[quickphilosophy] Re: Fodor on Concepts II: First argument against BCP
- From: wittrsl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- To: quickphilosophy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2010 13:53:53 -0000
Nice post, Ron, but I hope Larry stops in to defend Quine on analyticity
here...or Budd to defend Fodor.
I actually think this paper would have been better if he'd attacked a more
specific thesis, instead of trying to round up the whole century. If, for
example, the thesis were precisely the Wittgensteinsian doctrine (I don't say
whether W held it himself) that to understand a concept is NOTHING BUT to
follow some set of (perhaps unspecifiable) rules, I think Fodor would have made
serious headway. He hits on some good reasons against that, I think, but they
won't QUITE work against the entire BCP clan.
W
--- In quickphilosophy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Ron Allen <wavelets@...> wrote:
>
> Hi Walter:
> The members of Fodor's BCP society hold to some very extreme positions. I
> have to think, possibly along with you and Neil, that he's not fairly
> representing the other side's position.
> For example, in 2(i) why must the group of inferences be listable? It's
> clearly countably infinite, and it can't be listed; there aren't enough
> elementary particles in the universe. Take any true proposition involving C;
> call it P(C). Then P(C) | Q, where Q is anything whatever is a valid
> inference from P(C). We'd have to list P(C) | Q, where Q is any proposition.
> This is silly. The propositions that are empirically inferred in 2(ii) is
> even larger, so that is an even sillier stipulation. Nobody who thinks things
> like this could be called "bare bones" conceptually pragmatic. No, they're
> carrying some real baggage.
> So far, Fodor is not doing very well. Evidently, the argument hinges on
> 2(iii). But, only orthodox Quineans are going to have a problem with this.
> Grice and Strawson refuted Quine's argument against the analytic/synthetic
> distinction, and all the BCPer has to do is assert the distinction.
> How can you tell whether these things are true or false?
> a. All bachelors are male.b. All bachelors are fat.
> Quine admits that any person that is unmarried and male and adult is
> therefore male. So, unless he allows definable predicates in 1st-order logic
> like the rest of us logicians, but is not going to allow it in a natural
> language (amazing: 1st-order logic is more expressive and more expansive than
> natural language; more amazing: how did we ever learn 1st-order logic?)
> So, Fodor's argument is unsound. It proceeds from one or more false premises.
> Two of the premises, 2(i) and 2(ii)are obviously bogus, and no one advocates
> them, so being able to reject them is irrelevant.
> And, in any case, I don't see any argument that possession of the concept of
> C as such avoids the pitfalls of Fodor's caricature BCP.
> Hmmm...better to look at Fodor's other arguments. The obliteration of the
> 20th century has only a 66% chance of success at this point.
> Thanks!--Ron
>
> --- On Thu, 8/19/10, walto <calhorn@...> wrote:
>
> From: walto <calhorn@...>
> Subject: [quickphilosophy] Fodor on Concepts II: First argument against BCP
> To: quickphilosophy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Date: Thursday, August 19, 2010, 4:28 PM
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> 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.
>
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> 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.
>
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> 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:
>
>
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> 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.
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> 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.
>
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> 3. But (i) and (ii) are absurd and (iii) requires a sustainable
> analytic/synthetic distinction.
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> 4. There is no sustainable analytic/synthetic distinction.
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> 5. Therefore BCP is false.
>
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> 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, andâ?"while
> he admits that the position has some initial plausibilityâ?"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.
>
>
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> 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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