Philosophical Introduction: The Background Theory

MY topic is what concepts are. Since I’m interested in that question
primarily as it arises in the context of ‘representational’ theories of mind
(RTMs), a natural way to get started would be for me to tell you about
RTMs and about how they raise the question what concepts are. I could
then set out my answer, and you could tell me, by return, what you think
is wrong with it. The ensuing discussion would be abstract and theory
laden, no doubt; but, with any luck, philosophically innocent.
That is, in fact, pretty much the course that I propose to follow. But, for
better or for worse, in the present climate of philosophical opinion it’s
perhaps not possible just to plunge in and do so. RTMs have all sorts of
problems, both of substance and of form. Many of you may suppose the
whole project of trying to construct one is hopelessly wrong-headed; if it
is, then who cares what RTMs say about concepts? So I guess I owe you
some sort of general argument that the project isn’t hopelessly wrongheaded.
But I seem to have grown old writing books defending RTMs; it occurs
to me that if I were to stop writing books defending RTMs, perhaps I
would stop growing old. So I think I’ll tell you a joke instead. It’s an old
joke, as befits my telling it.
Old joke: Once upon a time a disciple went to his guru and said: ‘Guru,
what is life?’ To which the Guru replies, after much thinking, ‘My Son,
life is like a fountain.’The disciple is outraged. ‘Is that the best that you can
do? Is that what you call wisdom?’ ‘All right,’ says the guru; ‘don’t get
excited. So maybe it’s not like a fountain.’
That’s the end of the joke, but it’s not the end of the story. The guru
noticed that taking this line was losing him clients, and gurus have to eat.
1
Philosophical Introduction: The
Background Theory
Needless to say, this rather baroque belief system gave rise to incredibly
complicated explanations by the tribal elders . . .
—Will Self
So the next time a disciple asked him: ‘Guru, what is life?’ his answer was:
‘My Son, I cannot tell you.’ ‘Why can’t you?’ the disciple wanted to know.
‘Because,’ the guru said, ‘the question “What is having a life?” is logically
prior.’ ‘Gee,’ said the disciple, ‘that’s pretty interesting’; and he signed on
for the whole term.
I’m not going to launch a full-dress defence of RTM; but I do want to
start with a little methodological stuff about whether having a concept is
logically prior to being a concept, and what difference, if any, that makes
to theorizing about mental representation.
It’s a general truth that if you know what an X is, then you also know
what it is to have an X. And ditto the other way around. This applies to
concepts in particular: the question what they are and the question what
it is to have them are logically linked; if you commit yourself on one, you
are thereby committed, willy nilly, on the other. Suppose, for example, that
your theory is that concepts are pumpkins. Very well then, it will have to
be a part of your theory that having a concept is having a pumpkin. And,
conversely: if your theory is that having a concept is having a pumpkin,
then it will have to be a part of your theory that pumpkins are what
concepts are. I suppose this all to be truistic.
Now, until quite recently (until this century, anyhow) practically
everybody took it practically for granted that the explanation of concept
possession should be parasitic on the explanation of concept individuation.
First you say what it is for something to be the concept X—you give the
concept’s ‘identity conditions’—and then having the concept X is just
having whatever the concept X turns out to be. But the philosophical
fashions have changed. Almost without exception, current theories about
concepts reverse the classical direction of analysis. Their substance lies in
what they say about the conditions for having concept X, and it’s the story
about being concept X that they treat as derivative. Concept X is just:
whatever it is that having the concept X consists in having. Moreover, the
new consensus is that you really must take things in that order; the
sanctions incurred if you go the other way round are said to be terrific.
(Similarly, mutatis mutandis for being the meaning of a word vs. knowing the
meaning of a word. Here and elsewhere, I propose to move back and forth
pretty freely between concepts and word meanings; however it may turn
out in the long run, for purposes of the present investigation word
meanings just are concepts.)
You might reasonably wonder how there possibly could be this stark
methodological asymmetry. We’ve just been seeing that the link between
‘is an X’ and ‘has an X’ is conceptual; fix one and you thereby fix the
other. How, then, could there be an issue of principle about which you
should start with? The answer is that when philosophers take a strong line
2 Philosophical Introduction
on a methodological issue there’s almost sure to be a metaphysical subtext.
The present case is not an exception.
On the one side, people who start in the traditional way by asking ‘What
are concepts?’ generally hold to a traditional metaphysics according to
which a concept is a kind of mental particular. I hope that this idea will
get clearer and clearer as we go along. Suffice it, for now, that the thesis
that concepts are mental particulars is intended to imply that having a
concept is constituted by having a mental particular, and hence to exclude
the thesis that having a concept is, in any interesting sense, constituted by
having mental traits or capacities.1 You may say, if you like, that having
concept X is having the ability to think about Xs (or better, that having the
concept X is being able to think about Xs ‘as such’). But, though that’s true
enough, it doesn’t alter the metaphysical situation as traditionally
conceived. For thinking about Xs consists in having thoughts about Xs,
and thoughts are supposed to be mental particulars too.
