Abstract
Recognitional concepts have the following characteristic property: thinkers are disposed to apply them to objects merely on the basis of undergoing certain perceptual experiences. I argue that a prominent strategy for defending the existence of constitutive connections among concepts, which appeals to thinkers’ semantic-cum-conceptual intuitions, cannot be used to defend the existence of recognitional concepts. I then outline and defend an alternative argument for the existence of recognitional concepts, which appeals to certain psychological laws.
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Notes
I follow the convention of using words written in small capitals to refer to concepts.
In what follows I focus on visual perception, but the arguments below apply to concepts connected to perceptual representations in other sensory modalities.
For a rejoinder see Carruthers and Veillet (2007).
Perhaps a theory of concepts can meet the demands of explanatory psychology while at the same time be used in an account of knowledge, rationality, entitlement, and so on. Fodor himself expresses skepticism about such an ecumenical approach: “It may be that one has eventually to choose between getting a theory of concepts that is epistemologically useful and getting one that’s useful for understanding how the mind works. That would hardly be surprising; epistemology really is a normative discipline, and psychology really isn’t” (2004, p. 106).
Peacocke sometimes argues in this fashion. For instance, in Being Known, he puts forward the following argument for what he calls “epistemically individuated concepts,” a category that includes recognitional and logical concepts: “[I]f knowledge is to be possible at all, not everything can be known by inference to the best explanation. An inference to the best explanation can yield knowledge only if the propositions to be explained in the explanation are themselves already known. If they are not already known, the explanatory hypothesis in question, however impressive, cannot by that means acquire the status of knowledge. It follows that if knowledge is to be attainable in some cases by inference to the best explanation, there must be some knowledge which is not so attained. … It is knowledge of contents containing epistemically individuated concepts which ultimately makes possible knowledge attained by inference to the best explanation” (1999, 15–16). And in The Realm of Reason, Peacocke says: “There is an abstract, structural argument that if rational, entitled thought is to be possible at all some concepts must be such that one is default-entitled to presume that one is in the circumstances in which they are individuated. … Now could it always be that inference, or some other entitled transition, has to be made before we are entitled to apply a concept? It seems that this could not be so if entitled application is ever to get started” (2004a, p. 72).
See Fodor and Lepore (1992) for extensive discussion of this and other criticisms of concept holism.
As Stephen Laurence and Eric Margolis put it: “[F]or all that Quine says, there may still be a perfectly tenable analytic-synthetic distinction; it’s just one that has none of the epistemological significance that the positivists took it to have. Purported analyticities are to be established on a posteriori grounds and are open to the same possibilities of disconfirmation as claims in any other part of science” (1999, p. 20). Similar points are made by BonJour (1998), Horwich (1992), Rey (1993, 1998), and Sober (2000), among others. For replies to Fodor’s empirical case against analyticity, see Rives (2009b).
Kent Johnson dubs this the “Isomorphism Assumption”: “the structure of a word is isomorphic to the structure of the concept it expresses” (2004, p. 335). Theorists who endorse this Assumption include Fodor (1981), Fodor and Lepore (2002), Jackendoff (1990, 2002), and Kornfilt and Correa (1993), among many others.
The Explanatory Argument is similar in spirit to Grice and Strawson’s (1956) influential response to Quine, and various versions of it can be found in work on meaning and concepts in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics; see, for example, Cruse (1986), Horwich (1992, 1998), Jackendoff (1990, 2002), Katz (1972, 1988), Pustejovsky (1995), and Rey (1993, 2005).
