38 Unphilosophical Introduction

What Concepts Have To Be 37
current jargon, the individuation of the propositional attitudes apparently
slices them about as thin as the syntactic individuation of forms of words,
hence not only thinner than reference can, but also thinner than sense can.
The other obstacle to saving the Frege programme was that it took for
granted that the semantic question ‘How can coreferential concepts fail to
be synonyms?’ gets the same answer as the psychological question ‘How
can there be more than one way of grasping a referent?’ The postulation
of senses was supposed to answer both questions. I argued, however, that
given Frege’s Platonism about senses, it’s by no means obvious why his
answer to the first would constitute an answer to the second; in effect,
Frege simply stipulates their equivalence. I supposed the moral to be that
Frege’s theoretical architecture needs to be explicitly psychologized.
Modes of presentation need to be ‘in the head’.
The short form is: the Frege programme needs something that is both
in the head and of the right kind to distinguish coreferential concepts, and
the Mates cases suggest that whatever is able to distinguish coreferential
concepts is apt for syntactic individuation. Put all this together and it does
rather suggest that modes of presentation are syntactically structured
mental particulars. Suggestion noted.
The other research programme from which my budget of constraints on
theories of concepts derived is the attempt, in cognitive science, to explain
how a finite being might have intentional states and capacities that are
productive and systematic. This productivity/systematicity problem again
has two parts: ‘Explain how there can be infinitely many propositional
attitudes each with its distinctive propositional object (i.e. each with its
own content)’ and: ‘Explain how there can be infinitely many propositional
attitudes each with its distinctive causal powers (i.e. each with its own
causal role in mental processes).’ Here I have followed what Pylyshyn and
I (Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988) called the ‘Classical’ computational tradition
that proceeds from Turing: mental representations are syntactically
structured. Their conditions of semantic evaluation and their causal
powers both depend on their syntactic structures; the former because
mental representations have a compositional semantics that is sensitive to
the syntactic relations among their constituents; the latter because mental
processes are computations and are thus syntactically driven by definition.
So the Classical account of productivity/systematicity points in much the
same direction as the psychologized Frege programme’s account of the
individuation of mental states: viz. towards syntactically structured mental
particulars whose tokenings are matched, case for case, with tokenings of
the de dicto propositional attitudes.
Syntactically structured mental particulars whose tokenings are
matched, case for case, with tokenings of the de dicto propositional
38 Unphilosophical Introduction
attitudes are, of course, exactly what RTM has for sale. So RTM seems to
be what both the Frege/Mates problems and the productivity/systematicity
problems converge on. If beliefs (and the like) are relations to syntactically
structured mental representations, there are indeed two parameters of
belief individuation, just as Frege requires: Morning Star beliefs have the
same conditions of semantic evaluation as Evening Star beliefs, but they
implicate the tokening of different syntactic objects and are therefore
different beliefs with different causal powers. That believing P and
believing Q may be different mental states even if ‘P’ and ‘Q’ have the
same semantic value shows up in the Mates contexts. That believing P and
believing Q may have different causal powers even if ‘P’ and ‘Q’ have the
same semantic value shows up in all those operas where the soprano dies
of mistaken identity.
So RTM looks like a plausible answer to several questions that one
might have supposed to be unrelated. I hope that isn’t an accident. This
book runs on the assumption that it isn’t, hence that we need RTM a lot.
RTM, in turn, needs a theory of concepts a lot since compositionality says
that the contents and causal powers of mental representations are both
inherited, eventually, from the contents and causal powers of their
minimal constituents; viz. from the primitive concepts that they contain.
RTM is simply no good without a viable theory of concepts.
So be it, then. Let’s see what there might be on offer.
What Concepts Have To Be 39
Introduction
I WANT to consider the question whether concepts are definitions. And
let’s, just for the novelty, start with some propositions that are clearly true:
1. You can’t utter the expression ‘brown cow’ without uttering the word
‘brown’.
2. You can utter the word ‘bachelor’ without uttering the word
‘unmarried’.
The asymmetry between 1 and 2 will be granted even by those who believe
that the “semantic representation” of ‘bachelor’ (its representation, as
linguists say, “at the semantic level”) is a complex object which contains,
inter alia, the semantic representation of ‘unmarried’.
Now for something that’s a little less obvious:
3. You can’t entertain the M(ental) R(epresentation) BROWN COW
without entertaining the MR BROWN.
4. You can’t entertain the M(ental) R(epresentation) BACHELOR
without entertaining the MR UNMARRIED.
I’m going to take it for granted that 3 is true. I have my reasons; they’ll
emerge in Chapter 5. Suffice it, for now, that anybody who thinks that 3
and the like are false will certainly think that 4 and the like are false; and
that 4 and the like are indeed false is the main conclusion this chapter aims
at. I pause, however, to remark that 3 is meant to be tendentious. It claims
not just what everyone admits, viz. that anything that satisfies BROWN
COW inter alia satisfies BROWN, viz. that brow cows are ipso facto brown.