Abstract
It is commonplace in cognitive science that concepts are individuated in terms of the roles they play in the cognitive lives of thinkers, a view that Jerry Fodor has recently been dubbed ‘Concept Pragmatism’. Quinean critics of Pragmatism have long argued that it founders on its commitment to the analytic/synthetic distinction, since without such a distinction there is plausibly no way to distinguish constitutive from non-constitutive roles in cognition. This paper considers Fodor’s empirical arguments against analyticity, and in particular his arguments against lexical decomposition and definitions, and argues that Concept Pragmatists have two viable options with respect to them. First, Concept Pragmatists can confront them head-on, and argue that they do not show that lexical items are semantically primitive or that lexical concepts are internally unstructured. Second, Pragmatists may accept that these arguments show that lexical concepts are atomic, but insist that this need not entail that Pragmatism is false. For there is a viable version of Concept Pragmatism that does not take lexical items to be semantically structured or lexical concepts to be internally structured. Adopting a version of Pragmatism that takes meaning relations to be specified by inference rules, or meaning postulates, allows one to accept the empirical arguments in favor of Concept Atomism, while at the same time deny that such arguments show that there are no analyticities. The paper concludes by responding to Fodor’s recent objection that such a version of Concept Pragmatism has unhappy consequences concerning the relation between concept constitution and concept possession.
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Notes
I follow the convention of writing the names of concepts in small capitals. When quoting, I change the author’s notation to fit mine.
In philosophy this view is often called “conceptual role semantics,” “inferential role semantics” or “functional role semantics” (Block 1986; Field 1977; Harman 1999; Peacocke 1992). In psychology the various forms of “prototype theories” and “theory theories” of concepts accept some or other version of this claim (see Murphy 2002 for a recent review), as does “procedural semantics” in AI (Johnson-Laird 1977).
The critical literature on Quine’s arguments is, of course, vast. Grice and Strawson (1956) and Putnam (1975) are two classic replies to Quine (1953), and BonJour (1998), Horwich (1992), Rey (1993, 1998), and Sober (2000) criticize Quine in the context of the contemporary literature in semantics and epistemology.
There may also be differences in the number of lexical items that languages attach to a single conceptual domain. For example, English has one verb for the ‘putting on clothes’ domain, whereas Japanese has distinct verbs for different aspects of that domain: Japanese has one verb for putting on headgear, a different verb for putting clothes on lower parts of the body, and so forth (Clark 1983). English speakers can obviously make a conceptual distinction between these different aspects, even though such distinctions do not have lexical counterparts.
As Ray Jackendoff recently put it: “Nearly everyone thinks that learning anything consists of constructing it from previously known parts, using previously known means of combination. If we trace the learning process back and ask where the previously known parts came from, and their previously know parts came from, eventually we have to arrive at a point where the most basic parts are not learned: they are given to the learner genetically, by virtue of the character of brain development. … Applying this view to lexical learning, we conclude that lexical concepts must have a compositional structure, and that the word learner’s [functional]-mind is putting meanings together from smaller parts” (2002, p. 334).
In fact, many of the (apparently) primitive categories appealed to in the literature—e.g., event, thing, place, state, agent, cause, property, etc.—appear to be quite abstract and thus not ripe for an empiricist treatment.
