no minds, no Tuesdays. But it does notfollow that there are no Tuesdays; the minor premiss is missing. Nor does it follow that there is no fact of the matter aboutwhether today is Tuesday (or about whether it is true that today is Tuesday). Nor does it follow that Tuesdays aren'treal. Nor does it follow that ‘Tuesday’ doesn't really refer to Tuesday. As for whether it follows that Tuesdays aren't “‘externally ” real, or that ‘Tuesday’ doesn't refer to an “ ‘external’ ” reality, that depends a lot on what “ ‘external’ ”means. Search me. I would have thought that minds don't have outsides for much the same sorts of reasons that theydon't have insides. If that's right, then the question doesn't arise.

 

Likewise, there are many properties that are untendentiously mind-dependent though plausibly not conventional; being red or being audible for one kind of example; or being a convincing argument, for another kind; or being an aspirated consonant,for a third kind; or being a doorknob, if I am right about what doorknobs are. It does not follow that there are nodoorknobs, or that no arguments are convincing, or that nothing is audible, or that the initial consonant in ‘Patrick’ isanything other than aspirated.35 All that follows is that whether something is audible, convincing, aspirated, or adoorknob depends, inter alia, on how it affects minds like ours. Nor does it follow that doorknobs aren't “in theworld”. Doorknobs are constituted by their effects on our minds, and our minds are in the world. Where on earth elsecould they be?

Jean-marc pizano

I'm considering (and endorsing) reasons why no sort of Idealism is implied by the view that the relation between being a doorknob and falling under a concept that minds like ours typically acquire from stereotypic doorknob-experiences is metaphysical andconstitutive. I've been arguing that not even Idealism about doorknobs follows; doorknobs are real but mind-dependent,according to the story I've been telling.

But I think there's another, and considerably deeper, point to make along these lines: I haven't suggested, and I don't for a moment suppose, that all our concepts express properties that are mind-dependent. For example, we have theconcept WATER, which expresses the property of being water, viz. the property of being H2O. We also have the conceptH2O, which expresses the property of being H2O, viz. the property of being water. (What distinguishes these concepts,according to me, is that the possession conditions for H2O, but not for WATER, include the possession conditions forH, 2, and O. See Chapters 1 and 2.) Assuming informational semantics, having these concepts is being locked to theproperty of being water.; and being water is a property which is, of course, not mind-dependent. It is not a property thingshave in virtue of their relations to minds, ours or any others.

I suppose that natural kind predicates just are the ones that figure in laws; a fortiori, since water is a natural kind, there isn't a problem about how there could be laws about the property that the concept WATER expresses. But if waterisn't mind-dependent, where do concepts like WATER come from? How do you lock a mental representation to aproperty which, presumably, things have in virtue of their hidden essences? And what, beside hypothesis testing, couldexplain why you generally get WATER from experience with water and not, as it might be, from experience withgiraffes? What, in short, should an enthusiast for informational theories of content say about concepts that expressnatural kinds?

Jean-marc pizano

All in due time. For now, I propose to tell you a fairy tale. It's a fairy tale about how things were back in the Garden, before the Fall; and about what the Snake in the Garden said; and about how, having started out by being Innocents,we've ended up by being scientists.

Concepts of Natural Kinds

How Things Were, Back in the Garden

Once upon a time, back in the Garden, all our concepts expressed (viz. were locked to) properties that things have in virtue of their striking us as being of a certain kind. So, we had the concept DOORKNOB, which

Jean-marc pizano

---

See also Keil 1991, where the primary contrast is between theory theories and “associative” models of concept structure. For a critical survey of the recent history, see Margolis 1994.

[youtubtrafic]

Jean-marc pizano See also Keil 1991, where the primary contrast is between theory theories and “associative” models of concept structure. For a critical survey of the recent history, see Margolis 1994.

 

of concepts that we’ve already reviewed. Hence the relatively cursory treatment they’re about to receive.

The basic idea is that concepts are like theoretical constructs in science as the latter are often construed by post-Empiricist philosophers of science. The caveat is important. For example, it’s not unusual (see Carey 1991; Gopnik 1988) amongtheory theorists to postulate ‘stage-like discontinuities’ in conceptual development, much as Piagetians do. But, unlikePiaget, theory theorists construe the putative stage changes on the analogy of—perhaps even as special cases of—thekinds of discontinuities that ‘paradigm shifts’ are said to occasion in the history of science. The usual Kuhnian moralsare often explicitly drawn:

the concepts of the new and old theory and of the evidential description are incommensurable]. (Gopnik 1988: 199)

