In Epistemic injustice, Miranda Fricker employs the critical concept of hermeneutical injustice. Such injustice entails unequal participation in the epistemic practices of a community that often results in an inability of dominated subjects to understand their own experiences and have them understood by their community. I argue that hermeneutical injustice can be an aspect of institutions as well communites?to the extent that they too engage in epistemic practices that seek to understand the problems and experiences of their constituents. My primary (...) example is the case of development theory and international development agencies where human beings were objectified in undesirable ways by the prevailing neoliberal economic theories that guided development practice. Here economic theory and the power to achieve its vision of unconstrained economic growth were combined in various organizations. Consequently such organizations systematically misunderstood the problems of the very people they were supposed to help. I argue that if hermeneutical injustice can be the result of the intersection of science and organizations, we need to create more participatory ways of gleaning information about social ills to alleviate institutionally mediated hermeneutical injustice. (shrink)

Conscientious objection in healthcare is often granted by many legislations regulating morally controversial medical procedures, such as abortion or medical assistance in dying. However, there is virtually no protection of positive claims of conscience, that is, of requests by healthcare professionals to provide certain services that they conscientiously believe ought to be provided, but that are ruled out by institutional policies. Positive claims of conscience have received comparatively little attention in academic debates. Some think that negative and positive claims of (...) conscience deserve equal protection in terms of measures that institutions ought to take to accommodate them. However, in this issue of The Journal of Clinical Ethics (JCE), Abram Brummett argues against this symmetry thesis. He suggests that the relevant distinction is not between negative and positive claims of conscience, but between negative and positive rights of conscience. He argues that conscientious refusals and positive claims of conscience are both already protected as negative rights of conscience, but that this does not require institutions to accommodate positive claims of conscience. In this article I will argue that both Brummett and the authors he criticizes share a wrong view about the existence of conscience rights in healthcare. I will argue that there is no right to conscientious objection in healthcare, whether positive or negative. Thus, contra Brummett, I argue that the question whether such rights are positive or negative is as irrelevant as the question whether the claims of conscience are positive or negative. (shrink)

It is usual to regard mathematical objects as entities that can be identified, characterized, and known in isolation. In this chapter, I propose a contrasting view according to which mathematical entities are structureless points or positions in structures that are not distinguishable or identifiable outside the structure. By analysing the various relations that can hold between patterns, like congruence, equivalence, mutual occurrence, I also account for the incompleteness of mathematical objects, for mathematics turns out to be a conglomeration of theories, (...) each dealing with its own structure and each forgoing identities leading outside its structure. My suggestion that mathematical objects are positions in structures or patterns is not intended as an ontological reduction, but rather as a way of viewing mathematical objects and theories that put the phenomena of multiple reductions and ontological and referential relativity in a clearer light. (shrink)

If, as I grant, mathematical objects are abstract entities existing outside of space and time, and if the idea of supernaturally grasping abstract entities is scientifically unacceptable, then we need to explain how we can attain mathematical knowledge using our ordinary faculties. I try to meet this challenge through a postulational account of the genesis of our mathematical knowledge, according to which our ancestors introduced mathematical objects by first positing geometric ideals and then postulating abstract mathematical entities. Since positing involves (...) simply introducing a discourse about objects and affirming their existence, positing mathematical objects involves nothing more serious than writing fiction. For this reason, postulational approaches seem better suited for conventionalists; so in the second part of this chapter, I explain how positing in mathematics is different from positing in fiction, and how we can gain knowledge from the former. Finally, I try to make sense of the idea that mathematical postulates are about an independent mathematical reality and that we can refer to that reality through them, by giving an immanent and disquotational account of reference and contrasting it with a transcendent/causal account. (shrink)

This book presents a comprehensive defence of legal positivism on the basis of a novel account of social conventions. Marmor argues that the law is founded on constitutive conventions, and that consequently moral values cannot determine what the law is.

