Abstract
Jerry Fodor (Concepts: Where cognitive science went wrong. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) famously argued that lexical concepts are unstructured. After examining the advantages and disadvantages of both the classical approach to concepts and Fodor’s conceptual atomism, I argue that some lexical concepts are, in fact, structured. Roughly stated, I argue that structured lexical concepts bear a necessary biconditional entailment relation to their structural constituents. I develop this account of the structure of lexical concepts within the framework of Pavel Tichý’s (The foundations of Frege’s logic. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 1988) theory of constructions. I argue that concepts are constructions which can be combined by way of Tichý’s construction-forming operations of composition and closure and an additional operation, simplification, which I propose in section 6. The last of these construction-forming operations plays a central role in my account of lexical concept structure. Stated generally, structured lexical concepts are a result of simplifying their structural constituents.
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Notes
I will use brackets to refer to either concepts (e.g., ‘[red]’ will refer to the concept red) or thoughts (e.g., ‘[that it is raining]’ will refer to the thought that it is raining).
See Fodor and Lepore (1996).
Ibid., p. 2.
Ibid., p. 3.
Ibid., p. 4.
See Euthyphro.
See book one of The Republic.
See The Symposium.
See Quine (1953).
Fodor (1998), p. 36.
Fodor (1998), p. 22.
For example, we might wonder whether typicality effects involving ‘bird’ membership would exist in the case of bird experts.
Fodor (1998), p. 93.
A similar distinction between metaphysical and epistemological considerations can be found in Rey’s (1983) distinction between conception and concept.
As noted by Fodor and Lepore (1996), prototypes do not compose in ways required by the compositional structure of concepts. They illustrate this objection with the concept [pet fish]. While the prototype corresponding to [pet] involves features had by typical pets, such as dogs and cats, and the prototype corresponding to [fish] involves typical features of fish, such as salmon, trout, halibut, etc., the prototype corresponding to [pet fish] will involve features had by typical pet fish, such as goldfish. The problem is that the typical features corresponding to [pet fish] do not correspond to those generated by combining the typical features of [pet] and [fish]: “A goldfish is a poorish example of a fish, and a poorish example of a pet, but it’s quite a good example of a pet fish” (p. 12). With this in mind, prototype theory fails to satisfy principle P (constraint 5 above).
Fodor and Lepore (1996), p. 17.
See Laurence and Margolis (1999), p. 5.
As we will see, ‘entailment’ will be little more than a label for a more complex relation (i.e., necessary biconditional entailment plus a further restricting condition) between particular propositions composed of the relevant concepts.
The single quotes here are to note that I am using ‘structural constituent’ in a potentially non-traditional way insofar as I am not referring to compositional constituents.
In what follows I will use ‘[A] entails [BC]’ (where ‘[A]’ and ‘[BC]’ express concepts) as short for the more explicit ‘[x is an A] entails [x is a BC]’.
I thank an anonymous referee for this point.
Although, unlike the traditional view, I am claiming that the notion of structure involved in lexical concepts is not decompositional.
Of course, for any non-basic necessary truths there will be some set of more basic truths which, taken together, entail the truth in question, but these will be the sets which constitute the informative entailments (or, proofs) of such necessary truths.
Recall that this, according to F&L, is crucial to our ability to explain productivity and systematicity.
I am using [round] for simplicity here. What follows for [round] will follow for [round square] (as well as [∨ round square]) and [Gödel’s theorem is true] as well.
In Sect. 5.3 I will explain how this condition applies to ‘non-intersective’ concepts (e.g., [alleged], [possible]) and ‘relative’ concepts (e.g., [tall], [big]).
Notice that this also rules out knowing [x is an unmarried man ∨ x is a round square], insofar as knowing that [x is a bachelor] does not, by itself entail knowledge of the way ‘∨’ functions.
Understood in terms of complex concepts, the trees are the result of the decomposition of the complex concepts themselves, while in terms of non-primitive lexical concepts, the decomposition trees are those of the complex concepts which constitute the ‘structural constituents’ of the lexical concepts in question.
See Tichý (1988), pp. 63–65.
Tichý (1988), p. 3.
See Tichý (1988), p. 201.
This last point is to note concepts which, as opposed to those which construct their objects directly, ‘construct’ intensions, i.e., concepts (e.g., property concepts, individual concepts) whose extension depends upon a valuation (e.g., a possible world).
I pause to note that, according to Tichý, the only simple constructions (i.e., those which have no constituents) are variables. A variable is a construction whose specification depends upon a range of entities and its location within an ordered sequence of this range. Simply put, variables construct objects relative to valuations. For example, given the set of natural numbers, N 1,…,N n, and a sequence, s, the nth variable constructs the nth member of the sequence.
Composition in Tichý’s theory corresponds to application in Church’s λ-calculus. As we will see, closure in Tichý’s theory corresponds to abstraction in Church’s λ-calculus.
Ibid., p. 64.
For simplicity, I will suppress the τ notation.
I thank an anonymous referee for pointing this out.
In mentioning this, I am following the Davidsonian tradition according to which action verbs are to be analyzed as having a basic event component as an argument, in addition to the subjects and objects of the relevant verbs. For further details, see Davidson (1967).
Recall the previous point regarding the seamlessness of complex concepts that result from composition. The point is that while [unmarried] does not entail [bachelor], [unmarried male] does entail [bachelor].
Here, by ‘corresponding complex concept’, I mean that concept which satisfies 2, in addition to 1, in the preceding account of ‘definitional constituents’.
I thank an anonymous referee for raising this issue.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the members of the Southern Methodist University philosophy department, and an anonymous reviewer at Philosophical Studies for helpful comments. The paper has been improved significantly as a result. I would especially like to thank Graham Oddie for many helpful conversations about Tichý’s theory of constructions and the nature of concepts.
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Daley, K. The structure of lexical concepts. Philos Stud 150, 349–372 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9411-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9411-9