What Concepts Have To Be 29

It seems pretty clear that all sorts of concepts (for example, DOG,
FATHER, TRIANGLE, HOUSE, TREE, AND, RED, and, surely, lots
of others) are ones that all sorts of people, under all sorts of circumstances,
have had and continue to have. A theory of concepts should set
the conditions for concept possession in such a way as not to violate this
intuition. Barring very pressing considerations to the contrary, it should
turn out that people who live in very different cultures and/or at very
different times (me and Aristotle, for example) both have the concept
FOOD; and that people who are possessed of very different amounts of
mathematical sophistication (me and Einstein, for example) both have the
concept TRIANGLE; and that people who have had very different kinds
of learning experiences (me and Helen Keller, for example) both have the
concept TREE; and that people with very different amounts of knowledge
(me and a four-year-old, for example) both have the concept HOUSE.
And so forth. Accordingly, if a theory or an experimental procedure
distinguishes between my concept DOG and Aristotle’s, or between my
concept TRIANGLE and Einstein’s, or between my concept TREE and
Helen Keller’s, etc. that is a very strong prima facie reason to doubt that
the theory has got it right about concept individuation or that the
experimental procedure is really a measure of concept possession.
I am thus setting my face against a variety of kinds of conceptual
relativism, and it may be supposed that my doing so is itself merely
dogmatic. But I think there are good grounds for taking a firm line on this
issue. Certainly RTM is required to. I remarked in Chapter 1 that RTM
takes for granted the centrality of intentional explanation in any viable
cognitive psychology. In the cases of interest, what makes such
explanations intentional is that they appeal to covering generalizations
about people who believe that such-and-such, or people who desire that
so-and-so, or people who intend that this and that, and so on. In
consequence, the extent to which an RTM can achieve generality in the
explanations it proposes depends on the extent to which mental contents
are supposed to be shared. If everybody else’s concept WATER is different
from mine, then it is literally true that only I have ever wanted a drink of
water, and that the intentional generalization ‘Thirsty people seek water’
applies only to me. (And, of course, only I can state that generalization;
words express concepts, so if your WATER concept is different from mine,
‘Thirsty people seek water’ means something different when you say it and
when I do.) Prima facie, it would appear that any very thoroughgoing
conceptual relativism would preclude intentional generalizations with any
very serious explanatory power. This holds in spades if, as seems likely, a
coherent conceptual relativist has to claim that conceptual identity can’t
be maintained even across time slices of the same individual.
What Concepts Have To Be 29
30 Unphilosophical Introduction
There is, however, a widespread consensus (and not only among
conceptual relativists) that intentional explanation can, after all, be
preserved without supposing that belief contents are often—or even
ever—literally public. The idea is that a robust notion of content similarity
would do just as well as a robust notion of content identity for the
cognitive scientist’s purposes. Here, to choose a specimen practically at
random, is a recent passage in which Gil Harman enunciates this faith:
Sameness of meaning from one symbol system to another is a similarity relation
rather than an identity relation in the respect that sameness of meaning is not
transitive . . . I am inclined to extend the point to concepts, thoughts, and
beliefs . . . The account of sameness of content appeals to the best way of
translating between two systems, where goodness in translation has to do with
preserving certain aspects of usage, with no appeal to any more ‘robust’ notion of
content or meaning identity . . . [There’s no reason why] the resulting notion of
sameness of content should fail to satisfy the purposes of intentional explanation.
(1993: 169–79)4
It’s important whether such a view can be sustained since, as we’ll see,
meeting the requirement that intentional contents be literally public is
non-trivial; like compositionality, publicity imposes a substantial
constraint upon one’s theory of concepts and hence, derivatively, upon
one’s theory of language. In fact, however, the idea that content similarity
is the basic notion in intentional explanation is affirmed a lot more widely
than it’s explained; and it’s quite unclear, on reflection, how the notion of
similarity that such a semantics would require might be unquestionbeggingly
developed. On one hand, such a notion must be robust in the
sense that it preserves intentional explanations pretty generally; on the
other hand, it must do so without itself presupposing a robust notion of
content identity. To the best of my knowledge, it’s true without exception
that all the construals of concept similarity that have thus far been put on
offer egregiously fail the second condition.
Harman, for example, doesn’t say much more about content-similaritycum-
goodness-of-translation than that it isn’t transitive and that it
“preserves certain aspects of usage”. That’s not a lot to go on. Certainly
it leaves wide open whether Harman is right in denying that his account
of content similarity presupposes a “‘robust’ notion of content or meaning
identity”. For whether it does depends on how the relevant “aspects of
4 See also Smith, Medin, and Rips: “what accounts for categorization cannot account
for stability [publicity] . . . [a]s long as stability of concepts is equated with sameness of
concepts . . . But there is another sense of stability, which can be equated with similarity of
mental contents . . . and for this sense, what accounts for categorization may at least partially
account for ‘stability’ ”(1984: 268). Similar passages are simply ubiquitous in the cognitive
science literature; I’m grateful to Ron Mallon for having called this example to my attention.
usage” are themselves supposed to be individuated, and about this we’re
told nothing at all.
Harman is, of course, too smart to be a behaviourist; ‘usage’, as he uses
it, is itself an intentional-cum-semantic term. Suppose, what surely seems
plausible, that one of the ‘aspects of usage’ that a good translation of ‘dog’
has to preserve is that it be a term that implies animal, or a term that
doesn’t apply to ice cubes, or, for matter, a term that means dog. If so,
then we’re back where we started; Harman needs notions like same
implication, same application, and same meaning in order to explicate his
notion of content similarity. All that’s changed is which shell the pea is
under.
At one point, Harman asks rhetorically, “What aspects of use
determine meaning?” Reply: “It is certainly relevant what terms are
applied to and the reasons that might be offered for this application . . . it
is also relevant how some terms are used in relation to other terms” (ibid.:
166). But I can’t make any sense of this unless some notion of ‘same
application’, ‘same reason’, and ‘same relation of terms’ is being taken for
granted in characterizing what good translations ipso facto have in
common. NB on pain of circularity: same application (etc.), not similar
application (etc.). Remember that similarity of semantic properties is the
notion that Harman is trying to explain, so his explanation mustn’t
presuppose that notion.
I don’t particularly mean to pick on Harman; if his story begs the
question it was supposed to answer, that is quite typical of the literature
on concept similarity. Though it’s often hidden in a cloud of technical
apparatus (for a detailed case study, see Fodor and Lepore 1992: ch. 7), the
basic problem is easy enough to see. Suppose that we want the following
to be a prototypical case where you and I have different but similar
concepts of George Washington: though we agree about his having been
the first American President, and the Father of His Country, and his
having cut down a cherry tree, and so on, you think that he wore false
teeth and I think that he didn’t. The similarity of our GW concepts is thus
some (presumably weighted) function of the number of propositions
about him that we both believe, and the dissimilarity of our GW concepts
is correspondingly a function of the number of such propositions that we
disagree about. So far, so good.
But the question now arises: what about the shared beliefs themselves;
are they or aren’t they literally shared? This poses a dilemma for the
similarity theorist that is, as far as I can see, unavoidable. If he says that
our agreed upon beliefs about GW are literally shared, then he hasn’t
managed to do what he promised; viz. introduce a notion of similarity of
content that dispenses with a robust notion of publicity. But if he says