Re: [quickphilosophy] Fodor on Concepts III: Other Arguments Against BCP
- From: wittrsl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- To: quickphilosophy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2010 10:21:21 -0700 (PDT)
Hi Walter & quick-phil group:
Fodor's second refutation of Bare-Bones Concept Pragmatism (BCP) begins in
section 3.2 of his article "Having Concepts." He introduces the ideas of
productivity and systematicity. Human language and thought are both productive
and systematic.
That language and thought are productive means that "there are approximately
infinitely many thoughts that one can think." There's a footnote to this odd
formulation, where Fodor rejects as a red herring the possible counterpoint of
"performance constraints". My guess is that someone might make the obviously
correct reply that a human being cannot think infinitely many thoughts. A
finite brain and a finite lifetime in a finite universe ought to be constraint
enough, but Fodor just blithely ignores the obvious here. Probably, Fodor is
just making the assertion that given a few thoughts, one can combine them or
extend them in simple ways, and this results in a new thought. So, OK, we can
probably live with that.
That language and thought are systematic means that "there are certain
symmetries of expressive power in human conceptual systems/languages."
Fodor does not provide a list of the symmetries...perhaps this has been done by
someone else, say Chomsky. What he does is to give a rather poor example of
such a symmetry in language & thought: "John loves Mary." If a mind can
entertain the thought that John loves Mary, then, because of systematicity, it
can entertain the thought that Mary loves John. Well, OK, we can probably live
with this example, but almost any other subject-transitive verb-direct object
sentence in a natural language is going to fail the symmetry relation that
supports systematicity. For example, what if I think "John loves the color
blue." Do I get to think that "The color blue loves John"? I would say, yes,
sure, you can formulate such a thing, but it doesn't make much sense. But,
maybe that's what Fodor wants, just some vague set of
rules for flipping around language elements.
I think one could argue that this symmetry is exceptional, applying to some
language elements, but not others. Indeed, different natural language families
have quite different rules for combining concepts. It seems natural to think of
verbs as have past, present, and future tense. But, in point of fact, if you
talk about tense like that, it marks you as someone who speaks one of the
languages in the Indo-European family. Other languages don't have this. For
instance, in Navajo, you express your thoughts as something that you learned
from someone else, something that you were a direct witness to yourself, or
something that is a timeless truth. We could go on and on. But, I guess the way
to get anywhere is just let Fodor have his proof by example, not quibble about
how actual languages work and how they don't work the same way, and see where
we grind to a halt.
The next idea Fodor introduces is compositionality. Language and thought are
systematic and productive because they are compositional. "There is, for each
natural language, a finite set of 'lexical primitives' (words, more or
less) and a finite system of constructive principles that the primitives fall
under. The latter [rla: he means the constructive principles] apply recursively
and may iterate without bound." Fodor says that compositionality is required
to explain productivity and systematicity, and that therefore compositionality
is non-negotiable. If someone proposes an explanation of concept possession and
that explanation is incompatible with compositionality, then that theory of
concept possession [rla: you can see that Fodor is going to blow away BCP
because of this] must be rejected.
I'll look at the argument in more detail in my next post.
Thanks!
--Ron
--- On Tue, 8/24/10, walto <calhorn@xxxxxxx> wrote:
From: walto <calhorn@xxxxxxx>
Subject: [quickphilosophy] Fodor on Concepts III: Other Arguments Against BCP
To: quickphilosophy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Tuesday, August 24, 2010, 7:13 AM
Ron???
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