The Philosopher’s Tale 85

that putative intuitions of analyticity detect. A fortiori, such intuitions do
not detect the constituent structure of complex concepts.
TUESDAY is especially engaging in this respect. It pays to spend some
time on TUESDAY. I suppose the intuition that needs explaining is that
“Tuesday” is conceptually connected to a small circle of mutually
interdefinable terms, at least some of which you must have to have it. This
kind of thing is actually a bit embarrassing for the standard, semantic
account of analyticity intuitions. Since there’s no strong intuition about
which of the Tuesday-related concepts you have to have to have “Tuesday”,
it’s correspondingly unclear which of the concepts deployed in the various
necessary truths about Tuesdays should count as constitutive; i.e. which of
them should be treated as part of the definition of “Tuesday”. (Correspondingly,
there’s no clear intuition about which of this galaxy of concepts
should be constituents of TUESDAY, assuming you hold a containment
theory of definition.)
And Tuesday-intuitions raise another embarrassing question as well:
suppose you could somehow decide which Tuesday-involving necessities
are definitional and which aren’t. You would still have the worry which
Tuesday-related concepts are primitive and which are defined. Is it that
Tuesday is the second day of the week (in which case TUESDAY is the
definiendum and . . . WEEK . . . is the definiens)? Or is it that a week is
seven consecutive days, of which the second is Tuesday (in which case, the
primitive/defined relation goes the other way around)? The same sort of
question crops up, of course, with regard to kinship terms, chess terms,
and the like. Whenever you get a little family of jargon vocabulary, the
intuition is that the application of some of the terms depends on
inferences from the applicability of others, but that it doesn’t matter much
which you take as primitive. It used to be that philosophers thought this
decision might be made on the principle that the relatively primitive
concept is the one that’s closer to sensations. These days, however, not
even the friends of definitions think that this project has a prayer.6
My story about this says what I really do think one’s story ought to
say: such questions haven’t got answers.What’s being delivered by (e.g.) the
intuition that pawns are conceptually connected to queens is not the
internal structure of a concept (it’s not that the concept QUEEN has the
concept PAWN as a constituent or vice versa). What you’re intuiting is
really something epistemic: that the usual ways that PAWN gets semantic
access to pawnhood all run via inferences involving one or other member
of quite a small family. In consequence, although the connections of
The Philosopher’s Tale 85
6 There are a few, lonely exceptions; but they are mostly in AI, so perhaps they don’t
count. See, for example, Woods 1975.
PAWN to the other members of this family no doubt strike one as
conceptual, none of these connections is intuited as clearly definitional
rather than merely necessary; and none of the concepts involved is clearly
intuited as primitive rather than defined. This situation would be
paradoxical if the intuitions were detecting definitional relations. But they
aren’t, so it isn’t.
I’m suggesting that intuitions of conceptual connectedness are a sort
of normal illusion; they depend on an understandable conflation between
an epistemic property and a semantic one. In this respect, what I say about
analyticity intuitions is, of course, a lot like what Quine says; except that
he takes the epistemic property to be centrality whereas I think it’s onecriterionhood.
I doubt that either story covers all the cases, and there’s no
obvious reason why they shouldn’t both be true. After all, the moral of
both is that intuitions of analyticity are misguided; and, as Aristotle
pointed out a while ago, there are generally lots of ways for an arrow to
miss the target.
Conclusion
So, then, where have we got to? The best philosophical argument for
analyticity used to be necessity/a prioricity (the tradition I have in mind
generally didn’t distinguish between them). Positivism, in particular, took
it for granted that a priori truths must be necessary, and that if there is
necessity, it has to be linguistic/conceptual. Carnap and Quine split the
available options between them. According to Carnap, some truths are
necessary and a priori, so some must be analytic. According to Quine, no
truths are analytic, so none can be either necessary or a priori. It was,
quite distinctly, a family squabble. Over the last several decades, however,
it has come to seem increasingly implausible that necessary truths could be
analytic in the general case. Correspondingly, the best defence of
analyticity now turns on a direct appeal to intuition: some necessities strike
one as conceptual; the analytic truths are the ones that elicit intuitions of
that sort.
