76 The Demise of Definitions, Part II

imposes.
between dogs and DOG-tokens is reliable that there is a community of
dog-thinkers, creatures whose mental processes fall under the intentional
laws about dog-thoughts. Just so, epistemologists (have been known to)
say that it’s the reliability of the mediation between dogs and one’s dogthoughts
that justifies one’s knowledge claims about dogs. This
convergence of views is all to the good, of course; the requirements that
epistemology places upon epistemic warrant ought to be ones that the
theory of content allows many of one’s beliefs actually to meet.
The psychological and physiological mechanisms that mediate the
perception of middle-sized events and objects must surely head the list of
the mechanisms of semantic access. It’s about as reliable as the empirical
generalizations of intentional psychology ever get that if you put a DOGowner,
eyes open, in a dog-filled environment and you turn up the lights,
dog-thoughts will ensue. Or, to say it the way that RTM wants us to, the
mechanisms of visual perception normally function to insure that ‘IT’S
DOGGING’gets tokened in the subject’s belief box in such well-lit, doggy
situations. De facto, our capacities for thinking about dogs, and hence our
possibilities for knowing about them, both depend heavily on the reliability
with which the mechanisms of visual perception do this.
Note, however, that I did not just claim that one’s possession of the
concept DOG is constituted by the fact that seeing dogs causes tokens of
DOG in one’s belief box. To the contrary: one’s possession of that concept
is constituted by there being the appropriate, meaning-making lawful
relations between instantiated doghood and one’s neural-cum-mental
states. It’s that your mental structures contrive to resonate to doghood, not
how your mental structures contrive to resonate to doghood, that is
constitutive of concept possession according to the informational view.
This too is all to the good since it helps with satisfying the publicity
constraint on concept possession that was endorsed in Chapter 2. For
Helen Keller, it was not visual perception that sustained the meaningmaking
dog–DOG relation. Yet she and I, each in our way, can both
satisfy the conditions for DOG-possession according to the present
account of those conditions.
Just as I did not say that having perceptual mechanisms that connect
dog sightings with DOG-tokens-in-the-belief-box constitutes your having
the concept DOG, so I also did not say that the character of these
mechanisms determines the content of your concept. How a concept
achieves semantic access is one thing, what content the concept has is quite
another. It is a chief virtue of informational semantics to distinguish
between these two (just as it was the besetting vice of operationalism to
conflate them). You tell that a thing’s a dog by, inter alia, looking and
listening; dog-shaped sights and woof-shaped sounds are among the
76 The Demise of Definitions, Part II
reliable things to look and listen for. It does not follow either that there are
perceptual ‘criteria’ for doghood or that, if there are, these criteria are
constitutive of the content of the concept DOG. What’s metaphysically
pertinent to the content of DOG is the same thing that’s metaphysically
pertinent to your possession of DOG; namely, that it’s doghood (and not,
as it might be, cathood) that your DOG tokenings are under the lawful
control of.
I’ve said that, de facto, perceptual mechanisms head the list of the ones
that mediate our semantic access to doghood. But I now want to emphasize
that that list is very long; in fact, that it’s open-ended in a way that is
important both for semantics and for epistemology. Here are some routes,
other than perceiving dogs, that do, or might, sustain the meaning-making
causal connection between dogs and their mental representations:
—Dog bells. Someone may rig things so that a bell goes off when the
dog shakes its head. If I know how things are rigged, hearing the
bell may reliably cause me to think dog.4 Similarly for my hearing the
door bell when the dog pushes the button.
In fact, I may myself rig things this way, thereby insuring that if the
bell rings, thus indicating that doghood is locally instantiated, I will be
caused to think dog, and thus come to be in a cognitive condition that is
appropriate to my environmental situation. That we do, routinely and
successfully, pursue policies intended to engineer our mind–world
correlations in this sort of way strikes me as one of the most characteristic
and remarkable things about us. (See Fodor 1994.)
—Gossip. Somebody may tell me things about dogs—including dogs
far away, and dogs long dead and gone—and that too may cause me
to think dog. Gossip is like perception in that it offers a permanent
possibility of semantic access. Only, unlike perception, its range of
operation isn’t local.
I include, under this general head, cases where semantic access is
achieved by exploiting a linguistic division of labour. Hilary Putnam and
Tyler Burge have argued (though they don’t put it quite this way) that
sometimes all that’s needed to effect semantic access is that I’m properly
disposed to rely on experts to decide what my concept applies to. In effect,
dogs make the expert think dog, and the expert’s thinking dog makes me
The Philosopher’s Tale 77
4 This is what philosophers call a ‘thought experiment’. But I gather, from opera libretti,
that the sort of arrangement I’ve envisaged actually is employed by artless shepherdesses
and other light sopranos to keep their flocks from straying. How they manage to make their
trills heard in such a din, I simply cannot imagine.
think dog in so far as I am prepared to rely on him. So my dog-thoughts
are reliably (though indirectly) connected with dogs. Relying on experts to
mediate semantic access is a lot like relying on perception to mediate
semantic access, except that the perceptions you are using belong to
someone else. (Who may in turn rely on someone else’s still . . . and so on,
though not ad infinitum.) Gossips, experts, witnesses, and, of course,
written records have it in common that each extends, beyond the sorts of
limits that merely perceptual sensitivity imposes, the causal chains on
which achieving and sustaining semantic access—hence conceptual
content—depends. (With, however, a corresponding increase of the
likelihood that the chain may become degraded. Testimony one takes with
a grain of salt; it’s seeing that’s supposed to be believing.)
—Theoretical inference. The merest ripple in dog-infested waters may
suffice to cause dog-thoughts in the theoretically sophisticated.
Analogously: because they left their tooth marks on bones some
archaeologists dug up, and because I’ve done my homework, I can
know about, a fortiori think about, dogs that lived in Sumer a very
long while ago. Here semantic and epistemic access are sustained by
a mixture of perception and inference. I think that is quite probably
the typical case.
—High tech. Including dog detection by radar, sonar, telescopes,
microscopes, hearing aids, bifocal lenses, and other apparatus. The
open-endedness of this list, is, I suppose, pretty obvious.
The first moral that’s to be drawn from this (surely fragmentary) survey
is that, as often as not, the mechanisms whereby semantic access is
achieved themselves involve the operation of intentional processes. This
may well be so even where semantic access is sustained just by perception;
whether it is, is what the argument about whether perception is ‘inferential’
is an argument about. Anyhow, it’s patent that applying some concepts
mediates applying others wherever semantic access is sustained by gossip,
theoretical inference, expertise, deployment of instruments of observation,
and the like. This consideration would, of course, be devastating if the
present project were somehow to use the notion of semantic access to
define, or otherwise to analyse, such notions as content or intentionality.
But it’s not. What meaning is, is a metaphysical question to which, I’m
supposing, informational semantics is the answer. The current question, by
contrast, is about not metaphysics but engineering: how are certain lawful
mind–world correlations (the ones that informational semantics says are
content-constituting) achieved and sustained? Answers to this engineering
question can unquestion-beggingly appeal to the operation of semantic