There are other components to Fodor’s empirical case for Concept Atomism, namely, his arguments against prototype theories and theory-theories of concepts. A brief word about each of these is in order. Prototypes theories claim (roughly) that lexical concepts have internal structures that specify statistical features of their instances, i.e., properties that their instances tend to (but need not) have. Although such theories are versions of Concept Pragmatism, in that they accept that lexical concepts are internally structured, they do not concern us here since they give up on the idea that the structure of a concept specifies even necessary conditions on its application. Fodor’s main argument against such theories is that they fail the ‘compositionality constraint’, which requires that the content of complex concepts is a function of the content of their constituents and how those constituents are put together. If this is right, then such theories are left without an explanation of the productivity and systematicity of thought (Fodor 1998; Fodor and Lepore 2002); see, e.g., Prinz (2002) and Recanati (2002) for replies. Theory-theories take concepts to be individuated by their relations to other concepts as specified by a mental theory of some kind. As Fodor (1998) points out, theory-theorists are typically holists about conceptual content, and thus deny that one can specify some subset of the relations internal to the mental theory that are concept-constitutive. As a result, theory-theories apparently inherit all of the problems of Concept Holism. For our purposes, what’s relevant here is that Holists typically deny that there’s an analytic/synthetic distinction. If there were such a distinction, then one could take the concept-constitutive theoretical relations to be the analytic ones, and thus deny that all of a concept’s relations to other concepts in the theory are constitutive. Thus, although theory-theories are versions of Concept Pragmatism, they do not concern us here since they typically deny the existence of analyticities. See Fodor and Lepore (1992) for a general discussion of Holism, and Fodor (1998, pp. 112–119) and Laurence and Margolis (1999, pp. 48–50) for a critique of theory-theories along these lines.
Fodor does not just pick on Miller. He argues against analyzing ‘kill’ as ‘cause to die’ (Fodor 1970); against Jackendoff’s (1992) analysis of the polysemous verb ‘keep’ as ‘cause a state that endures over time’ (Fodor 1998, pp. 49–56); against Pustejovsky’s (1995) analysis of ‘bake’, ‘begin’ (/‘finish’), and ‘enjoy’, as well as his more general arguments for lexical decomposition (Fodor and Lepore 2002, Chap. 5); against Pinker’s (1989) arguments that positing lexical structure is a necessary component of a theory of how children acquire certain aspects of syntax (Fodor 1998, pp. 56–68); and against Hale and Keyser’s (1993) arguments for analyzing ‘denomial’ verbs as phrases that contain the corresponding nouns (e.g., analyzing ‘sing’ as ‘do a song’, ‘shelve’ as ‘put on a shelf’, etc.) (Fodor and Lepore 2002, Chap. 6). For responses to the above arguments, see, e.g., Johnson (2004), Pietroski (2003), Pustejovsky (1998), Hale and Keyser (1999), and Landau (2000).
Elsewhere, Fodor argues against prototype theories and theory-theories, which posit non-definitional conceptual structure, but these views are not relevant to our concerns. See note 9.
In fairness, Fodor and Lepore sometimes make it clear that it’s only Informational Atomism, and not Atomism per se, that implies the possibility of punctate minds. For instance, they say: “Suppose you think that there is no a/s distinction and that there is a convincing argument from anatomism to holism. In consequence, you think that semantic properties must be either holistic or punctate. What is the likelihood that they are punctate? Well, if they are, then, by definition, the meaning of an expression can not depend on its role in a language. What else might it depend upon? The traditional nonholist answer is: some symbol/world relation—specifically, some punctate symbol/world relation that one thing could bear to the world even if nothing else did. This is the doctrine we’ve been calling “semantic atomism”” (1992, p. 32).
See Margolis (1998, p. 348) for a similar characterization of Concept Atomism. Elsewhere, in characterizing what they call the ‘Inferential Model’ of conceptual structure, Margolis and Laurence recognize that one needn’t deny Atomism in order to accept conceptual/inferential role semantics (1999, p. 5).
This claim is not just false but odd, given that Fodor himself devotes an appendix of the same book to meaning postulates, in which he notes that “inferential role semantics doesn’t have to claim that lexical concepts are structurally complex if it doesn’t want to” (1998, p. 108). Fodor’s argument against meaning postulates in the appendix will be addressed in Sect. 5.
Given that Meaning-Postulate Pragmatism accepts Concept Atomism, it must of course live with any implications for innateness that Atomism brings along with it. For a discussion of concept nativism in the context of Atomism, and why the nativistic implications of Atomism might not be as radical as they’re often thought to be, see Fodor (1998, Chaps. 6 and 7), Margolis (1998), Laurence and Margolis (2002), and Weiskopf (2008).
