The Philosopher’s Tale 73

evidence
72 The Demise of Definitions, Part II
is that concepts aren’t definitions. Which, according to me, is also the
conclusion that we should draw from the available nonphilosophical
evidence. Convergence is bliss.
This story I’m about to tell you needs, however, some heavy duty
assumptions whose status is itself much in dispute. I propose to set these
out in a relatively leisurely and extended way, hoping thereby to illuminate
several aspects of conceptual atomism as well as the present issues about
the nature of analyticity intuitions. I claim for my assumptions only that
none of them is known to be false. Beyond that, it’s the usual
methodological situation: if my story is plausible, that argues for my
assumptions; if my assumptions are plausible, that argues for my story.
For the moment, all I ask is the temporary suspension of your disbelief.
First Assumption: Informational Semantics
I continue to take for granted, as I’ve been doing all along of course, that
semantic facts are somehow constituted by nomic relations. To a zero’th
approximation, the fact that DOG means dog (and hence the fact “dog”
does) is constituted by a nomic connection between two properties of
dogs; viz. being dogs and being causes of actual and possible DOG tokenings
in us.1 As those of you who follow the literature on informational
semantics will be aware, it’s a little tricky to get the details of this
nomological story about content just right. Never mind. My point will be
the modest one that if informational semantics can be sustained, that
would give us a leg up on accounting for such intuitions as that it’s analytic
that bachelors are unmarried and that Tuesdays come before Wednesdays.
I hope you will find even this modest claim surprising. It’s generally
thought that, because informational semantics is inherently atomistic,
intuitions of intrinsic conceptual connectedness are among its chief
embarrassments. Informational semantics denies that “dog” means dog
because of the way that it is related to other linguistic expressions
(“animal” or “barks”, as it might be). Correspondingly, informational
semantics denies that the concept DOG has its content in virtue of its
position in a network of conceptual relations. So, then, the intuition that
there are other concepts that anybody who has DOG must also have is
The Philosopher’s Tale 73
1 Since “dog” means dog, informational semantics requires that there be such a property
as being a dog. Mutatis mutandis, since “Tuesday” means Tuesday, informational semantics
requires that there be such a property as being a Tuesday (a highly mind-dependent, highly
relational property, presumably, of certain segments of space-time). I sympathize if you’re
inclined to gag on this rich ontology. But that one should do the ontology last is among my
religious principles, so please hold on till Chapter 6.
one that informational semantics can make no sense of. Intuitions of
conceptual connection are the bane of informational semantics; so goes the
usual account of the geography. But, I want to redraw the map a little: it’s
one question whether informational semantics rules out conceptual
connections that are constitutive of concept possession. It does, and therefore
so do I. But it’s quite a different question whether informational
semantics rules out there being intuitions as of such conceptual
connections. It doesn’t, and I don’t either. In fact, I think that there clearly
are such intuitions and that informational semantics helps explain them.
I pause, while I’m at it, to rub in a distinction that keeps coming up, and
that’s once again germane. What surely doesn’t embarrass informational
semantics, not even prima facie, is the intuition that there is a necessary
connection between being a dog and being an animal, or between being a
bachelor and being unmarried, or between being a Tuesday and being the
day before Wednesday. For informational semantics is a theory of content,
and these necessities might all be viewed as metaphysical rather than
semantic. (For example, they might be supposed to arise out of property
identities.)
The problem for informational semantics comes not from intuitions
that the connection between being Tuesday and coming before Wednesday
is necessary, but from intuitions that it’s constitutive in the sense that one
can’t have one of the concepts unless one has the other. Compare water is
H2O and two is prime. Presumably though both are necessary, neither is
constitutive. Accordingly, it’s possible to have the concept WATER but
not the concept HYDROGEN, and it’s possible to have the concept TWO
but not the concept PRIME. All of that is perfectly OK as far as
informational semantics is concerned. It’s perfectly consistent to claim
that concepts are individuated by the properties they denote, and that the
properties are individuated by their necessary relations to one another, but
to deny that knowing about the necessary relations among the properties
is a condition for having the concept.
Whether it is a virtue of informational semantics that it proposes to
distance the metaphysics of modality from the metaphysics of concept
possession is a large issue; one that I don’t propose to discuss here at all.
Clearly, if you think there’s any serious chance that part/whole relations
among concepts might explain what makes propositions necessary, then
informational semantics isn’t likely to be your dish; qua atomistic,
informational semantics denies that the reason cats have to be animals is
that ANIMAL is a constituent of CAT. As the reader will have gathered,
I doubt that explanations of that sort will be forthcoming, but I won’t
argue the general issue here. Suffice it that the difference between mere
necessity (which informational semantics is perfectly happy about) and
74 The Demise of Definitions, Part II
conceptual necessity (over which informational semantics weeps) is that
the latter, but not the former, constrains concept possession.
Second Assumption: Semantic Access
So far we have it, by assumption, that ‘dog’ and DOG mean dog because
‘dog’ expresses DOG, and DOG tokens fall under a law according to
which they reliably are (or would be) among the effects of instantiated
doghood. I now add the considerably less tendentious assumption that if
there are such meaning-making laws, they surely couldn’t be basic. Or, to
put it another way, if there is a nomic connection between doghood and
cause-of-DOG-tokeninghood, then there must be a causal process whose
operation mediates and sustains this connection. Or, to put it a third way,
if informational semantics is right about the metaphysics of meaning,
there must be mechanisms in virtue of which certain mental (-cum-neural)
structures ‘resonate’ to doghood and Tuesdayhood.2 Or, to put it a last way,
informational semantics is untenable unless there’s an answer to questions
like: ‘how does (or would) the instantiation of doghood cause tokenings of
DOG?’ I propose to call whatever answers such a question a mechanism
of ‘semantic access’. Mechanisms of semantic access are what sustain our
ability to think about things.
What such mechanism might there be in the case of dogs? Unsurprisingly,
the sort of inventory that suggests itself looks a lot like what
you’d get if you asked for the mechanisms that mediate our epistemic
access to dogs. Unsurprisingly because there can be no epistemic access
without semantic access; what you can’t think about, you can’t know
about.3 Informational semantics says that it’s because the mediation
The Philosopher’s Tale 75
2 I borrow J. J. Gibson’s phrase (see e.g. 1966) but not his metaphysics. Roughly,
informational semantics is Gibsonian semantics, but without the ban on mental processes;
just as, roughly, it is Skinnerian semantics without the behaviourism. (See below and Fodor
1990.)
3 Cf. Antony (1995: 433): “no device can be said to have epistemic access to any aspect
of its environment unless it is a device that represents its environment”. This doesn’t go the
other way around, of course: semantic access doesn’t guarantee epistemic warrant. With
any luck, all of this ought to come out right if your semantics is informational and your
theory of knowledge is reliabilist. Since content supervenes on purely nomic relations—
that is, on certain lawful relations among properties—and since lawful relations can
presumably hold among properties that are, de facto, uninstantiated, the metaphysical
conditions for content can in principle be met entirely counterfactually: no actual tokens of
DOG have actually to be caused by dogs for the counterfactuals that its content supervenes
on to be in place. Epistemic warrant, by contrast, has to do with the causal history of one
or another actual belief token: the warranted belief has to have been acquired by reliable
means. So it should turn out that the conditions for epistemic access include, but aren’t
exhausted by, the conditions that semantic access imposes.