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.

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

So, then, consider a supplementedversion of IA (I’ll call it SIA) which says everything that IA does and also that concept possession is some kind oflocking. The question before us is whether SIA requires radical nativism.

Jean-marc pizano So, then, consider a supplementedversion of IA (I’ll call it SIA) which says everything that IA does and also that concept possession is some kind oflocking. The question before us is whether SIA requires radical nativism.

 

That learning how can’t depend on learning that in every

case is, I suppose, the moral of Lewis Carroll’s story about Achilles and the tortoise: Carroll 1895/1995.

CogSci footnote: the present issue isn’t whether inferential capacities are ‘declarative’ rather than ‘procedural’; it’s whether they are interestingly analogous to skills. A cognitive architecture (like SOAR, for example) that is heavily committed to procedural representations is not thereby required to suppose that drawing inferences has muchin common with playing basketball or the piano. Say, if you like, that someone who accepts the inference from P to Q has the habit of accepting Q if he accepts P. Butthis sort of ‘habit’ involves a relation among one’s propositional attitudes and, prima facie, being able to play the piano doesn’t.

Concepts aren’t skills, of course; concepts are mental particulars. In particular, they are the constituents of beliefs, whereas skills can’t be the constituents of anything except other skills. But though all this is so, the argument in the text doesn’t presuppose it.

Notice that the question before us is not whether SIA permits radical nativism; it’s patent that it does. According to SIA, having a concept is being locked to a property. Well, being locked to a property is having a disposition, and thoughperhaps there are some dispositions that must be acquired, hence can’t be innate, nothing I’ve heard of argues thatbeing locked to a property is one of them. If, in short, you require your metaphysical theory of concept possession toentail the denial of radical nativism, SIA won’t fill your bill. (I don’t see how any metaphysics could, short of questionbegging, since the status of radical nativism is surely an empirical issue. Radical nativism may be false, but I doubt thatit is, in any essential way, confused.) But if, you’re prepared to settle for a theory of concepts that is plausibly compatiblewith the denial of radical nativism, maybe we can do some business.

Jean-marc pizano

If you assume SIA, and hence the locking model of concept possession, you thereby deny that learning concepts necessarily involves acquiring beliefs. And if you deny that learning concepts necessarily involves acquiring beliefs, thenyou can’t assume that hypothesis testing is an ingredient in concept acquisition. It is, as I keep pointing out, primarilycognitivism about the metaphysics of concept possession that motivates inductivism about the psychology of conceptacquisition: hypothesis testing is the natural assumption about how beliefs are acquired from experience. But if it can’tbe assumed that concept acquisition is ipso facto belief acquisition, then it can’t be assumed that locking DOORKNOBto doorknobhood requires a mediating hypothesis. And if it can’t be assumed that locking DOORKNOB to doorknobhoodrequires a mediating hypothesis, then, a fortiori, it can’t be assumed that it requires a mediating hypothesis in which theconcept DOORKNOB is itself deployed. In which case, for all that the Standard Argument shows, DOORKNOBcould be both primitive and not innate.

This maybe starts to sound a little hopeful; but not, I’m afraid, for very long. The discussion so far has underestimated the polemical resources that SA has available. In particular, there is an independent argument that seems to show thatconcept acquisition has to be inductive, whether or not the metaphysics of concept possession is cognitivist, so SA gets its inductivistpremiss even if SIA is right that having a concept doesn’t require having beliefs. The moral would then be that, thougha non-cognitivist account of concept possession may be necessary for RTM to avoid radical nativism, it’s a long wayfrom being sufficient.

Jean-marc pizano

In short, Patient Reader, the Standard Argument’s way of getting radical nativism goes like this:

(1) cognitivism about concept possession ^ (2) inductivist (i.e.

hypothesis-testing) model of concept learning ^ (3) primitive concepts can’t be learned.

SIA denies (1), thereby promising to block the standard argument. If, however, there’s some other source for (2)—some plausible premiss to derive it from that doesn’t assume a cognitivist metaphysics of concept possession—then thestandard argument is back in business.