Book Review: P.P. Tolochko. Ukraine between Russia and the West: Historical and Nonfiction Essays. Saint Petersburg: Saint Petersburg University of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2018. - 592 pp. ISBN 978-5-7621-0973-4This author discusses the problem of scientific objectivity and reviews a book written by the medievalist-historian P.P. Tolochko, full member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, honorable director of the NASU Institute of Archaeology. The book was published by the Saint Petersburg University of Humanities and Social Sciences in (...) the autumn of 2018. The book presents a collection of articles and reports devoted to processes in Ukraine and, first of all, in Ukrainian historical science, which, at the moment, is experiencing an era of serious reformation of its interpretative models. The author of the book shows that these models are being reformed to suit the requirements of the new ideology, with an obvious disregard for the conduct of objective scientific research. In this regard, the problem of objectivity of scientific research becomes the subject of this review because the requirement of objectivity can be viewed not only as a methodological requirement but also as a moral and political position, opposing the rigor of scientific research to the impact of ideological, political and moral systems and judgments. It is concluded that in this sense the position of P.P. Tolochko can be considered as the act of profound ethical choice. (shrink)

Social positioning theory, in defending a general social ontology, is a particular extension of critical realism. It is a theory of social constitution that clarifies how items including human bein...

In this article I defend the capability approach by focusing on its built-in gender-sensitivity and on its concern with comprehensive outcomes and informationally-rich evaluation of well-being, two elements of Sen's work that are too rarely put together. I then try to show what the capability approach would have to gain by focusing on trans-positional objectivity (as Elizabeth Anderson does) and by leaving behind the narrow confines of states in favor of a more cosmopolitan stance. These preliminary discussions are (...) followed by two more precise applications. At first, I show how a gender-sensitive capability approach that respects the criteria of trans-positional objectivity and cosmopolitanism can enhance the agency of women inhabiting third-world societies. I turn next to show how mainstream feminism can insulate itself against criticisms such as bell hooks' by switching to trans-positional objectivity in public reasoning. (shrink)

One objection that has been consistently raised for theorists who are committed to the idea that we have a positive duty to aid the global poor is the overdemandingness objection. This article is a critical discussion of this objection. First, the objection is laid out in some detail. A number of influential attempts to meet the overdemandingness objection are then discussed, and it is argued that they all fail in their intended purpose. The conclusion of the article is not that (...) the overdemandingness objection cannot be met. Rather, the conclusion is that the overdemandingness objection constitutes a serious challenge to anyone who accepts the objection and goes beyond the standard libertarian doctrine and commits herself to the existence of positive duties to aid the global poor. (shrink)

Do individuals in John Rawls’s original position take into account the fallibility of human nature? Some notable commentators on Rawls say that they do or that they should. But this enables us to say that individuals in the original position would not come to an agreement at all.

Visual percepts are called veridical when a “real” object can be identified as their cause, and illusions otherwise. The perceived position and color of a flashed object may be called veridical or illusory depending on which viewpoint one adopts. Since “reality” is assumed to be fixed (independent of viewpoint) in the definition of veridicality (or illusion), this suggests that “perceived” position and color are not properties of “real” objects.

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1992, given by Amartya Sen, an Indian philosopher.

This paper focuses on an argument against the existence of mathematical objects called the “Makes No Difference Argument” (MND). Roughly, MND claims that whether or not mathematical objects exist makes no difference, and that therefore, we have no reason to believe in them. The paper analyzes four different versions of MND for their merits. It concludes that the defender of the existence of mathematical objects (the mathematical Platonist) does have some retorts to the first three versions of MND, but that (...) no adequate reply is possible to the fourth, and most crucial, version of MND. That version argues that mathematical objects make no difference to our epistemic processes: they play no role in the process of obtaining mathematical knowledge. (shrink)

