Abstract
Intuitively it has seemed to many that our concepts conscious state and conscious creature are sharp rather than vague, that they can have no borderline cases. On the other hand, many who take conscious states to be identical to, or realized by, complex physical states are committed to the vagueness of those concepts. In the paper I argue that conscious state and conscious creature are sharp by presenting four necessary conditions for conceiving borderline cases in general, and showing that some of those conditions cannot be met with conscious state. I conclude that conscious state is sharp, and the conclusion is then extended to conscious creature. The paper ends with a brief discussion of some implications.
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Notes
Two familiar senses of the term ‘concept’ are the philosophical sense (roughly, an abstract meaning, sense, etc.), and the psychological sense (roughly, a mental representation that can be a constituent of thoughts). I refer to these, respectively, as conceptsPHL and conceptsPSY. Boldface type (and small caps in titles and headings) is reserved for conceptsPHL. Expressions within square brackets refer to conceptions, or elements of conceptions (see Sect. 2).
Rosenthal (2002, p. 417, fn. 3) is an exception who believes that “it may well be that conscious states can occur without the creature itself being conscious.” I shall assume the truth of the biconditional in the text.
Greenough (2003) has offered a “minimal” definition of ‘vagueness’ which is meant to be neutral among competing theories of vagueness. I do not discuss his definition because it applies to only one of two types of vagueness distinguished by Alston (1964) and others (as Greenough himself acknowledges, p. 240, fn. 4). My discussion, however, concerns both types (see Sect. 3.3).
To see that the vagueness is not explained, notice that for any correct concept F, that same concept can be imagined counterfactually to have been incorrect with respect to its vagueness/sharpness. For example, even if our current concept life is correct, that same vague concept would have been incorrect had life been such as to require a sharp concept. Since life remains vague across such actual and counterfactual situations while the nature of life differs, the nature of life cannot explain life’s actual vagueness even though it entails it.
Notice that I am not here assuming semantic internalism in any standard sense. Indeed, my argument that a concept F can change from sharp to vague (or vice versa) while maintaining reference to Fs assumes externalism. Both the vitalistic and molecular biological concepts life, for instance, are concepts of life in virtue of being related to the same external phenomenon. What is an internal, psychological matter is the concept’s vagueness/sharpness.
‘Phenomenology’ is to be understood here in the broad, Nagelian what it is like sense (see Nagel 1974). For an illustration, compare the phenomenology associated with uncertainty whether a 13-year old girl is a child or not, with the phenomenology associated with uncertainty whether a person who entered a poorly-lit room is a man or a woman. Notice that such a phenomenological difference poses no threat to the epistemic view of vagueness, so long as vagueness is viewed as a special kind of ignorance of sharp boundaries, as it is on Williamson’s (1994) theory, for example.
ConceptsPSY are explained in note 1, and conceptions in Sect. 2.1. If it turns out that because of the “hard problem” of consciousness (Chalmers 1996) psychology cannot account for phenomenological features of experience, accounting for the structural and functional features of the phenomenology will do.
Williamson (1997, 945 ff.) claims there could be a vague term for speakers who lack v-dispositions. He imagines a hypothetical “opinionated macho community” in which everyone confidently applies ‘bald’ or its negation to each case, in spite of considerable disagreement among speakers. Although the concept is intuitively sharp for each member of the community, Williamson maintains that ‘bald’ is vague nonetheless. However, because most people would likely insist that they mean something different by ‘bald’ than others in the community, it is doubtful that there is a single meaning for ‘bald’ in the community (cf. Horwich 2000, p. 91).
See note 1.
Notice that I am assuming that the elements of conceptions are themselves conceptions. Although nothing hangs on that assumption, it does seem reasonable: when we identify a case of baldness by employing elements like [scalp], the representation of scalps we employ will typically itself be complex (e.g., distinct regions of the scalp are likely to be represented in evaluating overall hair distribution); and similarly for other conceptions and elements. Notice that there is no claim here about our conceptsPSY being complex (more on this below).
I appeal here to McGlaughlin’s (1995, p. 121) distinction between the manifestation and activation of dispositions: “A type of thing a disposition is a tendency to be or do is a manifestation of the disposition….Dispositions [also] have activating conditions….Both cracking and shattering [for example]…can manifest the disposition of fragility, and both being struck and being dropped can activate it.”
And similarly our concepts conscious state and conscious creature. For an argument that ‘consciousness’ is univocal in the current consciousness literature, see Antony (2001b).
See Laurence and Margolis (1999) for examples.
Cf. Woodfield (1991).
Were it not true of most of our conceptions, much of the empirical research on conceptsPSY/conceptions would be inexplicable.
Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) in Descartes (1984).
Prima facie, because, as was just pointed out, many elements of our associated conceptions are unconscious; so unconscious elements from consciousness might rule out one or more of those theories. Another possibility is that elements of which we are aware entail in a non-obvious way the falsity of one of those theories. In the absence of evidence for either possibility, however, it is rational to treat the concept as neutral with respect to the theories.
See, e.g., “Letter to Mersenne”: “Nothing can be in…my mind, of which I am not aware” (Dec. 31, 1640, in Descartes 1991).
Nor, again, is there assumed to be a sharp line between clear Fs or clear not-Fs, on the one hand, and borderline Fs, on the other.
Alston speaks of degree and combinatory vagueness.
In distinguishing among three categories, it may appear that I am assuming borderline Fs to be distinct from both Fs and not-Fs. Williamson, however, has argued that a contradiction follows from that assumption (see, e.g., his 1994, Sect. 7.2). I am not assuming that, however (nor would I want to, given my desire to remain neutral with respect to the epistemic view). My claim, rather, concerns three categories of mental representations which individuals who possess vague concepts are psychologically capable of generating. And regardless of whether each borderline F must be either an F or a non-F, it is false that each individual represented as a borderline F (or with respect to which v-dispositions are generated) must either be represented as an F or represented as a non-F. At the level of mental representations, three distinct categories (at least) are required.
Cf. Wright’s (1975, p. 334) concept ϕ.
As far as I can tell, I need be committed here only to apparent conceptual sufficiency, a priori entailment, etc., which is consistent with there being no such clearly characterizable, theoretically useful (etc.) notions.
See Antony (2006a) for further discussion.
See the second to last paragraph in Sect. 1.
For example, if a [ψ] represents a chair with the elements [seat], [four legs] and [back], and the next [ψ] in the series represents an object with [seat] and [four legs] but not [back], it is not left open that the second object has a back, which was simply not represented. Rather, it is somehow part of the content of the second [ψ] (or entailed by it, etc.) that the object lacks a back.
One way is to reach borderline cases for a concept F by reaching borderline case for an element of the conception [F]. Call these vague-element borderline cases. Though there is much that can be said about these cases, I shall ignore them. That is because I believe (though I shall not argue) that whenever vague-element borderline cases are possible for a concept F, so are combinatory borderline cases. That being so, the possibility of vague-element borderline cases for conscious state is ruled out by my argument against combinatory borderline cases.
See Antony (2006a).
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Acknowledgements
Many people have helped with discussion or written comments, both brief and extended. Special thanks to Ned Block, Berel Lerner, Ruth Manor, Michael Martin, Michael Morreau, David Papineau, and several anonymous referees. Earlier versions of this paper were presented in 2003 at meetings of the Israeli Philosophical Society and the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology.
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Antony, M.V. Are Our Concepts conscious state and conscious creature Vague?. Erkenn 68, 239–263 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-007-9061-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-007-9061-2