Fodor Concepts Where cognitive science went wrong

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ontological conditions have to be met by things that function as
mental causes and effects.
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24 Unphilosophical Introduction
Since this is entailed by RTM (see Chapter 1), and hence is common to all
the theories of concepts I ll consider, I won t go on about it here. If,
however, you think that intentional causation explains behaviour only in
the way that the solubility of sugar explains its dissolving (see Ryle 1949),
or if you think that intentional explanations aren t causal at all (see e.g.
Collins 1987 ), then nothing in the following discussion will be of much use
to you, and I fear we ve reached a parting of the ways. At least one of us
is wasting his time; I do hope it s you.
2. Concepts are categories and are routinely employed as such.
To say that concepts are categories is to say that they apply to things in the
world; things in the world fall under them . So, for example, Greycat the
cat, but not Dumbo the elephant, falls under the concept CAT. Which,
for present purposes, is equivalent to saying that Greycat is in the extension
of CAT, that Greycat is a cat is true, and that is a cat is true of Greycat.
I shall sometimes refer to this galaxy of considerations by saying that
applications of concepts are susceptible of semantic evaluation : claims, or
thoughts, that a certain concept applies to a certain thing are always
susceptible of evaluation in such semantical terms as satisfied/unsatisfied,
true/false, correct/incorrect, and the like. There are, to be sure, issues about
these various aspects of semantic evaluability, and about the relations
among them, that a scrupulous philosopher might well wish to attend to.
But in this chapter, I propose to keep the philosophy to a bare minimum.1
Much of the life of the mind consists in applying concepts to things. If
I think Greycat is a cat (de dicto, as it were), I thereby apply the concept
CAT to Greycat (correctly, as it happens). If, looking at Greycat, I take
him to be a cat, then too I apply the concept CAT to Greycat. (If looking
at Greycat I take him to be a meatloaf, I thereby apply the concept
MEATLOAF to Greycat; incorrectly, as it happens.) Or if, in reasoning
about Greycat, I infer that since he s a cat he must be an animal, I thereby
proceed from applying one concept to Greycat to the licensed application
of another concept; the license consisting, I suppose, in things I know
about how the extensions of the concepts CAT and ANIMAL are related.
In fact, RTM being once assumed, most of cognitive psychology,
including the psychology of memory, perception, and reasoning, is about
how we apply concepts. And most of the rest is about how we acquire the
concepts that we thus apply. Correspondingly, the empirical data to which
cognitive psychologists are responsible consist largely of measures of
subject performance in concept application tasks. The long and short is:
whatever else a theory of concepts says about them, it had better exhibit
1
Or, at least, to confine it to footnotes.
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What Concepts Have To Be 25
concepts as the sorts of things that get applied in the course of mental
processes. I take it that consensus about this is pretty general in the
cognitive sciences, so I won t labour it further here.
Caveat: it s simply untendentious that concepts have their satisfaction
conditions essentially. Nothing in any mental life could be the concept
CAT unless it is satisfied by cats. It couldn t be that there are some mental
lives in which the concept CAT applies to CATS and others in which it
doesn t. If you haven t got a concept that applies to cats, that entails that
you haven t got the CAT concept. But though the satisfaction conditions
of a concept are patently among its essential properties, it does not follow
that the confirmation conditions of a concept are among its essential
properties. Confirmation is an epistemic relation, not a semantic relation,
and it is generally theory mediated, hence holistic. On the one hand, given
the right background theory, the merest ripple in cat infested waters might
serve to confirm an ascription of cathood; and, on the other hand, no cat-
containing layout is so well lit, or so utterly uncluttered, or so self-
certifying that your failure to ascribe cathood therein would entail that
you lack the concept. In short, it is OK to be an atomist about the
metaphysical conditions for a concept s having satisfaction conditions
(which I am and will try to convince you to be too), and yet be a holist
about the confirmation of claims that a certain concept is satisfied in a
certain situation. Shorter still: just as Quine and Duhem and those guys [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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