The realist versions of mathematical structuralism are often characterized by what I call ‘the insubstantiality thesis’, according to which mathematical objects, being positions in structures, have no non-structural properties: they are purely structural objects. The thesis has been criticized for being inconsistent or descriptively inadequate. In this paper, by implementing the resources of a real-definitional account of essence in the context of Fregean abstraction principles, I offer a version of structuralism – essentialist structuralism – which validates a weaker version of (...) the insubstantiality thesis: mathematical objects have no non-structural essential properties. Next, I show how this rendition of structuralism alleviates a Fregean worry against insubstantiality, which is directed at the explanation of the applicability of mathematics from the structuralist perspective. (shrink)

We analyze some normative relations as instances of a general schema of relations among a finite number of parties; in this schema parties can play various roles grouped into two main conceptual layers, called 'subject position' and 'object position'. Relying on the theoretical apparatus introduced, we develop a new symbolic representation for normative reasoning which constitutes an alternative to approaches available in the literature. Our contribution includes a semantic characterization for a series of logical systems built over the proposed framework.

Worries about scientific objectivity seem never-ending. Social critics and philosophers of science have argued that invocations of objectivity are often little more than attempts to boost the status of a claim, while calls for value neutrality may be used to suppress otherwise valid dissenting positions. Objectivity is used sometimes to advance democratic agendas, at other times to block them; sometimes for increasing the growth of knowledge, at others to resist it. Sandra Harding is not ready to throw (...) out objectivity quite yet. For all of its problems, she contends that objectivity is too powerful a concept simply to abandon. In Objectivity and Diversity, Harding calls for a science that is both more epistemically adequate and socially just, a science that would ask: How are the lives of the most economically and politically vulnerable groups affected by a particular piece of research? Do they have a say in whether and how the research is done? Should empirically reliable systems of indigenous knowledge count as "real science"? Ultimately, Harding argues for a shift from the ideal of a neutral, disinterested science to one that prizes fairness and responsibility. (shrink)

This article shows that in 1.4.2.15-24 of the Treatise of Human Nature, Hume presents his own position on objects, which is to be distinguished from both the vulgar and philosophical conception of objects. Here, Hume argues that objects that are effectively imagined to have a “perfect identity” are imagined due to the constancy and coherence of our perceptions (what we may call ‘level 1 constancy and coherence’). In particular, we imagine that objects cause such perceptions, via what I call ‘indirect (...) causation.’ In virtue of imagining ideas of objects that have a perfect identity, our perceptions seem to be even more constant and coherent (what we may call ‘level 2 constancy and coherence’). Thus, in addition to seeing that Hume is presenting his own position on objects in this section of the Treatise, we see that he is working with a previously unrecognized kind of causation, i.e., indirect causation, and that he has two kinds of constancy and coherence in mind: level 1 and level 2. (shrink)

According to the objection from positive duties, Kant's Formula of Universal Law is flawed because it cannot be used to derive any affirmative moral requirements. This paper offers a response to that objection and proposes a novel way to derive positive duties from Kant's formula. The Formula of Universal Law yields positive duties to adopt our own perfection and others’ happiness as ends because we could not rationally fail to will those ends as universal ends.

I examine whether Wilson et al.'s argument for a science of positive intentional change constitutes an argument for a science of objective moral values. Drawing from their discussion, I present four reasons for thinking that it may be and some considerations on why it may not be. Concluding, I seek help from the authors. [Open Peer Commentary on a BBS article.].