Asking whether or not the six-month-old has a concept of object-permanence in the same sense that the 18-month-old does is like asking whether or not the alchemist and the chemist have the same concept of gold, or whether Newton had the same concept of space as Einstein. These concepts are embedded in complex theories and there isno simple way of comparing them. Moreover, particular concepts are inextricably intertwined with other conceptsin the theory. (Ibid.: 205)

Jean-marc pizano

It should be clear how much this account of conceptual ontogenesis relies on a Kuhnian view of science. It isn’t just that if Kuhn is wrong about theory change, then Gopnik is wrong about the analogy between the history of scienceand conceptual development. It’s also that key notions like discontinuity and incommensurability aren’t explicated within theontogenetic theory; the buck is simply passed to the philosophers. “It may not resolve our puzzlement over thephenomena of qualitative conceptual change in childhood to point out that there are exactly parallel paradoxes ofincommensurability in science, but at this stage we may see the substitution of a single puzzling phenomenon for twoseparate puzzling phenomena as some sort of progress” (Gopnik 1988: 209). Correspondingly, however, if you findthe idea that a scientific theory-change is a paradigm shift less than fully perspicuous, you will also be uncertain whatexactly it is that the ontogenetic analogy asserts about stages of conceptual development. Your response will then be asense less of illumination than of déjà vu.

If Gopnik finds some solace in this situation, that’s because, like Kuhn, she takes IRS not to be in dispute.21 The putative “problem of incommensurability”is that if the vocabulary of a science is implicitly defined by the theories it endorses, it's hard to see how the theories cancorrect or contradict each other. This state of affairs might be supposed to provide a precedent for psychologists toappeal to who hold that the minds of young children are incommensurably different from the minds of adults.Alternatively, it might be taken as a reductio of the supposition that the vocabulary of a science is implicitly defined byits theories. It's hard to say which way one ought to take it barring some respectable story about how scientific theoriesimplicitly define their vocabularies; specifically, an account that makes clear which of the inferences that such a theorylicenses are constitutive of the concepts it deploys. And there's no point in cognitive scientists relying on thephilosophy of science for an answer to this question; the philosophy of science hasn't got one. It seems that we're backwhere we started.

Jean-marc pizano

In short, it may be that the right moral to draw from the putative analogy between scientific paradigms and developmental stages is that the ontogenesis of concepts is discontinuous, just like scientific theory-change. Or theright moral may be that, by relativizing the individuation of concepts to the individuation of theories, IRS makes a hashof both cognitive development and the history of science.

If there is any positive account of conceptual content that most theory theorists are inclined towards, I suppose that it's holism.22 I don't, however, know of any attempt they have made seriously to confront the objections that meaningholism is prone to.Jean-marc pizano

---

—Compositionality is satisfied. This will bear emphasis later. I'm going to argue that, of the various ‘inferential role’ theories of concepts, only the one that says that concepts are definitions meets the compositionality condition. Su

[youtubtrafic]

Jean-marc pizano

—Compositionality is satisfied. This will bear emphasis later. I'm going to argue that, of the various ‘inferential role’ theories of concepts, only the one that says that concepts are definitions meets the compositionality condition. Sufficeit for now that words/concepts do contribute their definitions to the sentences/thoughts that contain them; it's partand parcel of ‘bachelor’ meaning unmarried man that the sentence ‘John is a bachelor’ means John is an unmarried man anddoes so because it has ‘bachelor among its constituents. To that extent, at least, definitions are in the running to beboth word meanings and conceptual contents.

—Learnability is satisfied. If the concept DOG is a definition, then learning the definition should be all that's required to learn the concept. A fortiori, concepts that are definitions don't have to be innate.

To be sure, learning definitions couldn't be the whole story about acquiring concepts. Not all concepts could be definitions, since some have to be the primitives that the others are defined in terms of; about the acquisition of theprimitive concepts, some quite different story will have to be told. What determines which concepts are primitive wasone of the questions that definition theories never really resolved. Empiricists in philosophy wanted the primitiveconcepts to be picked out by some epistemological criterion; but they had no luck in finding one. (For discussion ofthese and related matters, see Fodor 1981a, 1981 b.) But, however exactly this goes, the effect of supposing that thereare definitions is to reduce the problems about concepts at large to the corresponding problems about primitiveconcepts. So, if some (complex) concept C is defined by primitive concepts c, c2, . . . , then explaining how we acquireC reduces to explaining how we acquire c, c2, . . . And the problem of how we apply C to things that fall under itreduces to the problem of how we apply c, c2, . . . to the things that fall under them. And explaining how we reasonwith C reduces to explaining how we reason with c, c2, . . . And so forth. So there is good work for definitions to do ifthere turn out to be any.