No doubt, intuitions deserve respect. As Grice and Strawson pointed
out (1956), if people agree that As are different from Bs, and if they agree
on which is which in novel cases, that’s strong prima facie evidence As and
Bs really are different in some way or other. But that As and Bs are
different is one thing; what they differ in is quite another. And, in fact, the
difference often turns out to be not at all what informants suppose.
Informants, oneself included, can be quite awful at saying what it is that
drives their intuitions; sometimes it’s just a fragment of underdone potato.
86 The Demise of Definitions, Part II
This holds all the way from chicken sexing to judgements of grammaticality
and modality. Good Quinean that I am, I think that it is always up
for grabs what an intuition is an intuition of. At a minimum, it is surely
sometimes up for grabs, and I don’t see why soi-disant intuitions of
conceptual connectedness shouldn’t be of this unapodictic kind.
I think that raw intuitions of conceptual connectedness can plausibly be
explained away by appealing to some mixture of centrality and Factor X.
And, as far as I know, there is nothing in philosophy aside from these raw
intuitions that seriously suggests that content constituting conceptual
connections exist. So I think it’s reasonable, on the philosophical evidence,
to suppose that such conceptual connections don’t exist. Quine was likely
right about conceptual connections, even though he was wrong about
necessity and a prioricity, both of which are, so I suppose, very important
and perfectly real. If all of that is so, then from the philosopher’s point of
view the bottom line is that necessity, a prioricity and the like are very
mysterious: they are, in general, not by-products of analyticity; and they
are, in general, things that we do not understand. What else is new?
And the bottom line for the purposes of the theory of concepts is this:
if there are no constitutive conceptual connections, then there are also no
definitions; and, if there are no definitions, then there are no definitions for
concepts to be.
Introduction
The definition theory says that concepts are complex structures which
entail their constituents. By saying this, it guarantees both the connection
between content and necessity and the connection between concept
individuation and concept possession. On the one hand, since definitions
entail their constituents, it follows that whatever belongs to a concept’s
definition is thereby true of everything, actual or possible, that the concept
subsumes. On the other hand, since what definitions entail are their
constituents, it follows that a definition of a concept specifies its canonical
(viz. individuating) structural description. And finally, whatever else
concept possession may amount to, you can’t have a thing unless you have
its parts; hence the connection between concept possession and concept
individuation according to the definition story. This metaphysical synthesis
of a theory of concept individuation with theories of modality and
concept possession was no small achievement. In some respects it has yet
to be bettered, as we’re about to see.
By and large, it’s been the modal properties of definitions that
philosophers have cared about since, as previously remarked, the
semantical truths that definitions generate recommend themselves for
5
Prototypes and Compositionality1
A Good Apple tree or a bad, is an Apple tree still: a Horse is not more a
Lion for being a Bad Horse.
—William Blake
1 Terminological conventions with respect to the topics this chapter covers are unsettled.
I’ll use ‘stereotype’ and ‘prototype’ interchangeably, to refer to mental representations of
certain kinds of properties. So, ‘the dog stereotype’ and ‘the dog prototype’ designate some
such (complex) concept as: BEING A DOMESTIC ANIMAL WHICH BARKS, HAS A
TAIL WHICH IT WAGS WHEN IT IS PLEASED, . . . etc. I’ll use ‘exemplar’ for the
mental representation of a kind, or of an individual, that instantiates a prototype; so
‘sparrows are the exemplars of birds’ and ‘Bambi is Smith’s exemplar of a deer’ are both
well-formed. ‘Sparrows are stereotypic birds’ (/‘Bambi is a prototypic deer’) are also OK;
they mean that a certain kind (/individual) exhibits certain stereotypic (/prototypic)
properties to a marked degree.