Onofri, A.: Concepts in context (2013)
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- Abstract
- My thesis discusses two related problems that have taken center stage in the recent literature on concepts: 1) What are the individuation conditions of concepts? Under what conditions is a concept Cv(1) the same concept as a concept Cv(2)? 2) What are the possession conditions of concepts? What conditions must be satisfied for a thinker to have a concept C? The thesis defends a novel account of concepts, which I call "pluralist-contextualist": 1) Pluralism: Different concepts have different kinds of individuation and possession conditions: some concepts are individuated more "coarsely", have less demanding possession conditions and are widely shared, while other concepts are individuated more "finely" and not shared. 2) Contextualism: When a speaker ascribes a propositional attitude to a subject S, or uses his ascription to explain/predict S's behavior, the speaker's intentions in the relevant context determine the correct individuation conditions for the concepts involved in his report. In chapters 1-3 I defend a contextualist, non-Millian theory of propositional attitude ascriptions. Then, I show how contextualism can be used to offer a novel perspective on the problem of concept individuation/possession. More specifically, I employ contextualism to provide a new, more effective argument for Fodor's "publicity principle": if contextualism is true, then certain specific concepts must be shared in order for interpersonally applicable psychological generalizations to be possible. In chapters 4-5 I raise a tension between publicity and another widely endorsed principle, the "Fregean constraint" (FC): subjects who are unaware of certain identity facts and find themselves in so-called "Frege cases" must have distinct concepts for the relevant object x. For instance: the ancient astronomers had distinct concepts (HESPERUS/PHOSPHORUS) for the same object (the planet Venus). First, I examine some leading theories of concepts and argue that they cannot meet both of our constraints at the same time. Then, I offer principled reasons to think that no theory can satisfy (FC) while also respecting publicity. (FC) appears to require a form of holism, on which a concept is individuated by its global inferential role in a subject S and can thus only be shared by someone who has exactly the same inferential dispositions as S. This explains the tension between publicity and (FC), since holism is clearly incompatible with concept shareability. To solve the tension, I suggest adopting my pluralist-contextualist proposal: concepts involved in Frege cases are holistically individuated and not public, while other concepts are more coarsely individuated and widely shared; given this "plurality" of concepts, we will then need contextual factors (speakers' intentions) to "select" the specific concepts to be employed in our intentional generalizations in the relevant contexts. In chapter 6 I develop the view further by contrasting it with some rival accounts. First, I examine a very different kind of pluralism about concepts, which has been recently defended by Daniel Weiskopf, and argue that it is insufficiently radical. Then, I consider the inferentialist accounts defended by authors like Peacocke, Rey and Jackson. Such views, I argue, are committed to an implausible picture of reference determination, on which our inferential dispositions fix the reference of our concepts: this leads to wrong predictions in all those cases of scientific disagreement where two parties have very different inferential dispositions and yet seem to refer to the same natural kind.