This edited volume explores the intersections of the human, nonhuman, transhuman, and posthuman from a phenomenological perspective. Representing perspectives from several disciplines, these investigations take a closer look at the relationship between the phenomenology of life, creative ontopoiesis, and otherness; technology and the human; art and the question of humanity; nonhumans, animals, and intentionality; and transhumanism. Ontological positioning of the human is reconsidered with regard to the nonhuman, transhuman, and posthuman within the cosmos. Further examination of the artificial and object (...) in the lifeworld is also explored. This volume also pays tribute to Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka and her methodical contributions to phenomenology. This text appeals to students and researchers of phenomenology worldwide. (shrink)

Evaluative claims and assumptions are ubiquitous in positive psychology. Some will deny this. But such disavowals are belied by the literature. Some will consider the presence of evaluative claims a problem and hope to root them out. But this is a mistake. If positive psychology is to live up to its raison d’être – to be the scientific study of the psychological components of human flourishing or well-being – it must make evaluative claims. Well-being consists in those things that are (...) good for us, that make life go well. Thus, one cannot investigate this topic without making claims about what is good for people and what they have reason to do. It’s time, therefore, to embrace the fact that positive psychology is value-laden. Doing so would benefit the field by allowing for more rigorous theorizing, and – perhaps counterintuitively – increasing the field’s objectivity. (shrink)

This article discusses the chapter “Objection to Positional Power” (Nan shi 難勢) of Han Feizi 韓非子. It provides a full translation cum analysis of the text and explores systematically the chapter’s structure, rhetoric, and its political message. The discussion, which contextualizes the chapter’s message within broader trends of the Warring States-period political debates, demonstrates that beneath the surface of debates about “positional power” (shi 勢) versus “worth” (xian 賢), the chapter addresses one of the touchiest issues in Chinese (...) political thought: that of the intrinsic weakness of hereditary monarchy. Furthermore, “Objection to Positional Power” also addresses problems of the meritocratic system of rule and elucidates some of the reasons for Han Fei’s dislike of meritocratic discourse. By highlighting some of the chapter’s intellectual gems I hope to attract further attention to the immense richness of Han Feizi as one of the most sophisticated products of China’s political thought. (shrink)

We perceive a world of mind-independent macroscopic material objects such as stones, tables, trees, and animals. Our experience is the joint upshot of the way these things are and our route through them, along with the various relevant circumstances of perception; and it depends on the normal operation of our perceptual systems. How should we characterise our perceptual experience so as to respect its basis and explain its role in grounding empirical thought and knowledge? I offered an answer to this (...) question in Perception and its objects. Here I aim to clarify some of my central arguments and to develop and defend the position further in the light of subsequent critical discussion. (shrink)

Professor Arda Denkel argues here that objects are nothing more than bundles of properties. From this point of view he tackles some central questions of ontology: how is an object distinct from others; how does it remain the same while it changes through time? A second contention is that properties are particular entities restricted to the objects they inhabit. The appearance that they exist generally, in a multitude of things, is due to the way we conceptualize them. Other problems dealt (...) with include how objects bear similarities by belonging to the same kinds, and how change in them is caused. Denkel defends a thoroughgoing particularism and offers purely qualitative accounts of individuation, identity, essences and matter. Throughout, the main alternative positions are surveyed, and the relevant historical background is traced. (shrink)

This chapter accepts for the sake of argument Ronald Dworkin’s point that the only viable form of normative skepticism is internal, and develops an internal skeptical argument directed specifically at normative realism. There is a striking and puzzling coincidence between normative judgments that are true, and normative judgments that causal forces led us to believe—a practical/theoretical puzzle to which the constructivist view has a solution. Normative realists have no solution, but are driven to conclude that we are probably hopeless at (...) recognizing the independent normative truths they posit. Since this is an unacceptable conclusion, we must conclude that normative realism is false. Drawing on evolutionary considerations, it is explained why this internal skeptical argument does not carry over to our knowledge of objects in our manifest surroundings, and why the challenge does not depend on any assumption that the epistemology of the normative domain must be a causal one. (shrink)

