tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post9019687266825721595..comments2024-03-27T08:33:11.834-07:00Comments on There is some truth in that: Concepts and Survey ResultsJonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-5983975461636823672011-03-31T02:43:23.000-07:002011-03-31T02:43:23.000-07:00I don't see why you are setting the really hig...I don't see why you are setting the really high bar for yourself here of arguing that bringing in concepts _can't_ help. The argument you mustered in the last comment involves a case where they aren't needed, which is fine, and I don't think anyone would disagree. Surely one need be committed to<br>--Appealing to concepts is necessary to handle all cases of putative verbal disagreements.<br>in order to claim that<br>--In the sorts of cases philosophers are generally interested in, appealing to a theory of concepts (if someone were to have one) would be useful in handling putative cases of verbal disagreements.<br><br>Fodor's theory of concepts makes the gap between those claims easy to see. On his view, we can just tell very easily in the "Jonathan"/"Jonathan" case that the concept expressed by the one is locked on to a different property than the concept expressed by the other. But it's hard to see how to even start telling a story (or at least get to chapter 2) about how we do that with "knowledge"/"knowledge". We need resources for the philosophically interesting cases that seem very substantially beyond the resources we have ready to bring to bear in ordinary, easily-umpired cases of verbal disagreement, like with proper names of good gestalt middle-sized physical objects. _Especially_ if one requires that those resources be available from the armchair, concepts are likely to be a very attractive candidate for a place to try to get those resources from.jonathan weinbergnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-39168459755661557122011-03-31T02:45:02.000-07:002011-03-31T02:45:02.000-07:00Er, "need _not_ be committed", that is. ...Er, "need _not_ be committed", that is. Pesky negations.jonathan weinbergnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-29110465048991054952011-03-30T23:36:06.000-07:002011-03-30T23:36:06.000-07:00Brian: I've changed what I suspect is the rele...Brian: I've changed what I suspect is the relevant setting; hopefully full posts will be RSSd in the future. (Maybe the change is even retroactive? I don't know.)<br><br>Jonathan: I'm afraid I'm not getting it. Take a really obvious example of a merely verbal dispute. (I'm on the record as thinking these are a lot rarer than a lot of philosophers do, but I think it's obvious there could be some.) For example, suppose someone hears me say "Jonathan is a Yankees fan," and also hears you say "Jonathan is a Red Sox fan". We're each talking about each other, and so what we say is perfectly consistent, but some witness to our remarks thinks we're talking about some one individual Jonathan, and thus wrongly takes us to disagree. Here's the right thing to say about this case: Weinberg and Ichikawa are each using 'Jonathan' differently; Weinberg's use picks out a different person than does Ichiakwa's. There is no genuine disagreement. 'Jonathan' is in the relevant sense ambiguous.<br><br>I haven't said anything about concepts. I could if I wanted to; I could say that Weinberg's use of 'Jonathan' corresponds to Weinberg's concept, C1, while Ichikawa's use of 'Jonathan' corresponds to Ichikawa's concept C2, and C1 and C2 are not the same concept type. So they don't disagree because the thoughts their utterances express are made up of different concepts.<br><br>I don't think this more complicated story is in any sense better than the more natural one that just stuck to word meanings. Of course, one could ask, why think that the story about word meanings is right? What reason have we to believe that 'Jonathan' in Weinberg's mouth means something different than 'Jonathan' in Ichikawa's mouth? This is a legitimate question, of course. But I don't think the answer to it has anything essentially to do with concepts. We'd cite facts about use, facts about reference, facts about truth conditions, etc. Switching to concepts just doesn't help.<br><br>I think the same goes for 'knowledge' and 'knowledge'. Ernie wants to suggest that the words are used equivocally; that there is no genuine disagreement. It is entirely proper to ask why we should think this is so. (And I have some sympathy -- more than I did when I first started engaging these questions some years ago -- with the idea that this is a pretty serious challenge.) But I don't see why we should think concepts are relevant to the answer here. We CAN 'conceptually ascend' and have the conversation at that level; but why think it would help? What's at issue is what this word means in one mouth, and what it means in another mouth. Fodor's conceptual atomism is entirely consistent with any arbitrary putative disagreement's being merely verbal in Ernie's sense.Jonathannoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-58091364882806182272011-03-30T13:28:58.000-07:002011-03-30T13:28:58.000-07:00Just a short meta-note. The RSS feed for the blog ...Just a short meta-note. The RSS feed for the blog seems to be truncated. Is there any way you could put the full entries in the RSS?Brian Weathersonnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-25285758788726678452011-03-30T15:14:25.000-07:002011-03-30T15:14:25.000-07:00Here's one way of seeing the potential relevan...Here's one way of seeing the potential relevance of such a move: anyone wanting to run a "different meanings" line as a response needs to have some sort of working theory of when divergent predications are, and when they are not, the manifestation of divergent meanings. One obvious candidate way of doing this is via concepts, on a Fodoro-Gricean picture of the sort fairly commonplace in philosophy of mind: if two people are expressing the same concept in their different predications, then they are disagreeing; if not, not. (That's the answer to your question about Fodor, by the way: there's not much more to a theory of word meanings than a theory of concepts, plus a theory of how tokens in Mentalese get mapped by your brain to tokens of English or whatever.)<br><br>And so a theory of concepts, and concept individuation in particular, would be needed in order to run a line in that direction. And so it's not that one _needs_ to run a line in that direction, though it's still what one would expect to be the first direction many folks would think to go in (clearly it was so for Sosa). But clearly having a good theory of concept individuation would go a long way towards making this kind of meaning-pluralist move credible. And if one isn't going to go that way, one still needs a line on the issue of how we can distinguish between actual disagreements, and meaning-divergent differences in predication.jonathan weinbergnoreply@blogger.com