On the other side, people who start with ‘What is concept possession?’
generally have some sort of Pragmatism in mind as the answer. Having a
concept is a matter of what you are able to do, it’s some kind of epistemic
‘know how’. Maybe having the concept X comes to something like being
reliably able to recognize Xs and/or being reliably able to draw sound inferences
about Xness.2 In any case, an account that renders having concepts
as having capacities is intended to preclude an account that renders
concepts as species of mental particulars: capacities aren’t kinds of things;
a fortiori, they aren’t kinds of mental things.
So, to repeat, the methodological doctrine that concept possession is
logically prior to concept individuation frequently manifests a preference
The Background Theory 3
1 I want explicitly to note what I’ve come to think of as a cardinal source of confusion
in this area. If concept tokens are mental particulars, then having a concept is being in a
relation to a mental particular. This truism about the possession conditions for concepts
continues to hold whatever doctrine you may embrace about how concepts tokens get
assigned to concept types. Suppose Jones’s TIGER-concept is a mental token that plays a
certain (e.g. causal) role in his mental life. That is quite compatible with supposing that
what makes it a token of the type TIGER-concept (rather than a token of the type
MOUSE-concept; or not a token of a concept type at all) is something dispositional; viz.
the dispositional properties of the token (as opposed, say, to its weight or colour or electric
charge).
The discussion currently running in the text concerns the relation between theories about
the ontological status of concepts and theories about what it is to have a concept. Later, and
at length, we’ll consider the quite different question how concept tokens are typed.
2 Earlier, less sophisticated versions of the view that the metaphysics of concepts is
parasitic on the metaphysics of concept possession were generally not merely pragmatist but
also behaviourist: they contemplated reducing concept possession to a capacity for
responding selectively. The cognitive revolutions in psychology and the philosophy of mind
gagged on behaviourism, but never doubted that concepts are some sort of capacities or
other. A classic case of getting off lightly by pleading to the lesser charge.
for an ontology of mental dispositions rather than an ontology of mental
particulars. This sort of situation will be familiar to old hands; proposing
dispositional analyses in aid of ontological reductions is the method of
critical philosophy that Empiricism taught us. If you are down on cats,
reduce them to permanent possibilities of sensation. If you are down on
electrons and protons, reduce them to permanent possibilities of
experimental outcomes. And so on. There is, however, a salient difference
between reductionism about cats and reductionism about concepts:
perhaps some people think that they ought to think that cats are constructs
out of possible experiences, but surely nobody actually does think so; one
tolerates a little mauvaise foi in metaphysics. Apparently, however, lots of
people do think that concepts are constructs out of mental (specifically
epistemic) capacities. In consequence, and this is a consideration that I
take quite seriously, whereas nobody builds biological theories on the
assumption that cats are sensations, much of our current cognitive science,
and practically all of our current philosophy of mind, is built on the
assumption that concepts are capacities. If that assumption is wrong, very
radical revisions are going to be called for. So, at least, I’ll argue.
To sum up so far: it’s entirely plausible that a theory of what concepts
are must likewise answer the question ‘What is it to have a concept?’ and,
mutatis mutandis, that a theory of meaning must answer the question
‘What is it to understand a language?’We’ve been seeing, however, that this
untendentious methodological demand often comports with a substantive
metaphysical agenda: viz. the reduction of concepts and meanings to
epistemic capacities.
Thus Michael Dummett (1993a: 4), for one illustrious example, says
that “any theory of meaning which was not, or did not immediately yield,
a theory of understanding, would not satisfy the purpose for which,
philosophically, we require a theory of meaning”. There is, as previously
remarked, a reading on which this is true but harmless since whatever
ontological construal of the meaning of an expression we settle on will
automatically provide a corresponding construal of understanding the
expression as grasping its meaning. It is not, however, this truism that
Dummett is commending. Rather, he has it in mind that an acceptable
semantics must explicate linguistic content just by reference to the
“practical” capacities that users of a language have qua users of that
language. (Correspondingly, a theory that explicates the notion of
conceptual content would do so just by reference to the practical capacities
that having the concept bestows.) Moreover, if I read him right, Dummett
intends to impose this condition in a very strong form: the capacities upon
which linguistic meaning supervenes must be such as can be severally and
determinately manifested in behaviour. “An axiom earns its place in the