Objects generate time; time does not generate or change objects. That is the central thesis of this book by the philosopher Graham Harman and the archaeologist Christopher Witmore, who defend radical positions in their respective fields. Against a current and pervasive conviction that reality consists of an unceasing flux-a view associated in philosophy with New Materialism-object-oriented ontology asserts that objects of all varieties are the bedrock of reality from which time emerges. And against the narrative convictions of time as the (...) course of historical events, the objects and encounters associated with archaeology push back against the very temporal delimitations which defined the field and its objects ever since its professionalization in the nineteenth century. In a study ranging from the ruins of ancient Corinth, Mycenae, and Troy to debates over time from Aristotle and al-Ash'ari through Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, the authors draw on alternative conceptions of time as retroactive, percolating, topological, cyclical, and generational, as consisting of countercurrents or of a surface tension between objects and their own qualities. Objects Untimely invites us to reconsider the modern notion of objects as inert matter serving as a receptacle for human categories"-. (shrink)

Historically associated with military service, conscientious objection has become a significant phenomenon in health care. Mark Wicclair offers a comprehensive ethical analysis of conscientious objection in three representative health care professions: medicine, nursing and pharmacy. He critically examines two extreme positions: the 'incompatibility thesis', that it is contrary to the professional obligations of practitioners to refuse provision of any service within the scope of their professional competence; and 'conscience absolutism', that they should be exempted from performing any action contrary to (...) their conscience. He argues for a compromise approach that accommodates conscience-based refusals within the limits of specified ethical constraints. He also explores conscientious objection by students in each of the three professions, discusses conscience protection legislation and conscience-based refusals by pharmacies and hospitals, and analyzes several cases. His book is a valuable resource for scholars, professionals, trainees, students, and anyone interested in this increasingly important aspect of health care. (shrink)

Bimanual robots have been studied for decades and regulation on internal force of the being held object by two manipulators becomes a research interest in recent years. In this paper, based on impedance model, a method to obtain the optimal target position for bimanual robots to hold an object is proposed. We introduce a cost function combining the errors of the force and the position and manage to minimize its value to gain the optimal coordinates for the robot end effectors. (...) To implement this method, two necessary algorithms are presented, which are the closed-loop inverse kinematics method to work out joint positions from desired EE pose and the generalized-momentum-based external force observer to measure the subjected force acting on the EE so as to properly compensate for the joint torques. To verify the effectiveness, practicality, and adaptivity of the proposed scheme, in the simulation, a bimanual robot system with three degrees of freedom in every manipulator was constructed and employed to hold an object, where the results are satisfactory. (shrink)

The controversy around the accommodation of conscientious objections in medicine persists, especially for such contentious services as abortions. COs are typically considered in their negativ...

Ascriptions of objectivity carry significant weight. But they can also cause confusion because wildly different ideas of what it means to be objective are common. Faced with this, some philosophers have argued that objectivity should be eliminated. I will argue, against one such position, that objectivity can be useful even though it is plural. I will then propose a contextualist approach for dealing with objectivity as a way of rescuing what is useful about objectivity while (...) acknowledging its plurality. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to show clearly what the terms “object” and “objectivity” as used over the centuries of modern philosophy — from the time of Descartes down to the time of Wittgenstein and Husserl, i.e., from early modern Rationalism and Empiricism to late modern Phenomenology and Analytic philosophy — have obscured. Objectivity, far from being “the ability to consider or represent facts, information, etc., without being influenced by personal feelings or opinions; impartiality; detachment,” as the (...) OED would have it, is fundamentally the condition of occupying the position of the significate in a triadic relation the foreground element of which is a sign vehicle conveying that significate to or for some third. Simply put, an “object” is a significate, a fact that common usage has come to obscure by sedimenting the influence of modern philosophy's reversal of the meaning of the terms “subjective” and “objective,” where the former has come to signify “private opinion” in contrast to “the way things are.” But this sedimentation to the level of common usage of modern solipsistic epistemology is precisely a usage that semiotic analysis of the linguistic sign overcomes, showing that in the expression “object signified” the qualification “signified” is redundant, for an object is nothing other than something signified! Thus “significate,” a term that modern dictionary makers resist, says clearly what the term “object” says obscurely; and a great deal of mischief in philosophy over the centuries after Descartes has been the result of this distinctively modern obscurantism in philosophy. (shrink)

