Abstract
There is reason to expect a reasonable account of a priori knowledge to be linked with an account of the nature of conceptual thought. Recent “two-dimensionalist” accounts of conceptual thought propose an extremely direct connection between the two: on such views, being in a position to know a priori a large number of non-trivial propositions is a necessary condition of concept-possession. In this paper I criticize this view, by arguing that it requires an implausibly internalist and intellectualist conception of capacities we bring to bear in applying concepts in experience. Empirical concept-application depends on the exercise of a variety of capacities, many of which can be grouped together under the general label “recognitional”. As I argue, two-dimensionalism cannot accommodate a plausible account of such capacities. This suggests that the link between a priori knowledge and the nature of conceptual thought is not as direct as twodimensionalists take it to be. I close by briefly sketching a different way to think of that link.
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Notes
The formulation used here is not accidental, but rather defended as a useful heuristic in Chalmers (1996, p. 57).
Of course, our possession of some – and perhaps even all—of our concepts depends on experience. But this experience is not part of what justifies our knowledge of the corresponding conditionals, and justificatory dependence is just what is at issue here.
Much work on two-dimensionalism has been published recently. What follows has points of contact with some of it, particularly with Yablo (2002). I will elaborate on this later on in the paper.
A note about terminology is in order here. According to Chalmers’s usage, the term ‘concept’ applies to mental representations, that is, mental particulars with semantic properties analogous to those of words (see Chalmers 2002c, p. 3). This is somewhat surprising, since on Chalmers’s Fregean view it would be more natural to take concepts to be non-mental, abstract entities. What could be considered as mental is the state of grasping a concept; but then, that is most naturally construed as general rather than particular, since it is a state many different subjects can be in at many different times. In what follows I will us the term ‘concept’ to refer not to mental particulars, but rather to components of thoughts that can be shared by many subjects.
See, for example, Chalmers and Jackson (2001). Of course two-dimensionalism must offer a different account of what it is to possess the concepts included in the basic vocabulary—perhaps by allowing homophonic application-conditionals for these concepts.
See Putnam (1975).
The class of concepts that do not—or do not primarily—serve this function is very diverse, of course. It includes, for example, normative concepts and logical concepts.
I use the term “discursive reasoning” for reasoning that can be represented in words, regardless of whether the subject who engages in it consciously goes through some kind of internal monologue or not. I take it as obvious that not all reasoning is discursive in this sense. When considering how to get a large sofa down a narrow stairwell, for example, I am definitely engaged in a process of reasoning. But it is clear that I do not need to have any knowledge of the geometrical theory that would be required to formulate and solve this problem in a language. My reasoning, therefore, is not discursive in the present sense.
This account (as well as the refinement of it I will discuss shortly) suffers from an obvious difficulty, which for reasons of simplicity I will ignore. No specification involving only the qualitative properties of water can capture the required recognitional capacity, because no such specification discriminates between water and twin-water (a substance found only on Twin Earth, a distant but actual planet). But, intuitively, if a person from Earth calls twin-water ‘water’, she has not recognized twin-water as water: she has, rather, made a mistake. Her recognitional capacity has misfired in this case. The problem is that on the present account no mistake can be found in her performance, since she has correctly judged that her specification applies to twin-water.
What we need seems to be a requirement that the object picked out be the one the subject has actually interacted with in the past, and from which the stored specification derives. So the specification would end up looking like this (where S is supposed to be a specification involving only qualitative properties): “the x such that: (x is S & my past interactions with x are the source of S)”. These complications will be ignored in the text, since there are more fundamental problems facing the proposed account.
2002, pp. 441–492.
2002, pp. 467–469. As Yablo notes, not all Cassinis turn out to be oval; but, like Yablo, I ignore the point here.
This would seem to be Chalmers’s own response: “given the phenomenal information […] about appearances (in a pure phenomenal vocabulary) ‘peeking’ comes for free” (2002a, p. 185).
Even though Yablo does not distinguish between inferentialist and non-inferentialist accounts of recognition, some of the things he says suggest he has a non-inferentialist account of recognition in mind. See, primarily, the argument in Yablo (2002, pp. 473–474; also 464–465). If his intention is indeed to argue against the inferentialist conception of recognition or concept-application in general, then his argument about peeking is not sufficient.
On this point, I have encountered the objection that, whatever capacity a subject has to recognize manifest shapes (and oval among them), it is retained when she considers other hypothetical scenarios as actual. Thus, it is objected, when the subject considers the specified hypothesis as actual, she can tell that dimes are round and not oval, and accordingly she can discount her appearances on that supposition as misleading. As a point about the evaluation of conditional claims of the relevant form this appears to be all right: after all, we do intuitively judge that dimes are not oval on the relevant hypothesis. Nevertheless, the question here is to account for our ability to apply the concept oval, whether hypothetically or not (and thus also for our ability to evaluate the relevant conditionals). This is precisely the feature of two-dimensionalism we are in the process of evaluating. We cannot, therefore, simply assume that the ability to correctly apply the concept oval carries over to the hypothetical scenario. Instead, we must examine whether the resources available to two-dimensionalism really do amount to a capacity to correctly apply the concept hypothetically.
The point may be illustrated by considering a simple attempt to capture the epistemic intension of oval by a description. Consider the following biconditional: ‘x is oval if and only if x looks oval in the actual world (to normal subjects and in normal conditions)’. Such a biconditional seems to be in the spirit of two-dimensionalism (general doubts about the coherence of introducing concepts by means of such biconditionals are not relevant here). This biconditional makes it clear that, on the hypothesis that dimes normally look oval in the actual world, dimes are oval. The analogous result might be right for so-called “response dependent” concepts, such as the concept cool. But, intuitively, such concepts lack a kind of objectivity that concepts of manifest shape possess.
Strictly speaking, denying inferentialism is not the only way to avoid the problems of Sect. 6. There seems to be room for an externally constrained inferentialism, according to which what oval applies to is held constant, even though recognition still operates inferentially (the possibility of this hybrid view was suggested to me by John McDowell). This view is still not acceptable to two-dimensionalists for just the reasons explained in the text: it requires us to hold fixed something that is not knowable by reflection alone. I do not consider this view (except briefly in Sect. 9), because I find the combination of constant intension and inferentialism unmotivated.
I am assuming that states of knowing are individuated more finely than reference is, so that the knowledge described in the text does not collapse to knowledge of the proposition that o is o.
The idea is also at the heart of Kripke (1982).
If concept-application is inferential all the way down, then, plausibly, there must be some basic concepts that are applied on the basis of only trivial inferences. Such inferences will consist in detaching from a homophonic statement of the satisfaction-conditions of a concept, on the basis of an experience described using the concept in question itself (See also footnote 6 above).
As already noted, at the most basic level this reasoning will simply involve applying a concept on the basis of its homophonic satisfaction-conditions and an experience described using that very concept. I am assuming here (as I have been doing throughout) that manifest shape concepts are not basic in this sense—that is, I assume that on the two-dimensionalist view there will be non-trivial application-conditionals that one must be in a position to know in order to possess these concepts.
This kind of response was suggested to me by Cian Dorr.
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Valaris, M. Two-dimensionalism and the epistemology of recognition. Philos Stud 142, 427–445 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9195-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9195-8