Re: [quickphilosophy] Re: Fodor on Concepts II: First argument against BCP
- From: wittrsl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- To: quickphilosophy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2010 09:15:39 -0700 (PDT)
Thanks, Walter.
Rereading it, though, I wonder if I wasn't a little too snippy. A couple more
observations upon the 1st anti-BCP argument.
It seems to me that Fodor is conflating two things that it might be useful to
distinguish: ideas and concepts. If I have the idea of a partridge, for
example, I should be able to sort partridges from sparrows and brussels sprouts
and canned tuna, but I might not be able to reliably utilize the idea in
inferences. Because I don't have a systematic account of what it takes to be a
partridge. OTOH, if I have developed a concept of partridge, then I can make
deductions of the sort that Jack's pet bird is bigger than Tommy's, because
Jack has a partridge, and Tommy owns a sparrow, and partridges are bigger than
sparrows.
Secondly, to demand that the idea or concept owner assent or dissent to all
consequent propositions requires far too much precise skill in terms of
employing the concept. Can I not have a concept of quartz, without knowing the
crystal structure of the component silicon and oxygen atoms? And a
sophisticated BCPer, like Wittgenstein, allows for fuzzy conceptualization in
any case.
I am amused by Fodor's quoting Galen Strawson at the top of the article. In the
20th century, Edwin Hubbell discovered how big the universe was and where our
shabby little planet was situated; Einstein discovered that matter and energy
were really two forms of one underlying substance, mass-energy; Russell and
Whitehead showed that all of mathematics was derivable from set theory; Gödel
showed that arithmetic was incomplete; Watson and Crick explained the molecular
basis for Darwin's macro-theory of evolution...and Galen Strawson put forward
panpsychism and attached the label of "silly" to the whole century.
One more notch of the pistol grip of philosophy.--Ron
--- On Sat, 8/21/10, walto <calhorn@xxxxxxx> wrote:
From: walto <calhorn@xxxxxxx>
Subject: [quickphilosophy] Re: Fodor on Concepts II: First argument against BCP
To: quickphilosophy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Saturday, August 21, 2010, 6:53 AM
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:
>
>
>
> 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.
>
>
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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.
>
>
>
> 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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