In the last decade, many problematic cases of scientific conduct have been diagnosed; some of which involve outright fraud others are more subtle. These and similar problems can be interpreted as caused by lack of scientific objectivity. The current philosophical theories of objectivity do not provide scientists with conceptualizations that can be effectively put into practice in remedying these issues. We propose a novel way of thinking about objectivity for individual scientists; a negative and dynamic approach.We provide (...) a philosophical conceptualization of objectivity that is informed by empirical research. In particular, it is our intention to take the first steps in providing an empirically and methodologically informed inventory of factors that impair the scientific practice. The inventory will be compiled into a negative conceptualization, which could in principle be used by individual scientists to assess objectivity of scientific practice. We propose a preliminary outline of a usable and testable instrument for indicating the objectivity of scientific practice. (shrink)

The essays in Object-Oriented Feminism explore OOF: a feminist intervention into recent philosophical discourses--like speculative realism, object-oriented ontology (OOO), and new materialism--that take objects, things, stuff, and matter as primary. Object-oriented feminism approaches all objects from the inside-out position of being an object too, with all of its accompanying political and ethical potentials. This volume places OOF thought in a long history of ongoing feminist work in multiple disciplines. In particular, object-oriented feminism foregrounds three significant aspects of feminist thinking in (...) the philosophy of things: politics, engaging with histories of treating certain humans (women, people of color, and the poor) as objects; erotics, employing humor to foment unseemly entanglements between things; and ethics, refusing to make grand philosophical truth claims, instead staking a modest ethical position that arrives at being "in the right" by being "wrong." Seeking not to define object-oriented feminism but rather to enact it, the volume is interdisciplinary in approach, with contributors from a variety of fields, including sociology, anthropology, English, art, and philosophy. Topics are frequently provocative, engaging a wide range of theorists from Heidegger and Levinas to Irigaray and Haraway, and an intriguing diverse array of objects, including the female body as fetish object in Lolita subculture; birds made queer by endocrine disruptors; and truth claims arising in material relations in indigenous fiction and film. Intentionally, each essay can be seen as an "object" in relation to others in this collection. Contributors: Irina Aristarkhova, University of Michigan; Karen Gregory, University of Edinburgh; Marina Gržinic, Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts; Frenchy Lunning, Minneapolis College of Art and Design; Timothy Morton, Rice University; Anne Pollock, Georgia Tech; Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Columbia University; R. Joshua Scannell, CUNY Graduate Center; Adam Zaretsky, VASTAL. (shrink)

I consider some of the objections that have been raised against a conceptualist solution to the “grounding problem”, I address in particular two objections that I call Conceptual Validity and Instantiation, and I attempt to answer them on behalf of the conceptualist. My response, in a nutshell, is that the first of these objections fails because it ascribes to the conceptualist some commitments that do not really follow from the view’s basic insight, while the second objection also fails because it (...) denies the conceptualist resources that the alternative positions are allowed to use. (shrink)

Conscious recollection, of the kind characterised by sensory mental imagery, is often thought to involve ‘episodically’ recalling experienced events in one’s personal past. One might wonder whether this overlooks distinctive ways in which we sometimes recall ordinary, persisting objects. Of course, one can recall an object by remembering an event in which one encountered it. But are there acts of recall which are distinctively objectual in that they are not about objects in this mediated way (i.e., by way of being (...) about events in which they featured)? This question has broad implications, not least for understanding the nature and role of imagery in remembering, the requirements of memory-based singular thought about objects, and the sense in which remembering involves ‘mental time travel’ through which one ‘relives’ past events. In this paper, I argue that we sometimes do recall objects from our past without remembering events in which they featured. The positive view of such cases I go on to propose draws on a wide body of empirical work in its support and accommodates a more nuanced picture of the role of imagery in remembering. Succinctly, remembering might essentially involve a kind of ‘re-experiencing’, but it need not involve ‘reliving’. (shrink)

