What Concepts Have To Be 35

34 Unphilosophical Introduction
Here is the first: although I’m distinguishing three theories of concepts
for purposes of exposition and attack, and though supporters of each of
these theories have traditionally wanted to distance themselves as much as
possible from supporters of the others, still all three theories are really
versions of one and the same idea about content. I want to stress this since
I’m going to argue that it is primarily because of what they agree about
that all three fail.
The theories of concepts we’ll be considering all assume a metaphysical
thesis which, as I remarked in Chapter 1, I propose to reject: namely, that
primitive concepts, and (hence) their possession conditions, are at least
partly constituted by their inferential relations. (That complex concepts—
BROWN COW, etc.—and their possession conditions are exhaustively
constituted by their inferential relations to their constituent concepts is
not in dispute; to the contrary, compositionality requires it, and
compositionality isn’t negotiable.) The current near-universal acceptance
of Inferential Role Semantics in cognitive science marks a radical break
with the preceding tradition in theories about mind and language: premodern
theories typically supposed that primitive concepts are
individuated by their (e.g. iconic or causal) relations to things in the world.
The history of the conversion of cognitive scientists to IR semantics would
make a book by itself; a comedy, I think, though thus far without a happy
ending:
—In philosophy, the idea was pretty explicitly to extend the Logicist
treatment of logical terms into the non-logical vocabulary; if IF and
SOME can be identified with their inferential roles, why not TABLE and
TREE as well?
—In linguistics, the idea was to extend to semantics the Structuralist
notion that a level of grammatical description is a ‘system of differences’:
if their relations of equivalence and contrast are what bestow phonological
values on speech sounds, why shouldn’t their relations of implication and
exclusion be what bestow semantic values on forms of words?
—In AI, the principle avatar of IRS was ‘procedural semantics’, a
deeply misguided attempt to extend the principle of ‘methodological
solipsism’ from the theory of mental processes to the theory of meaning:
if a mental process (thinking, perceiving, remembering, and the like) can
be ‘purely computational’ why can’t conceptual content be purely
computational too? If computers qua devices that perform inferences can
think, why can’t computers qua devices that perform inferences mean?
—I don’t know how psychology caught IRS; perhaps it was from
philosophy, linguistics, and AI. (I know one eminent developmental
psychologist who certainly caught it from Thomas Kuhn.) Let that be an
object lesson in the danger of mixing disciplines. Anyhow, IRS got to be
What Concepts Have To Be 35
36 Unphilosophical Introduction
the fashion in psychology too. Perhaps the main effect of the “cognitive
revolution” was that espousing some or other version of IRS became the
received way for a psychologist not to be a behaviourist.
So, starting around 1950, practically everybody was saying that the
‘“Fido”–Fido fallacy’ is fallacious,7 and that concepts (/words) are like
chess pieces: just as there can’t be a rook without a queen, so there can’t
be a DOG without an ANIMAL. Just as the value of the rook is partly
determined by its relation to the queen, so the content of DOG is partly
determined by its relation to ANIMAL. Content is therefore a thing that
can only happen internal to systems of symbols (or internal to languages,
or, on some versions, internal to forms of life). It was left to ‘literary
theory’ to produce the reductio ad absurdum (literary theory is good at
that): content is constituted entirely by intra-symbolic relations; just as
there’s nothing ‘outside’ the chess game that matters to the values of the
pieces, so too there’s nothing outside the text that matters to what it means.
Idealism followed, of course.
It is possible to feel that these various ways of motivating IRS,
historically effective though they clearly were, are much less than
overwhelmingly persuasive. For example, on reflection, it doesn’t seem that
languages are a lot like games after all: queens and pawns don’t mean
anything, whereas ‘dog’ means dog. That’s why, though you can’t translate
the queen into French (or, a fortiori, into checkers), you can translate ‘dog’
into ‘chien’. It’s perhaps unwise to insist on an analogy that misses so
glaring a difference.
Phonemes don’t mean anything either, so prima facie, pace Saussure,
“having a phonological value” and “having a semantic value”would seem
to be quite different sorts of properties. Even if it were right that phonemes
are individuated by their contrasts and equivalences—which probably they
aren’t—that wouldn’t be much of a reason to claim that words or concepts
are also individuated that way.
If, in short, one asks to hear some serious arguments for IRS, one
discovers, a bit disconcertingly, that they are very thin upon the ground. I
think that IRS is most of what is wrong with current theorizing in
cognitive science and the metaphysics of meaning. But I don’t suppose for
a minute that any short argument will, or should, persuade you to consider
junking it. I expect that will need a long argument; hence this long book.
Long arguments take longer than short arguments, but they do sometimes
create conviction.
Accordingly, my main subject in what follows will be not the history of
7 That is, the “fallacy” of assuming that the meaning of the word is the eponymous
dog.
IR semantics, or the niceties of its formulation, or its evidential status, but
rather its impact on empirical theories of concepts. The central
consideration will be this: If you wish to hold that the content of a concept
is constituted by the inferences that it enters into, you are in need of a
principled way of deciding which inferences constitute which concepts.What
primarily distinguishes the cognitive theories we’ll consider is how they
answer this question. My line will be that, though as far as anybody knows
the answers they offer exhaust the options, pretty clearly none of them
can be right. Not, NB, that they are incoherent, or otherwise confused; just
that they fail to satisfy the empirical constraints on theories of concepts
that I’ve been enumerating, and are thus, almost certainly, false.
At that point, I hope that abandoning IRS in favour of the sort of
atomistic, informational semantics that I tentatively endorsed in Chapter
1 will begin to appear to be the rational thing to do. I’ll say something in
Chapter 6 about what this sort of alternative to IRS might be like.
So much for the first of my two concluding addenda. Here is the second:
I promised you in Chapter 1 that I wouldn’t launch yet another defence
of RTM; I proposed—aside from my admittedly tendentious endorsement
of informational semantics—simply to take RTM for granted as the
context in which problems about the nature of concepts generally arise
these days. I do mean to stick to this policy. Mostly. But I can’t resist
rounding off these two introductory chapters by remarking how nicely the
pieces fit when you put them all together. I’m going to exercise my hobbyhorse
after all, but only a little.
In effect, in these introductory discussions, we’ve been considering
constraints on a theory of cognition that emerge from two widely different,
and largely independent, research enterprises. On the one hand, there’s
the attempt to save the architecture of a Fregean—viz. a purely referential—
theory of meaning by taking seriously the idea that concepts can
be distinguished by their ‘modes of presentation’ of their extensions. It’s
supposed to be modes of presentation that answer the question ‘How can
coreferential concepts be distinct?’ Here Frege’s motives concur with those
of Informational Semantics; since both are referential theories of content,
both need a story about how thinking about the Morning Star could be
different from thinking about the Evening Star, given that the two
thoughts are connected with the same ‘thing in the world’.
The project of saving the Frege programme faces two major hurdles.
First, ‘Mates cases’ appear to show that modes of presentations can’t be
senses. Frege to the contrary notwithstanding, it looks as though
practically any linguistic difference between prima facie synonymous
expressions, merely syntactic differences distinctly included, can be
recruited to block their substitution in some Mates context or other. In the