Jean-marc pizano

“[take] the burden of explaining learningout of the environmental input and [put] it back into the child” (1989: 14—15). Only if the child does not overgeneralizelexical categories is there evidence for his “differentiating [them] a priori’ (ibid.: 44, my emphasis); viz. prior toenvironmentally provided information.

Jean-marc pizano “[take] the burden of explaining learningout of the environmental input and [put] it back into the child” (1989: 14—15). Only if the child does not overgeneralizelexical categories is there evidence for his “differentiating [them] a priori’ (ibid.: 44, my emphasis); viz. prior toenvironmentally provided information.

 

Pinker’s argument is therefore straightforwardly missing a premiss. The logical slip seems egregious, but Pinker really does make it, as far as I can tell. Consider:

[Since there is empirical evidence against the child’s having negative information, and there is empirical evidence for the child’s rules being productive,] the only way out of Baker’s Paradox that’s left is . . . rejecting arbitrariness.Perhaps the verbs that do or don’t participate in these alterations do not belong to arbitrary lists after all . . .[Perhaps, in particular, these classes are specifiable by reference to semantic criteria.] … If learners could acquireand enforce criteria delineating the[se] . . . classes of verbs, they could productively generalize an alternation to verbsthat meet the criteria without overgeneralizing it to those that do not. (ibid.: 30)

Precisely so. If, as Pinker’s theory claims, the lexical facts are non-arbitrary and children are sensitive to their nonarbitrariness, then the right prediction is that children don’t overgeneralize the lexical rules.

Which, however, by practically everybody’s testimony, including Pinker’s, children reliably do. On Pinker’s own account, children aren’t “conservative” in respect of the lexicon (see 1989: 19—26, sec. 1.4.4.1 for lots and lots ofcases).38 This being so, there’s got to be something wrong with the theory that the child’s hypotheses “differentiate”lexical classes a priori. A priori constraints would mean that false hypotheses don’t even get tried. Overgeneralization, bycontrast, means that false hypotheses do get tried but are somehow expunged (presumably by some sort ofinformation that the environment supplies).

Jean-marc pizano

At one point, Pinker almost ’fesses up to this. The heart of his strategy for lexical learning is that “if the verbs that occur in both forms have some [e.g. semantic] property. . . that is missing in the verbs that occur [in the input data] inonly one form, bifurcate the verbs … so as to expunge nonwitnessed verb forms generated by the earlierunconstrained version of the rule if they violate the newly learned constraint” (1989: 52). Pinker admits that this may“appear to be using a kind of indirect negative evidence: it is sensitive to the nonoccurrence of certain kinds of verbs”.To be sure; it sounds an awful lot like saying that there is no Baker’s Paradox for the learning of verb structure, henceno argument for a priori semanticconstraints on the child’s hypotheses about lexical syntax. What happens, on this view, is that the child overgeneralizes,just as you would expect, but the overgeneralizations are inhibited by lack of positive supporting evidence from thelinguistic environment and, for this reason, they eventually fade away. This would seem to be a perfectlystraightforward case of environmentally determined learning, albeit one that emphasizes (as one might have said in theold days) ‘lack of reward’ rather than ‘punishment’ as the signal that the environment uses to transmit negative data tothe learner. I’m not, of course, suggesting that this sort of story is right. (Indeed Pinker provides a good discussion ofwhy it probably isn’t, see section 1.4.3.2.) My point is that Pinker’s own account seems to be no more than a case of it.What is crucial to Pinker’s solution of Baker’s Paradox isn’t that he abandons arbitrariness; it’s that he abandons ‘no negative data’.