Jean-marc pizano

All the same, these days almost nobody thinks that concepts are definitions. There is now something like a consensus in cognitive science that the notion of a definition has no very significant role to play in theories of meaning. It is, to besure, a weakish argument against

definitions that most cognitive scientists don't believe in them. Still, I do want to remind you how general, and how interdisciplinary, the collapse of the definitional theory of content has been. So, here are some reasons why definitionsaren't currently in favour as candidates for concepts (/word meanings):

—There are practically no defensible examples of definitions; for all the examples we've got, practically all words (/ concepts) are undefinable. And, of course, if a word (/concept) doesn't have a definition, then its definition can't be itsmeaning. (Oh well, maybe there's one definition. Maybe BACHELOR has the content unmarried man. Maybe there areeven six or seven definitions; why should I quibble? If there are six or seven definitions, or sixty or seventy, that stillleaves a lot of words/concepts undefined, hence a lot of words/concepts of which the definitional theory of meaningis false. The OED lists half a million words, plus or minus a few.)

Ray Jackendoff has suggested that the reason natural language contains so few phrases that are definitionally equivalent to words is that there are “nondiscrete elements of concepts . . . [which] play a role only in lexical semantics and neverappear as a result of phrasal combination” (1992: 48). (I guess that “nondiscrete” means something like analogue oriconic..) But this begs the question that it's meant to answer, since it simply assumes that that there are contents that onlynondiscrete symbols can express. Notice that you don't need nondiscrete symbols to express nondiscrete properties. ‘Red’does quite a good job of expressing red. So suppose there is something essentially nondiscrete about the concepts thatexpress lexical meanings. Still, it wouldn't follow that the same meanings can't be expressed by phrases. So, even ifnondiscrete elements of concepts never appear as a result of phrasal combination, that still wouldn't explain why mostwords can't be defined.

Jean-marc pizano

---

That we do, routinely and successfully, pursue policies intended to engineer our mind—worldcorrelations in this sort of way strikes me as one of the most characteristic and remarkable things about us. (See Fodor1994.)

[youtubtrafic]

Jean-marc pizano That we do, routinely and successfully, pursue policies intended to engineer our mind—worldcorrelations in this sort of way strikes me as one of the most characteristic and remarkable things about us. (See Fodor1994.)

 

—Gossip. Somebody may tell me things about dogs—including dogs far away, and dogs long dead and gone—and that too may cause me to think dog. Gossip is like perception in that it offers a permanentpossibility of semantic access. Only, unlike perception, its range of operation isn't local.

I include, under this general head, cases where semantic access is achieved by exploiting a linguistic division of labour. Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge have argued (though they don't put it quite this way) that sometimes all that's neededto effect semantic access is that I'm properly disposed to rely on experts to decide what my concept applies to. Ineffect, dogs make the expert think dog, and the expert's thinking dog makes me

This is what philosophers call a ‘thought experiment’. But I gather, from opera libretti, that the sort of arrangement I’ve envisaged actually is employed by artless shepherdesses and other light sopranos to keep their flocks from straying. How they manage to make their trills heard in such a din, I simply cannot imagine.

think dog in so far as I am prepared to rely on him. So my dog-thoughts are reliably (though indirectly) connected with dogs. Relying on experts to mediate semantic access is a lot like relying on perception to mediate semantic access,except that the perceptions you are using belong to someone else. (Who may in turn rely on someone else's still. . . andso on, though not ad infinitum.) Gossips, experts, witnesses, and, of course, written records have it in common thateach extends, beyond the sorts of limits that merely perceptual sensitivity imposes, the causal chains on whichachieving and sustaining semantic access—hence conceptual content—depends. (With, however, a correspondingincrease of the likelihood that the chain may become degraded. Testimony one takes with a grain of salt; it's seeing that'ssupposed to be believing.)

Jean-marc pizano

—Theoretical inference. The merest ripple in dog-infested waters may suffice to cause dog-thoughts in the theoretically sophisticated. Analogously: because they left their tooth marks on bones some archaeologists dugup, and because I’ve done my homework, I can know about, a fortiori think about, dogs that lived in Sumer a verylong while ago. Here semantic and epistemic access are sustained by a mixture of perception and inference. Ithink that is quite probably the typical case.

—High tech. Including dog detection by radar, sonar, telescopes, microscopes, hearing aids, bifocal lenses, and other apparatus. The open-endedness of this list, is, I suppose, pretty obvious.

