The Philosopher’s Tale 79

semantic
78 The Demise of Definitions, Part II
and intentional mechanisms, since ‘semantic’ and ‘intentional’ are
presumed to be independently defined.
A second moral I want to draw is the multiplicity of the means of
semantic access. Prima facie there are all sorts of mechanisms,
physiological, psychological, cultural, and technological, that can, and do,
sustain the meaning-making nomic connections that constitute the
contents of one’s concepts. To be sure, it may be that all the non-perceptual
mechanisms that sustain semantic access to doghood depend, ‘in the long
run’, on one’s having and exercising perceptual capacities. But not,
according to the present view, on one’s having any particular perceptual
capacity (remember Helen Keller). Nor could the dependence of concept
possession upon perceptual capacities turn out to be principled.
Informational semantics says that a (certain kind of) nomic relation
between DOGs and doghood, however mediated, suffices for content. But
‘however mediated’ should be read to include, in principle, nomic relations
that aren’t mediated at all. There is nothing in informational semantics
that stops content-making laws from being basic. For that matter, I
suppose there’s nothing in metaphysics that stops any law from being basic;
it’s just a fact about the world that the ones that are and the ones that
aren’t aren’t. That being so, the centrality of perceptual mechanisms in
mediating the meaning-making laws is also 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.
I pause to underline this last point: it is, I think, a great virtue of
informational semantics that, unlike any version of Empiricism, it denies
a constitutive status to the relation between content and perception. If
you try to list the sorts of perceptual environments in which dog-thoughts
are likely to arise in a perceiver if he has the concept DOG at all, you will
find that the list is, on the one hand, open-ended and, on the other hand,
closely dependent on what the perceiver happens to know about, believe
about, or want from, dogs. And if you try to list the sorts of perceptual
environments in which dog-thoughts must arise if a creature has the
concept DOG, you will find that there aren’t any: no landscape is either so
barren, or so well lit, that it is metaphysically impossible to fail to notice
whether it contains a dog. That, in some circumstances, perception
primitively compels one to think of dogs is a psychophysical fact of capital
significance: perception is one of the core mechanisms by which one’s
semantic access to dogs is sustained. But the necessity of the connection
between having the concept and having perceptually driven dog-thoughts
The Philosopher’s Tale 79
is itself empirical, not metaphysical. It entails no constitutive constraints
either on the content of one’s concept, or on the conditions for possessing
it. If informational semantics is anywhere near to being right, Empiricism
is dead.
OK; kindly hold onto all that. There’s one more ingredient I want to
add.
‘One-Criterion’ Concepts
Back in 1983, Putnam wrote a paper about analyticity that one can see in
retrospect to have been motivated by many of the same considerations
that I’ve been discussing here. Putnam was an early enthusiast for Quine’s
polemic against analyticities, definitions, constitutive conceptual
connections, and the like. But he was worried about bachelors being
unmarried and Tuesdays coming before Wednesdays. These struck
Putnam as boringly analytic in a way that F = MA, or even dogs are
animals, is not. So Putnam had trouble viewing Tuesday before Wednesday
and the like as bona fide cases of theoretical centrality; and, as remarked
above, theoretical centrality was all Quine had on offer to explain why
some truths seem to be conceptual. Putnam therefore proposed to tidy up
after Quine.
Strictly speaking, according to Putnam, there are definitions,
analyticities, and constitutive conceptual connections after all. But that
there are isn’t philosophically interesting since they won’t do any of the
heavy duty epistemological or metaphysical work that philosophers have
had in mind for them, and that they won’t is intrinsic to the nature of
conceptual connection. According to Putnam’s story, analyticity works
only for concepts that lack centrality; only for concepts that fail to exhibit
any substantial intricacy of attachment to the rest of the web of belief; in
short, only for concepts that lack precisely what philosophers care about
about concepts. The very facts that permit there to be conceptual truths
about bachelors and Tuesdays prohibit there being such truths in the case
of more amusing concepts like DOG, CAUSE, or TRIANGLE; to say
nothing of PHYSICAL OBJECT, GOD, PROTON, or GOOD. So,
anyhow, Putnam’s story was supposed to make it turn out.
Putnam’s idea was that, out at the edge of the web, and hence connected
to nothing very much, there is a fringe of ‘one-criterion’ concepts. Criteria
are ways of telling, so you’re a one-criterion concept only if there is just
one way to tell that you apply. BACHELOR qualifies because the only
way to tell whether Jones is a bachelor is by finding out if he’s an
unmarried man. TUESDAY qualifies because the only way to tell that it’s
80 The Demise of Definitions, Part II
Tuesday is by finding out if it’s the second day of the week. And so on.
Well, according to Putnam, if a concept has, in this sense, only one
criterion, then it is conceptually necessary (viz. constitutive of the content
of the concept) that if the criterion is satisfied then the concept applies. So
there is, after all, an epistemic clause in the theory of concept constitutivity.
Old timers will recognize this treatment of BACHELOR and the like as
close kin to the then-popular theory that DOG, CAUSE, PAIN, FORCE,
WATER, INFLUENZA, and the like are “cluster” concepts. In effect, a
cluster concept is one for whose application there are lots of criteria.
So, then, according to Putnam, analyticity just is one-criterionhood.
The problems with this account by now seem pretty obvious; we’ll return
to them in a moment. First, however, a word or two in its praise.
To begin with, it deconfounds analyticity from centrality, thereby
freeing embarrassed Quineans from having to assimilate bachelors are
unmarried to F= MA. It also deconfounds analyticity from mere necessity
in a way that intuition applauds. As I remarked above, it’s necessary that
bachelors are unmarried, and it’s again necessary that two is prime, but
only the first seems to be a good candidate for a conceptual necessity since
one isn’t much tempted by the thought that not having the concept
PRIME entails not having the concept TWO. Putnam’s story works very
well here. It is precisely because two is enmeshed in a rich—indeed an
infinite—network of necessities that one hesitates to choose among them
the ones that constitute the content of the concept. Given the plethora of
necessary inferences that TWO can mediate, who’s to say which ones your
having the concept requires that you acknowledge? Similarly with the
logical particles. And similarly, too, for FORCE and DOG (though the
necessities that embed these concepts are characteristically metaphysical
and/or nomic rather than mathematical or logical). In short, the less work
a concept does, the stronger the analyticity intuitions that it is able to
support; just as Putnam’s account of conceptual connectedness predicts.
And since being well connected to the web, like being near the web’s
centre, is a matter of degree, Putnam’s story explains straight off why
intuitions of analyticity are graded. Nobody seriously doubts that
bachelors being unmarried is a better candidate for analyticity than dogs
being animals, which is in turn a better candidate than F ’s being MA,
which is in turn at least as bad a candidate as two’s being prime. The
gradedness of analyticity intuitions suggests some sort of epistemic
construal if the alternative explanation is that they arise from such
structural relations among concepts as containment. Containment, unlike
criteriality, doesn’t plausibly come in more or less.
So there are nice things to be said for Putnam’s account of analyticity,
and I suppose that Quine’s sympathizers would have jumped at it except