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Understandably, Pinker resists this diagnosis. The passage cited above continues as follows:

This procedure might appear to be using a kind of indirect negative evidence; it is sensitive to the nonoccurrence of certain kinds of forms. It does so, though, only in the uninteresting sense of acting differently depending onwhether it hears X or doesn’t hear X, which is true of virtually any learning algorithm … It is not sensitive to thenonoccurrence of particular sentences or even verb-argument structure combinations in parental speech; rather it isseveral layers removed from the input, looking at broad statistical patterns across the lexicon. (1989: 52)

Jean-marc pizano

The difference between us is in the strengths of our beliefs, not in their contents.8 And, as usual, it really does seem to beidentity of belief content that’s needed here. If our respective beliefs about Presidents having to be of voting age weresupposed to be merely similar, circularity would ensue: since content similarity is the notion we are trying to explicate, itmustn’t be among the notions that the explication presupposes. (I think I may have mentioned that before.)

Jean-marc pizano The difference between us is in the strengths of our beliefs, not in their contents.8 And, as usual, it really does seem to beidentity of belief content that’s needed here. If our respective beliefs about Presidents having to be of voting age weresupposed to be merely similar, circularity would ensue: since content similarity is the notion we are trying to explicate, itmustn’t be among the notions that the explication presupposes. (I think I may have mentioned that before.)

 

The same sort of point holds, though even more obviously, for other standard ways of construing conceptual similarity. For example, if concepts are sets of features, similarity of concepts will presumably be measured by somefunction that is sensitive to the amount of overlap of the sets. But then, the atomic feature assignments mustthemselves be construed as literal. If the similarity between your concept CAT and mine depends (inter alia) on ouragreement that ‘+ has a tail’ is in both of our feature bundles, then the assignment of that feature to these bundles mustexpress a literal consensus; it must literally be the property of having a tail that we both literally think that cats literallyhave. (As usual, nothing relevant changes if feature assignments are assumed to be probabilistic or weighted; or if thefeature assigned are supposed to be “subsemantic”, though these red herrings are familiar from the Connectionistliterature.)

Or, suppose that concepts are thought of as positions in a “multidimensional vector space” (see e.g. Churchland 1995) so that the similarity between your concepts and mine is expressed by the similarity of their positions in our respectivespaces. Suppose, in particular, that it is constitutive of the difference between our NIXON concepts that you thinkNixon was even more of a crook than I do. Once again, a robust notion of content identity is presupposed since eachof our spaces is required to have a dimension that expresses crookedness; a fortiori, both are requiredto have dimensions which express degrees of the very same property. That should seem entirely unsurprising. Vector spacemodels identify the dimensions of a vector space semantically (viz. by stipulating what the location of a concept alongthat dimension is to mean), and it’s just a truism that the positions along dimension D can represent degrees of D-nessonly in a mind that possesses the concept of being D. You and I can argue about whether Nixon was merely crookedor very crooked only if the concept of being crooked is one that we have in common.

Jean-marc pizano

It may seem to you that I am going on about such truisms longer than necessity demands. It often seems that to me, too. There are, however, at least a zillion places in the cognitive science literature, and at least half a zillion in thephilosophy literature, where the reader is assured that some or all of his semantical troubles will vanish quite away ifonly he will abandon the rigid and reactionary notion of content identity in favour of the liberal and laid-back notion ofcontent similarity. But in none of these places is one ever told how to do so. That’s because nobody has the slightestidea how. In fact, it’s all just loose talk, and it causes me to grind my teeth.

Please note that none of this is intended to claim that notions like belief similarity, content similarity, concept similarity, etc. play less than a central role in the psychology of cognition. On the contrary, for all I know (certainly for all I amprepared non-negotiably to assume) it may be that every powerful intentional generalization is of the form “If x has abelief similar to P then … ” rather than the form “If x believes P then … ”. If that is so, then so be it. My point is justthat assuming that it is so doesn’t exempt one’s theory of concepts from the Publicity constraint. To repeat one lasttime: all the theories of content that offer a robust construal of conceptual similarity do so by presupposing acorrespondingly robust notion of concept identity. As far as I can see, this is unavoidable. If I’m right that it is, then thePublicity constraint is ipso facto non-negotiable.