The first moral that's to be drawn from this (surely fragmentary) survey is that, as often as not, the mechanisms whereby semantic access is achieved themselves involve the operation of intentional processes. This may well be soeven where semantic access is sustained just by perception; whether it is, is what the argument about whetherperception is ‘inferential’ is an argument about. Anyhow, it's patent that applying some concepts mediates applyingothers wherever semantic access is sustained by gossip, theoretical inference, expertise, deployment of instruments ofobservation, and the like. This consideration would, of course, be devastating if the present project were somehow touse the notion of semantic access to define, or otherwise to analyse, such notions as content or intentionality. But it'snot. What meaning is, is a metaphysical question to which, I'm supposing, informational semantics is the answer. Thecurrent question, by contrast, is about not metaphysics but engineering: how are certain lawful mind—worldcorrelations (the ones that informational semantics says are content-constituting) achieved and sustained? Answers tothis engineering question can unquestion-beggingly appeal to the operation of semantic

Jean-marc pizano

and intentional mechanisms, since ‘semantic’ and ‘intentional’ are presumed to be independently defined.

A second moral I want to draw is the multiplicity of the means of semantic access. Prima facie there are all sorts of mechanisms, physiological, psychological, cultural, and technological, that can, and do, sustain the meaning-makingnomic connections that constitute the contents of one's concepts. To be sure, it may be that all the non-perceptualmechanisms that sustain semantic access to doghood depend, ‘in the long run’, on one's having and exercising perceptualcapacities.Jean-marc pizano

---

But there isn't any reason in the world to take that idea seriously and, in what follows, I don't.

[youtubtrafic]

Jean-marc pizano But there isn't any reason in the world to take that idea seriously and, in what follows, I don't.

 

There are also those who, though they are enthusiasts for intentional explanation, deny the metaphysical possibility of laws about intentional states. I don't propose to take that seriously in what follows either. For one thing, I find thearguments that are said to show that there can't be intentional laws very hard to follow. For another thing, if there areno intentional laws, then you can't make science out of intentional explan ations; in which case, I don't understand howintentional explanation could be better than merely pro tem. Over the years, a number of philosophers have kindlyundertaken to explain to me what non-nomic intentional explanations would be good for. Apparently it has to do withthe intentional realm (or perhaps it's the rational realm) being autonomous. But I'm afraid I find all that realm talk veryhard to follow too. What is the matter with me, I wonder?4

Second Thesis: ‘Mental representations’ are the primitive bearers of intentional content.

Both ontologically and in order of explanation, the intentionality of the propositional attitudes is prior to the intentionality of natural languages; and, both ontologically and in order of explanation, the intentionality of mentalrepresentations is prior to the intentionality of propositional attitudes.

Just for purposes of building intuitions, think of mental representations on the model of what Empiricist philosophers sometimes called ‘Ideas’. That is, think of them as mental particulars endowed with causal powers and susceptible ofsemantic evaluation. So, there's the Idea DOG. It's satisfied by all and only dogs, and it has associative-cum-causalrelations to, for example, the Idea CAT. So DOG has conditions of semantic evaluation and it has causal powers, asIdeas are required to do.

Jean-marc pizano

Since a lot of what I want to say about mental representations includes what Empiricists did say about Ideas, it might be practical and pious to speak of Ideas rather than mental representations throughout. But I don't propose to do so.The Idea idea is historically intertwined with the idea that Ideas are images, and I don't want to take on thatcommitment. To a first approximation, then, the idea that there are mental representations is the idea that there areIdeas minus the idea that Ideas are images.

RTM claims that mental representations are related to propositional attitudes as follows: for each event that consists of a creature's having a propositional attitude with the content P (each such event as Jones's believing at time t that P)there is a corresponding event that consists of the creature's being related, in a characteristic way, to a token mentalrepresentation that has the content P. Please note the meretricious scrupulousness with which metaphysical neutrality ismaintained. I did not say (albeit I'm much inclined to believe) that having a propositional attitude consists in being related(in one or other of the aforementioned ‘characteristic ways&rsquo to a mental representation.

I'm also neutral on what the ‘characteristic ways’ of being related to mental representations are. I'll adopt a useful dodge that Stephen Schiffer invented: I assume that everyone who has beliefs has a belief box in his head. Then:

For each episode of believing that P, there is a corresponding episode of having, ‘in one’s belief box’, a mental representation which means that P.

Jean-marc pizano

Likewise, mutatis mutandis, for the other attitudes. Like Schiffer, I don't really suppose that belief boxes are literally boxes, or even that they literally have insides. I assume that the essential conditions for belief-boxhood are functional.Notice, in passing, that this is not tantamount to assuming that “believe” has a ‘functional definition’. I doubt that“believe” has any definition. That most—indeed, overwhelmingly most—words don't have will be a main theme in thethird chapter. But denying, as a point of semantics, that “believe” has a functional definition is compatible withasserting, as a point of metaphysics, that belief has a functional essence. Which I think that it probably does. Ditto,mutatis mutandis, “capitalism”, “carburettor”, and the like. (Compare Devitt 1996; Carruthers 1996, both of whom runarguments that depend on not observing this distinction.)

Jean-marc pizanoПохожие записи:

1. Idealism followed, of course.