[Wittrs] [quickphilosophy] Fodor on Concepts II: First argument against BCP
- From: "walto" <calhorn@xxxxxxx>
- To: quickphilosophy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 23:28:13 -0000
To take down concept pragmatism, Fodor first defines what he takes to be a bare
boned version of it, which he calls "BCP." Then he provides three arguments
against it: I'll discuss only the first.
So, what, exactly, is BCP? Fodor says it's any theory according to which
"concept possession is constituted by" two epistemic capacities, that for
INFERRING and that for SORTING. Assuming again that concepts "can occur as the
constituents of thoughts" BCP holds that when a concept C is a constituent of
some thought T, T will have certain entailments as a result of containing C.
If, for example, someone eats a partridge, someone will have eaten a bird,
while if someone eats a frog, that won't be the case. The thought that Smith
is eating a partridge entails that Smith is eating a bird in virtue of the
thought's having the constituent PARTRIDGE. And, according to BCP, a condition
for possessing the concept C is that "one is disposed to draw (or otherwise to
acknowledge) some of the inferences" that thoughts have in virtue of containing
C. While it may be a necessary truth that for X to be a partridge, X must be a
bird, the entailments here need not be necessary. For example, if it's widely
known that all adult partridges are bigger than a standard thimble, then it may
be that one cannot have the concept PARTRIDGE without inferring from "Smith ate
a partridge" that Smith ate something bigger than a standard thimble.
Besides making at least some of the right inferences, a concept possessor must
according to BCP be able to do a bit of sorting. If one can't separate the
partridges from the frogs in a batch consisting of both animals, one probably
hasn't got either the concept PARTRIDGE, the concept FROG (or, I guess, the
concept DIFFERENT). It may be that we need to have both inferential and
sorting skills down to be said to have some concept. E.g., to possess the
concept PARTRIDGE we may need to be both "primitively compelled" to infer from
"X is a partridge" that X is an animal, and also be able to reliably
distinguish partridges from frogs.
Fodor says that there are three basic objections to any such theory ("fatal
when taken separately" and "annihilating when taken together"). I'll deal here
only with the first basic objection, the so-called "analyticity argument,"
which Fodor claims to be the most familiar of the three. I take this argument
to go as follows:
1. According to BCP, for any person S and concept C there are some propositions
that must be at least acquiesced to by S in order for S to have C.
2. If (1), then either the particular group of inferences that S must at least
acquiesce to in order to possess C must either (i) be listable; (ii) include
EVERY proposition that may be validly (even if empirically) inferred from a
proposition including C; or (iii) involve all and only those propositions that
analytically follow from a proposition that includes C.
3. But (i) and (ii) are absurd and (iii) requires a sustainable
analytic/synthetic distinction.
4. There is no sustainable analytic/synthetic distinction.
5. Therefore BCP is false.
In support of the absurdity of (3)(ii), Fodor notes that concepts are public:
lots of concepts are shared by lots of people. If (3)(ii) were true, Fodor
holds, no two people could share any concept C unless they shared all their
beliefs involving C. But, he says, "practically everybody has some eccentric
beliefs about practically everything" at some time or other so not only does
this sort of holism imply that no two people share the same concept, but even
that no single person is likely to share it at different times during his/her
life. (And for those who might want to do away with concept identity between
people in favor of concept similarity, Fodor refers them to a paper he wrote
with Lepore that he believes shows that to be hopeless as well.)
Fodor calls "molecularism" the theory that some, but not ALL C-containing
inferences need be acquiesced to in order for C to be possessed, and?while he
admits that the position has some initial plausibility?he claims it depends on
a sustainable analytic/synthetic distinction, since that is necessary to tell
us just which beliefs are "conceptually necessary" to C.
According to Fodor, the best way to make the point against the
analytic/synthetic distinction is that "nobody has the slightest idea what the
truth markers for claims about analyticity could be; that nobody knows what
analyticity is, nobody can give clear account of what might make ascriptions of
analyticity true (/false)." Some have tried to base analyticities on
part/whole: e.g., it's analytic that bachelors are unmarried simply because
BACHELOR is nothing but some sort of combination of UNMARRIED and MAN. But (a)
the number of concepts that have parts has been vastly overrated, and (b)
there's no good reason to suppose that UNMARRIED isn't really the derivative
concept and BACHELOR is primitive.
Another try has been made via "truth by convention." But even if linguistic
analyticities are plausibly taken to be conventional, how could conceptual
truths be? "Did somebody stipulate that the concept BACHELOR applies only to
men who are unmarried? If so, when and who was it, and how did he go about
it?" Furthermore, how could something be both "true by meaning alone" and yet
require some empirical fact to have at one time obtained? "Copper is a metal"
can't be analytically true if it requires it to be the case that copper is a
metal.
And so, Fodor concludes, BCP is false.
There seem to me to be a number of weak points in his argument here, the most
forceful one being that concept possession seems to me to be a fuzzier thing
than Fodor can admit. This isn't necessarily a matter of Smith's concept C
being only similar and not identical to Jones's, it's that the two people have
differential masteries of what may really be one and the same thing. Having
the concept PARTRIDGE need not be the same thing for all people in order for
PARTRIDGE itself to qualify as a single public concept. Those who support BCP
(as I guess maybe I do) and think that a sign of possession is epistemic don't
therefore hold that the concept itself just IS the mastery or indeed any
epistemic or dispositional element.
But, of course, Fodor has other, and perhaps more powerful, arguments against
BCP. I leave their exposition to Ron.
W
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