Jean-marc pizano

OK, so those are my five untendentious constraints on theories of concepts.Jean-marc pizano

Alas, ecumenicism has to stop somewhere. The fifth (and final thesis) of my version of RTM does depart from the standard Frege architecture.

Jean-marc pizano

Alas, ecumenicism has to stop somewhere. The fifth (and final thesis) of my version of RTM does depart from the standard Frege architecture.

Fifth Thesis: Whatever distinguishes coextensive concepts is ipso facto ‘in the head’. This means, something like that

it’s available to be a proximal cause (/effect) of mental processes.10

As I understand it, the Fregean story makes the following three claims about modes of presentation:

5.1 MOPs are senses; for an expression to mean what it does is for the expression to have the MOP that it does.

I take it that one of the things that distinguishes Fregeans sans phrase from neo -Fregeans (like e.g. Peacocke 1992) is that the latter are not committed to Fege’s anti-mentalism and are therefore free to agree with Thesis Five if they’re so inclined. Accordingly, for the neo -sort of Fregean, the sermon that follows will seem to be preached to the converted.

5.2 Since MOPs can distinguish concepts, they explain how it is possible to entertain one, but not the other, of twocoreferential concepts; e.g. how it is possible have the concept WATER but not the concept H2O, hence how itis possible to have (de dicto) beliefs about water but no (de dicto) beliefs about H2O.

5.3 MOPs are abstract objects; hence they are non-mental.

In effect, I’ve signed on for 5.2; it’s the claim about MOPs that everybody must accept who has any sympathy at all for the Frege programme. But I think there are good reasons to believe that 5.2 excludes both 5.1 and 5.3. In which case, Itake it that 5.1 and 5.3 will have to go.

Jean-marc pizano

—’What’s wrong with 5.1: 5.1 makes trouble for 5.2: it’s unclear that you can hold onto 5.2 if you insist, as Frege does, that MOPs be identified with senses. One thing (maybe the only one) that we know for sure about senses is thatsynonyms share them. So if MOPs are senses and distinct but coextensive concepts are distinguished (solely) by theirMOPs, then synonymous concepts must be identical, and it must not be possible to think either without thinking theother. (This is the so-called ‘substitution test’ for distinguishing modes of presentation.) But (here I follow Mates1962), it is possible for Fred to wonder whether John understands that bachelors are unmarried men even though Fred does notwonder whether John understands that unmarried men are unmarried men. The moral seems to be that if 5.2 is right, so thatMOPs just are whatever it is that the substitution test tests for, then it’s unlikely that MOPs are senses.

Here’s a similar argument to much the same conclusion. Suppose I tell you that Jackson was a painter and that Pollock was a painter, and I tell you nothing else about Jackson or Pollock. Suppose, also, that you believe what I tell you. Itlooks like that fixes the senses of the names ‘Jackson’ and ‘Pollock’ if anything could; and it looks like it fixes them asboth having the same sense: viz. a painter. (Mutatis mutandis, it looks as though I have fixed the same inferential role forboth.) Yet, in the circumstances imagined, it’s perfectly OK—perfectly conceptually coherent—for you to wonderwhether Jackson and Pollock were the same painter. (Contrast the peculiarity of your wondering, in such a case, whetherJackson was Jackson or whether Pollock was Pollock.) So, then, by Frege’s own test, JACKSON and POLLOCKcount as different MOPs. But if concepts with the same sense can be different MOPs then, patently, MOPs can’t besenses. This isn’t particularly about names, by the way. If I tell you that a flang is a sort of machine part and a glanf is asort of machine part, it‘s perfectly OK for you to wonder whether a glanf is a flang.11

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You can’t, of course, do this trick with definite descriptions since they presuppose uniqueness of reference. If you mean by “Jackson” the horse that bit John, and you mean by “Pollock” the horse that bit John, you can’t coherently wonder whether Jackson is the same horse as Pollock.By the way, I have the damnedest sense of déjà vu about theargument in the text; I simply can’t remember whether I read it somewhere or made it up.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.