Fodor et al. (1975), pp. 18–20.
As Fodor quips: “[i]t’s an iron law of cognitive science that, in experimental environments, definitions always behave exactly as though they weren’t there” (1998, p. 46). For an alternative interpretation of this comprehension data, which is consistent with the Sort of Consensus and the reply to Fodor discussed in Sect. 2, see Jackendoff (1992, p. 49; 1983, pp. 125–127), and Miller and Johnson-Laird (1976, p. 328).
As Fodor remarks: “[T]his finding is mind-boggling. And, mind-boggling or otherwise, it is clear that shadowing latency is an extremely conservative measure of the speed of comprehension. Since shadowing requires repeating what one is hearing, the 250 ms of lag between stimulus and response includes not only the time required for the perceptual analysis of the message, but also the time required for the subject’s integration of his verbalization” (1983, p. 61).
For ease of exposition, I’m ignoring delicate metaphysical issues here. For instance, strictly speaking it’s not true that you couldn’t possess this dollar bill without possessing its constituents. For a dollar bill can survive the loss of some of its constituents. There are thus counterfactual scenarios in which you possess this dollar bill even though it’s constituted by a distinct set of constituents. Abstracting away from these issues will not affect the argument in the text.
It may be that this dollar bill’s being made by the Federal Bureau of Engraving and Printing cannot be one of its constitutive properties unless it constituents were also made by the Federal Bureau of Engraving and Printing. But that of course wouldn’t imply that being made by the Bureau is a property that relates the dollar bill to its constituents.
A further similarity between Informational Atomism and Meaning-Postulate Pragmatism is that the former also posits analyticities that don’t turn on conceptual structure. For it falls out of Informational Atomism that ‘Mark Twain is Sam Clemens’, ‘water is H2O’, ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’, and the like, are analytic (Fodor 1994, p. 110). The reason for this is as follows: since informational semantics has it that the content of water is the property of being water, and that the content of h 2 o is being H 2 O, ‘water is H2O’ is conceptually necessary in the sense that it’s guaranteed by the content of water and the content of h 2 o, together with the fact that water is H2O. (It’s worth pointing out that this implication does not sit happily with Fodor’s claim that analytic inferences are those that turn on the compositional structure of concepts, and vice versa. If ‘water is H2O’ is analytic, then compositionality and analyticity can come apart, since the inference from water to h 2 o obviously doesn’t turn on the compositional structure of water.) However, a key difference is that Informational Atomism denies that one must endorse such analytic inferences in order to possess the relevant concepts. One can possess water without knowing that water is H2O. The analytic inferences that don’t turn on conceptual structure posited by Meaning-Postulate Pragmatism, on the other hand, require that thinkers endorse such inferences in order to possess the concepts. The point in the text is that the concept-constitutive relational properties posited by Meaning-Postulate Pragmatism and Informational Atomism both constrain a theory of concept possession, albeit in different ways.
As Fodor puts it: “[B]ecause meaning postulates break the ‘formal’ relation between belonging to the structure of a concept and being among its constitutive features, it’s unclear why it matters … whether a given inference is treated as meaning-constitutive. Imagine two minds that differ in that ‘whale → mammal’ is a meaning postulate for one but is ‘general knowledge’ for the other. Are any further differences between these minds entailed? If so, which ones? … It’s a point Quine made against Carnap that the answer to ‘When is an inference analytic?’ can’t be just ‘Whenever I feel like saying that it is’” (1998, pp. 111–112).
See also Quine (1967, p. 54).
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to audiences at the University of Maryland at College Park and Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where portions of the paper were presented. Special thanks to Peter Carruthers, Paul Pietroski, Georges Rey, Eric Rubenstein, and two anonymous referees for useful feedback on this material and for discussion of this and related topics.
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Rives, B. The Empirical Case Against Analyticity: Two Options for Concept Pragmatists. Minds & Machines 19, 199–227 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-009-9148-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-009-9148-4