Abstract
This paper concerns the dialectal role of Frege Cases in the debate between Concept Cartesians and Concept Pragmatists. I take as a starting point Christopher Peacocke’s argument that, unlike Cartesianism, his ‘Fregean’ Pragmatism can account for facts about the rationality and epistemic status of certain judgments. I argue that since this argument presupposes that the rationality of thoughts turn on their content, it is thus question-begging against Cartesians, who claim that issues about rationality turn on the form, not the content, of thoughts. I then consider Jerry Fodor’s argument that ‘modes of presentation’ are not identical with Fregean senses, and argue that explanatory considerations should leads us to reject his ‘syntactic’ treatment of Frege cases. Rejecting the Cartesian treatment of Frege cases, however, is not tantamount to accepting Peacocke’s claim that reasons and rationality are central to the individuation of concepts. For I argue that we can steer a middle course between Fodor’s Cartesianism and Peacocke’s Pragmatism, and adopt a form of Pragmatism that is constrained by Fregean considerations, but at the same time denies that concepts are constitutively tied to reasons and rationality.
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Notes
I follow the convention of using words written in small capitals to refer to concepts. When quoting, I change the author’s notation to fit mine.
This way of putting things assumes that there is a “narrow” construal of mental content, according to which narrow content supervenes on facts “inside the heads” of thinkers. Oscar and Twin Oscar’s WATER concepts have the same narrow content even though their water-thoughts have different truth conditions. This is the sense in which Twin Earth examples putatively show that identity of content does not imply identity of reference. Similarly, when I say that Frege cases putatively show that identity of reference does not imply identity of content, I am understanding content narrowly. The concepts the morning star and the evening star are referentially identical even though there’s a sense in which they differ in content. Positing narrow content in such cases allows us to account for the apparent fact that John can think that the morning star is beautiful without thinking that the evening star is beautiful. I argue below for a semantic construal of Fregean “modes of presentation,” and thus for a kind of narrow content, but nothing in what follows turns on (and I will not be arguing for) a particular ontology of narrow contents.
Indeed, Peacocke says: “My own view is that there is a large circle of interrelated notions, including entitlement, knowledge, and even intentional content itself, each of whose elucidations ultimately involves the others” (2004, p. 11).
Note that for Peacocke, the term ‘Fregean IRS’ is synonymous with my term ‘Knowledge Pragmatism’. Part of my aim in this paper is to show that Fregean IRS and Knowledge Pragmatism should be distinguished. For, as I suggest below, Judgment Pragmatism is a version of Fregean IRS that doesn’t take concepts to be constitutively tied to rationality and knowledge.
I argue below, in Sect. 6, that even if facts about rationality turn on facts about content, this need not be taken as support for Knowledge Pragmatism.
Prominent among them is Nathan Salmon (1986), who claims that “anyone who knows that Hesperus is Hesperus knows that Hesperus is Phosphorus, no matter how strongly he or she may deny the latter” (p. 83). See also Soames (2002). For discussion of the bullet-biting view, by both proponents and opponents of purely referential theories of meaning, see, e.g., Crimmins and Perry (1989), Braun (1998), Devitt (1996), Pietroski (2000), and Recanati (1993).
It is this fact that makes the computational-representational theory of mind both powerful and potentially limited in its scope. See Fodor (1983, 2000a) for arguments that the theory happily accounts for the modular components of the mind, and doubts that the theory can illuminate the nature of the “central systems” involved in higher cognitive functions, e.g., decision making, inference, and belief fixation. See Carruthers (2003) for an optimistic rejoinder.
In what follows I use ‘formal’ and ‘syntactic’ interchangeably. Strictly speaking, though, being formal and being syntactic are distinct properties. Rotating a mental image might be a computational process that is sensitive only to the formal properties of the representation, but images do not have a syntax. Being syntactic is thus one way of being formal, but representations need not be syntactic for computational processes to be defined over them (Fodor 1980, p. 64).
As Fodor puts it: “It’s really the basic idea of [the Representational Theory of Mind] that Turing’s story about the nature of mental processes provides the very candidates for MOP-hood that Frege’s story about the individuation of mental states independently requires. If that’s true, it is about the nicest thing that ever happened to cognitive science” (1998, p. 22).
I argue below that the same is true of Judgment Pragmatism.