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

So, then, consider a supplementedversion of IA (I’ll call it SIA) which says everything that IA does and also that concept possession is some kind oflocking. The question before us is whether SIA requires radical nativism.

Jean-marc pizano So, then, consider a supplementedversion of IA (I’ll call it SIA) which says everything that IA does and also that concept possession is some kind oflocking. The question before us is whether SIA requires radical nativism.

 

That learning how can’t depend on learning that in every

case is, I suppose, the moral of Lewis Carroll’s story about Achilles and the tortoise: Carroll 1895/1995.

CogSci footnote: the present issue isn’t whether inferential capacities are ‘declarative’ rather than ‘procedural’; it’s whether they are interestingly analogous to skills. A cognitive architecture (like SOAR, for example) that is heavily committed to procedural representations is not thereby required to suppose that drawing inferences has muchin common with playing basketball or the piano. Say, if you like, that someone who accepts the inference from P to Q has the habit of accepting Q if he accepts P. Butthis sort of ‘habit’ involves a relation among one’s propositional attitudes and, prima facie, being able to play the piano doesn’t.

Concepts aren’t skills, of course; concepts are mental particulars. In particular, they are the constituents of beliefs, whereas skills can’t be the constituents of anything except other skills. But though all this is so, the argument in the text doesn’t presuppose it.

Notice that the question before us is not whether SIA permits radical nativism; it’s patent that it does. According to SIA, having a concept is being locked to a property. Well, being locked to a property is having a disposition, and thoughperhaps there are some dispositions that must be acquired, hence can’t be innate, nothing I’ve heard of argues thatbeing locked to a property is one of them. If, in short, you require your metaphysical theory of concept possession toentail the denial of radical nativism, SIA won’t fill your bill. (I don’t see how any metaphysics could, short of questionbegging, since the status of radical nativism is surely an empirical issue. Radical nativism may be false, but I doubt thatit is, in any essential way, confused.) But if, you’re prepared to settle for a theory of concepts that is plausibly compatiblewith the denial of radical nativism, maybe we can do some business.

Jean-marc pizano

If you assume SIA, and hence the locking model of concept possession, you thereby deny that learning concepts necessarily involves acquiring beliefs. And if you deny that learning concepts necessarily involves acquiring beliefs, thenyou can’t assume that hypothesis testing is an ingredient in concept acquisition. It is, as I keep pointing out, primarilycognitivism about the metaphysics of concept possession that motivates inductivism about the psychology of conceptacquisition: hypothesis testing is the natural assumption about how beliefs are acquired from experience. But if it can’tbe assumed that concept acquisition is ipso facto belief acquisition, then it can’t be assumed that locking DOORKNOBto doorknobhood requires a mediating hypothesis. And if it can’t be assumed that locking DOORKNOB to doorknobhoodrequires a mediating hypothesis, then, a fortiori, it can’t be assumed that it requires a mediating hypothesis in which theconcept DOORKNOB is itself deployed. In which case, for all that the Standard Argument shows, DOORKNOBcould be both primitive and not innate.

This maybe starts to sound a little hopeful; but not, I’m afraid, for very long. The discussion so far has underestimated the polemical resources that SA has available. In particular, there is an independent argument that seems to show thatconcept acquisition has to be inductive, whether or not the metaphysics of concept possession is cognitivist, so SA gets its inductivistpremiss even if SIA is right that having a concept doesn’t require having beliefs. The moral would then be that, thougha non-cognitivist account of concept possession may be necessary for RTM to avoid radical nativism, it’s a long wayfrom being sufficient.

Jean-marc pizano

In short, Patient Reader, the Standard Argument’s way of getting radical nativism goes like this:

(1) cognitivism about concept possession ^ (2) inductivist (i.e.

hypothesis-testing) model of concept learning ^ (3) primitive concepts can’t be learned.

SIA denies (1), thereby promising to block the standard argument. If, however, there’s some other source for (2)—some plausible premiss to derive it from that doesn’t assume a cognitivist metaphysics of concept possession—then thestandard argument is back in business.

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.

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?

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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?

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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