The Standard Argument 137

The Standard Argument 137
cognitivist according to this criterion, and wouldn’t be even if (by accident)
the concept DOORKNOB happened to be triggered by doorknobs.) Well,
by this criterion, my story isn’t cognitivist either. My story says that what
doorknobs have in common qua doorknobs is being the kind of thing that
our kind of minds (do or would) lock to from experience with instances of
the doorknob stereotype. (Cf. to be red just is to have that property that
minds like ours (do or would) lock to in virtue of experiences of typical
instances of redness.) Why isn’t that OK?12
If you put that account of the metaphysics of doorknobhood together
with the metaphysical account of concept possession that informational
semantics proposes—having a concept is something like “resonating to”
the property that the concept expresses—then you get: being a doorknob is
having that property that minds like ours come to resonate to in
consequence of relevant experience with stereotypic doorknobs. That, and
not being learned inductively, is what explains the content relation between
DOORKNOB and the kinds of experience that typically mediates its
acquisition. It also explains how doorknobhood could seem to be
undefinable and unanalysable without being metaphysically ultimate. And
it is also explains how DOORKNOB could be both psychologically
primitive and not innate, the Standard Argument to the contrary not
withstanding.
Several points in a spirit of expatiation:
The basic idea is that what makes something a doorknob is just: being
the kind of thing from experience with which our kind of mind readily
acquires the concept DOORKNOB. And, conversely, what makes
something the concept DOORKNOB is just: expressing the property that
our kinds of minds lock to from experience with good examples of
instantiated doorknobhood. But this way of putting the suggestion is too
weak since experience with stereotypic doorknobs might cause one to lock
to any of a whole lot of properties (or to none), depending on what else is
going on at the time. (In some contexts it might cause one to lock to the
property belongs to Jones.) Whereas, what I want to say is that
doorknobhood is the property that one gets locked to when experience with
typical doorknobs causes the locking and does so in virtue of the properties
they have qua typical doorknobs. We have the kinds of minds that often
12 Modal footnote (NB): Here as elsewhere through the present discussion, ‘minds like
ours’ and ‘the (stereo)typical properties of doorknobs’ are to be read rigidly, viz. as denoting
the properties that instances of stereotypic doorknobs and typical minds have in this world.
That the typical properties of minds and doorknobs are what they are is meant to be
contingent.