Relying on intuitions at all may raise eyebrows in some quarters. Recent work in “experimental philosophy” suggests that people’s intuitions vary according to seemingly irrelevant facts like culture and socio-economic status. For instance, there’s evidence that Westerners are more likely than East Asians to have Kripkean intuitions about reference, and that Westerners are also more likely than East Asians to have the standard Gettier intuitions; see Machery et al. (2004) and Weinberg et al. (2001). Of course, there are ongoing debates about how to interpret this evidence. Some critics (e.g., Adams and Steadman (2004), Sosa (2007)) and some experimental philosophers (e.g., Nichols and Ulatowski (2007)) suggest that some of the data can be explained away—as performance errors, pragmatic effects, differences in interpretation of a key term, etc.—and thus don’t reflect differences in conceptual competence. But the success of the Explanatory Argument doesn’t depend on how these debates play out. For suppose we discovered that people had different intuitions concerning the application of some concept that weren’t the result of a performance error, a pragmatic effect, etc. This wouldn’t count against the Explanatory Argument, since such a discovery might simply show that they don’t share that particular concept. If, say, two people were in complete agreement about everything else in the world, but had different intuitions about whether a concept applied to something, then that would count as very good evidence that they didn’t possess the same concept.
As Peacocke says: “Having a perception of a desk straight ahead of one seems to give grounds, in everyday circumstances, for the content ‘that desk is straight ahead’, and that it does so seems to be partially constitutive of the identity of the concepts in the content” (2004a, p. 34). The latter claim—that this connection is constitutive of the concepts—is of course the very issue at hand.
Or consider: “[T]he centrality of perceptual mechanisms in mediating the meaning-making laws is … 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” (Fodor, 1998a, p. 79).
Indeed, the critical literature on Fodor’s theory of concepts and content is immense. The papers in Loewer and Rey (1991) provide a good entry point, particularly with respect to Fodor’s “asymmetric dependency” theory of content. More recent discussions include Keil and Wilson (2000), Landau (2000), Peacocke (2004b), Pietroski (2000), Prinz (2002), Rey (2004, 2009), and Rives (2009a, 2009b).
The qualifier ‘some of’ is necessary since plausibly not all of the laws in which a concept figures determine its identity. I’ll have more to say about this below.
It’s plausible that different kinds of mechanisms will underwrite different kinds of laws. For instance, the mechanisms that sustain laws involving color concepts are plausibly different in kind from those that sustain laws involving artifact concepts. For starters, color perception doesn’t involve a distinct stage for constructing object-based representations, as the visual system represents colors as surface properties; see Palmer (1999, Ch. 3) for an excellent overview of such details.
Thanks to Dan Boone for raising this objection.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this issue.
Not everyone agrees with this assessment. Cohen (1981), for instance, argues that some of the data are best explained as performance errors, and don’t reflect fundamental facts about our cognitive competence. For an alternative view, see Stein (1996). For reviews of this literature and discussions of its implications for human rationality, in addition to Stein (1996), see Evans and Over (1996), Goldman (1986, chapters 13–16), Nisbett and Ross (1980), and Stich (1990).
Paul Horwich’s use theory of meaning suggests something similar, for it has it that only the “explanatorily basic use facts” of a word determine its meaning, while the others are “mere consequences of that meaning” (1998, pp. 6–7). See Rey (2009) for a defense of a view that relies on elements of both Fodor’s and Horwich’s theories.
See Seigel (2006) for arguments that high-level properties may be perceptually represented.
Of course, if it turned out that being a desk and being a chair are too high-level to be represented in perception, then the antecedents of laws such as L2 and L4 would also fail to be satisfied.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to audiences at the 2006 Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Portland OR, and the 2008 conference of the PASSHE Interdisciplinary Association for Philosophy and Religious Studies in Indiana PA, where I presented early versions of some of this material. Thanks also to my commentator at the APA, Imogen Dickie, and to Dan Boone, Peter Carruthers, Gualtiero Piccinini, Georges Rey, Eric Rubenstein, Andrea Scarantino, Susan Schneider, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and discussion. Finally, thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities for financial support.
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Rives, B. Concepts and Perceptual Belief: How (Not) to Defend Recognitional Concepts. Acta Anal 25, 369–391 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-010-0092-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-010-0092-y