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Thought Structure, Belief Content, and Possession Conditions

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Abstract

According to Peacocke, concepts are individuated by their possession conditions, which are specified in terms of conditions in which certain propositions containing those concepts are believed. In support, Peacocke tries to explain what it is for a thought to have a structure and what it is for a belief to have a propositional content. I show that the possession condition theory cannot answer such fundamental questions. Peacocke’s theory founders because concepts are metaphysically fundamental. They individuate the propositions and thoughts containing them, which in turn individuate the propositional attitudes that are relations to those propositions or thoughts.

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Notes

  1. See the publications by Peacocke cited in the references. For reviews, see Millar 1994; Philipse 1994; Bermúdez 1999; Fodor 2004.

  2. Davis 2005a, b. These, along with the present essay, grew out of my contribution to a workshop on Being Known held at New York University on May 31 and June 1, 2001. The other participants were Christoph Jäger (the organizer), Mitchell Green, Jonathan Weinberg, and Christopher Peacocke (the gracious host). I have profited from the workshop discussion, from written comments by Jäger, Mark Siebel, Steven Kuhn, Linda Wetzel, members of the University of Virginia Philosophy Department, Nenad Miščević, and a number of reviewers, as well as from Peacocke’s (2005) replies to Davis 2005a in the Noûs symposium.

  3. See Peacocke 1992a: 6; 1999: 14, 18, 32–33; 2000: 327.

  4. Using this formulation, I count whole thoughts as concepts too, both because they are improper parts of themselves, and because they are parts of more complex thoughts such as conjunctions. In English, I believe it is perfectly proper to say that the idea that man evolved from earlier hominids was one of the most important concepts of the nineteenth century. But in this paper, we will be concerned almost exclusively with concepts that are proper thought parts. For my full theory of concepts, see Meaning, Expression, and Thought (2003: part III), and Nondescriptive Meaning and Reference (2005c).

  5. See also Peacocke 1989b: 53–4; 1992a: 7–8. I discuss Peacocke’s theory of observational concepts in greater depth in Davis 2005b.

  6. In the intended sense, looking red does not entail taking the object to be red or having the concept of red. In another sense, looking red does mean taking the object to be red on the basis of the way it looks in the first sense. In the former sense, “The penny looks elliptical” is true when the penny is viewed from an angle; in the latter sense it is false. In the intended sense, looking a certain way is a purely sensory phenomena.

  7. “Taking experience at face value” in the possession condition cannot include taking that experience (the object’s appearing F) at face value. Otherwise the condition will be vacuous, holding whether or not the concept is possessed. See Davis 2005b: 301–2.

  8. Of course, it can appear in sentences like “All he said was ‘ugh.’” But non-words can be constituents of sentences in this way.

  9. Davis 2003: §15.1; 2005c: §3.1. I have not claimed, however, that the dependencies are logical.

  10. Fodor 2004: 46 jumped to a similar conclusion.

  11. See also Peacocke 1986: Chap. 8.

  12. Mates (1986: 62) similarly maintains that talk of containment among concepts was a mere “projection of the containment relations among the corresponding linguistic expressions.” See also Ryle 1949: 295; Pitcher 1964: 8; Alston 1964: 24–5; Schiffer 1994: 304–5.

  13. See also Fodor 1987: 147–53, 1998a: 97–100; Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988: §3.2; Sterelny 1990: 24–5; Davies 1991: 239–44; Lycan 1993; Rey 1995: 213; Davis 2003: esp. Chaps. 13, 14, and 22.

  14. See also Bealer 1993: 22, 30.

  15. I intend the term “figuralist” to cover the thesis that mereological terms apply to thoughts only in an extended sense. One might hold that when we say that friends have grown distant, this is not technically a figure of speech but an extension of the literal spatial senses of “grow” and “distant.” I agree that it is an extended sense, but would also count it as a dead metaphor, one that has become conventional. I intend “figure of speech” here to cover dead as well as live figures. I presume Frege and Dummett would agree that it is at least as conventional to say that thoughts contain concepts as it is to say that our friends can grow distant.

  16. Unless we are willing to count something like “x is a component of y iff y is the mereological sum of a number of objects including x.” But that just shifts the question to “What makes a thought the sum of a number of concepts?”

  17. Peacocke (2005: 177) conjectures that “conceptual composition cannot be elucidated using only the resources of Davis’s approach.” This is not completely true. I do take “x is part of y” along with “thought” as primitive. I then argue that thoughts have parts, and define “concepts” as thought parts. So I elucidate conceptual composition as the composition of concepts, just as a chemist would elucidate molecular composition as the composition of molecules.

  18. I argue this point at greater length in Meaning, Expression, and Thought, §10.6.

  19. See Davis 2003: §10.6. Peacocke believes that the question of empirical applicability is trivial for expression types, because expression types are concatenated only if their instances (tokens) are concatenated. Nothing analogous holds for concepts, he maintains. “In the sense in which concepts have instances, the way in which a predicational combination of two concepts is applied in classifying mental states is not given by some operation on the objects to which those objects apply” (1992a: 115). On my view, as on Peacocke’s, concepts have both psychological and referential aspects. In addition to having instances (referents) to which the concepts apply predicatively, concepts have tokens, which are instances in a different sense. When a thought occurs to us, tokens of all of its component concepts occur to us, and stand in relations similar to concatenation in some respects. A closer model, perhaps, is provided by the relationships among the tones of a musical chord. The synonym “idea” is generally more natural when we are discussing the occurrence and other psychological aspects of concepts, but there is an unfortunate history of assuming that “idea” must denote images rather than concepts.

  20. I agree with Wright’s general point, however, that “statements which have the same truth-conditions may express different thoughts” and that “if a statement involves reference to an object of a particular sort, we cannot lay it down as a necessary condition for another statement to have the same truth-conditions that it too involves reference to that object – the most we can say is that it must entail that the object exists” (1988: 459). I am only questioning whether there is such a difference in reference in the present cases.

  21. Peacocke (1992a: 120) himself underestimates the problems when he says “We know exactly what shape property a token has to have to instantiate an actually uninstantiated type.” Linda Wetzel (2002) shows on the contrary that its dependence on the context and the speaker’s intention makes any purely geometric criterion for an expression type utopian.

  22. When Peacocke gave possession conditions for perceptual concepts in earlier work and in Chap. 1 of A Study of Concepts, he talked about what the thinker is disposed to believe. Later, he switched to what the thinker is willing to believe, or prepared to believe. Peacocke gave no indication that the change was significant, and I cannot see that it makes a difference to the points made below.

  23. Peacocke specifies that Δ is to be the appearance presented by Lincoln Plaza in the perceptual encounter from which A’s possession of the concept “Lincoln Plaza” stems. Let this be understood in the discussion below.

  24. Cf. Fodor 2004: 30; Peacocke 2004: 90.

  25. The same goes for an additional condition in Peacocke’s possession conditions for “Lincoln Plaza” that the subject “is taking it for granted that the object is in the presupposed range” (1992a: 110).

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    Wayne A. Davis

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Davis, W.A. Thought Structure, Belief Content, and Possession Conditions. Acta Anal 23, 207–231 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-008-0030-4

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