For instance, Fodor might deny that one can adequately reply to him by offering a particular Fregean theory of the semantics of attitude ascriptions. For if, as Fodor claims, “English has no semantics” (1998, p. 9), then presumably it doesn’t have a semantics of attitude ascriptions, in which case providing such a semantics would not constitute an adequate reply to the Cartesian’s use of Mates cases. But, as Pietroski (2000) points out, to say that natural languages do not have a compositional semantics is to make a very strong claim, the truth of which would require not only that semanticists are wrong about what their theories are theories of, but also that there be an alternative explanation for the successes that semanticists have had in providing detailed semantic theories. And as Pietroski says: “[O]ne does not account for the successes of actual semantic theories simply by positing unspecified mechanisms that map (translate, or compile) the sentences we know about into allegedly distinct sentences [of Mentalese] whose structure and meaning remains unknown. One owes a case-by-case discussion of the facts apparently explained by our best theories of adverbs, tense, etc. In the absence of a semantics textbook for Mentalese, it is reasonable to assume that English has a semantics partly described by the (actual) semantics textbooks for English” (2000, p. 345, original emphasis). In the eyes of Fregeans, then, it might seem rash to insist that Mates cases support the claim MOPs are not senses, especially if one’s case for doing so requires that one deny that natural languages have a compositional semantics.
This reply was suggested to me by Murat Aydede.
This is not to say that such an Atomist ought to make this claim, as Putnam’s (1975) example of radio-controlled cows (or, in his case, cats) from outer space suggests. If cow → animal is analytic, then if it turned out that what we call ‘cows’ were radio-controlled robots, then it would follow that there were no cows. But such a situation would arguably be one in which it turned out that cows are not animals.
An anonymous referee has pointed out that although Fodor will not appeal to meaning postulates to account for differences in the inferential roles of primitive coreferential concepts, he might claim that such differences are brute and not meaning-constituting. On such a view, there would be inferential connections that primitive concepts bear to other concepts that hold as matter of empirical fact, but which are not individuative of the concepts or their content. The trouble with this response is that the Cartesian’s claim is that syntactically-individuated MOPs can play the role of Fregean senses. One of the primary reasons for positing Fregean senses is that they explain why coreferential concepts can differ in their role in cognition. If one claims that primitive, coreferential MOPs are inferentially linked to different concepts as a matter of brute, empirical fact, I take it one is thereby giving up on one of the crucial explanatory reasons for positing MOPs in the first place.
In fact, one might claim that this is true of the case we have been considering. After all, the property of being a diamond is not identical with being a square, since some diamonds are not regular-diamonds. The relevant concepts in this case would thus be square and regular-diamond, and the structure of the latter could serve to distinguish it from the former. But this is surely a happy accident! In any event, I take it the case could be made with any number of other examples, e.g. coriander and cilantro.
For instance, some theorists (e.g., Tooley 1977) argue that uninstantiated properties are needed in an account of the metaphysics of laws.
It is true that Fodor often hedges when it comes to characterizing Atomism. In fact, to the best of my knowledge he nowhere claims that all lexical concepts are internally unstructured. Rather, he usually says that most lexical concepts lack structure, or that it is approximately true that all lexical concepts are atoms. Presumably, the reason he hedges is that the issue of whether a certain mental representation has internal structure is an empirical one. (Who knows, perhaps it will turn out that there is a small handful of definitions!) Again, the point is that the distinction between structured and unstructured lexical concepts must be principled, and facts about which concepts happen to corefer surely do not provide the basis for a principled distinction.
Indeed, Fodor moves freely between talk of MOPs, concepts, and mental representations (1998, pp. 15–22).
Note that although Fodor puts the point in terms of logical form, that is because he is concerned here with the propositional attitudes, whose relevant formal properties are their logical-form properties. The claim is that what matters for the type-individuation of mental representations are their formal properties.
The third is the following: “(iii) Mental processes (including, paradigmatically, thinking) are computations, that is, they are operations defined on the syntax of mental representations, and they are reliably truth preserving in indefinitely many cases” (Fodor 2000a, pp. 18–19).
Consider, in this regard, Fodor’s distinction between ‘conservative’ and ‘diehard’ intentional realists: “A conservative intentional realist who is not a diehard can contemplate with equanimity the abandonment of belief/desire psychology strictly socalled, so long as the apparatus of intentional explanation is itself left intact” (1990, pp. 174–175).
One way to draw such a distinction would be to somehow ground it in an a priori/a posteriori distinction. But it is not clear that, qua good Quinean, Fodor would want to draw the distinction in this way.
Oddly enough, Fodor himself seems to recognize this point elsewhere (1998, p. 15n9).
I’m grateful to Murat Aydede, Peter Carruthers, Sandy Goldberg, Paul Pietroski, Georges Rey, Eric Rubenstein, and an anonymous referee for very helpful comments and discussion.
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Rives, B. Concept Cartesianism, Concept Pragmatism, and Frege Cases. Philos Stud 144, 211–238 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9207-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9207-3