A ubiquitous assumption about composite material objects is that—if they exist at all—they are single things. This chapter articulates and defends manyism, which rejects that assumption. According to manyism, each composite object is simply its many parts. Since manyism accepts the existence of composite objects, it is distinct from nihilism; since manyism denies that composite objects are each one in number in addition to being many in number, it is distinct from the view known as composition as identity (CAI). What’s (...) more, manyism is both coherent and attractive. Manyism is coherent because it can be underwritten by a defensible quasi-Quinean metaontology, and because it’s not analytic that objects are each one in number. Manyism is attractive because it shares all of the benefits of CAI without having to join CAI in objectionably positing many–one identities, and without incurring other serious costs. (shrink)

Two main claims are defended in this paper: first, that typical disputes in the literature about the ontology of physical objects are merely verbal; second, that the proper way to resolve these disputes is by appealing to common sense or ordinary language. A verbal dispute is characterized not in terms of private idiolects, but in terms of different linguistic communities representing different positions. If we imagine a community that makes Chisholm's mereological essentialist assertions, and another community that makes Lewis's four‐dimensionalist (...) assertions, the members of each community speak the truth in their respective languages. This follows from an application of the principle of interpretive charity to the two communities. (shrink)

In recent times the question of whether or not there is such a thing as nonconceptual content has been the object of much serious attention. For analytical philosophers, the locus classicus of the view that there is such a phenomena is to be found in Evans remarks about perceptual experience in Varieties of Reference. John McDowell has taken issue with Evans over his claim that "conceptual capacities are first brought into operation only when one makes a judgement of experience, and (...) at that point a different species of content comes into play" (McDowell 1994: 48). In contrast, he proposes that "A judgement of experience does not introduce a new kind of content, but simply endorses the conceptual content, or some of it, that is already possessed by the experience on which it is grounded" (McDowell 1994: 48-49). Ironically, in light of the ambitions of Mind and World, this sits very happily with the firmly embedded views of many traditional classical cognitivists. It has been a long-standing article of faith that, even in its most basic forms, perceptual content must be conceptual. But those who adopt this position have a heavy burden when it comes to explaining the origin and development of concepts (cf. Peacocke 1992a: 9). In line with the proposal that at least some primitive concepts must be innate, theorists like Fodor make appeal to the intrinsic character of such concepts to explain more complex conceptual contents and their essential characteristics (Fodor 1998: 130). Primitive concepts and their properties as simply assumed because of an explanatory need despite that fact that making this assumption has a paradoxical consequence --which, in this case, is revealed by Fodor's claim that all concepts must be acquired inductively (cf. Fodor 1998: 130-132). The good news is that if we opt for a nonconceptualist approach then we need not assume that any concepts are innate. There is a plausible programme afoot, initiated by Cussins, which hopes explain "the construction of cognitive properties out of non-cognitive properties" (Cussins 1990: 374). He encourages us to suppose "that the mind/world distinction is a phylogenetic or ontogenetic achievement" (Cussins 1990: 409). However, some advocates of nonconceptual content believe that providing this explanation will be a relatively straightforward, although clearly difficult, task given that a contentful base of nonconceptual informational states, of the kind Evans envisioned, is presupposed. My aim is to defend Evans but if if nonconceptual content is to play the important role assigned to it of helping to explain the development of concepts then we must explicate the nature of such content in such a way that does not presuppose that it is truth-conditional. We must also be able to say exactly what part nonconceptual responses play in judgement making and conceptual development. It is the burden of this paper to provide a sketch of how both these ends might be achieved and to offer some reasons for thinking the project is a viable one. I do this in two stages. The first is to advocate a modest biosemantic theory of nonconceptual content and the second is to show how this can shore up a Davidsonian understanding of the possession conditions for concepts. (shrink)