Three things happened in the last class. First, there were some introductory remarks about externalism. Second, we discussed Millikan’s project – mainly its goal and quite briefly [since again you didn’t read the text] the substantive part of the proposal. Third, we mentioned some of the motivations for such a move against descriptions and also possible practical consequences. Here I will focus on the first three sections of the paper.
1. Intro
Both the Classical Theory (CT) and the Prototype Theory (PT) consider concepts to be constituted by certain kinds of descriptions. In the first case, the descriptions are definitional, they consist of necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of concepts. To apply a concept C means to say of an object a that it is an instance of C. E.g. ‘Ana is a student.’ The predicate ‘student’ expresses the concept STUDENT. This concept is a description. It might be something like this description: x is human; x is enrolled in a higher education institution. In bi-conditional form: x is an instance of C if and only if x is human and x is enrolled in a higher education institution. The concept can be thus applied to all [sufficiency] objects that satisfy these conditions – and only [necessity] to them. The important point is this: what you have when you have a concept is a description like the one just mentioned. The idea is that when you apply/use a concept, you go over the list of conditions. Over all of them.
I assume that it is clear by now what changes when one moves to Prototype Theory. Concepts are still descriptions, but the conditions of application are relaxed. Roughly, we have features where we had conditions, and features can be weighted. We’re looking for relevant similarity, not for identity between objects that fall under the same concept. Note that in this case descriptions might not be of a linguistic nature – this was strongly suggested by the Classical Theory. Prototypes are structured sets of features – and features could be bits of sensory information – e.g. visual info.
There’s another thing [other than descriptionism but related to it] that CT and PT have in common. They are internalist (the common versions that we discussed at least). This means that the nature of a concept depends only on what goes on in the heads/minds of agents. The environment is irrelevant. Descriptions – definitions or prototypes – are something that we cook up in our heads, and then apply to the external world. One could imagine scenarios [google ‘brain in a vat’] in which there is little connection or correlation between the conceptual repertoire of a mind and its environment.
Millikan goes against both descriptions and internalism. It is therefore an alternative proposal in a more radical sense.
2. Millikan’s paper
Section #1
The project: Kripke and Putnam manage to put up a powerful criticism of descriptionist accounts [see ‘The problem of ignorance and error’!]; but we lack a detailed positive alternative built on their insights. So let’s try to have it done.
Note: The main insight of K&P was that that meaning of the word – the concept expressed, we would say – does depend on the external environment of the agent and not on what goes on in the agent’s mind. If the substance in the lakes and rivers around you is not H2O but XYZ, than your concept WATER does not consist of the description H2O, but of whatever reliably ‘points to’ the substance in the lakes and rivers around, that is XYZ; it doesn’t matter if you have the description H2O associated with WATER. Moreover, you can conceive of the external environment as social environment: so it’s not what you have in your head that matters, but what the community or the culture agrees on.
Scope of the project: concepts of substances. Substances = individuals, stuffs, real kinds [natural kinds, like hydrogen, Rosch’s basic level categories – natural objects, like mice, & artefacts, like houses].
Proposal: all substance concepts do something like pointing; they are ‘subject concepts’. We don’t classify objects when we use them – we don’t describe someone when we say ’Mama’, we don’t describe something when we say ‘milk’ – at least initially; we identify them (over multiple encounters).
What does this mean? Problem: ‘cash in the metaphor of pointing’ [p.526].
Note: the account will be causal (based on interactions with the environment) and will not depend directly on language > ‘Preverbal humans, indeed, any animal that collects practical knowledge over time of how to relate to specific stuffs, individuals, and real kinds, must have concepts of them.’ [p. 526 – my emphases].
Section #2
This section explains what is understood by ‘substances’. The central notion is that substances have ‘rich inductive potential’ [pp 527- ff]. You can learn about them quickly – maybe from a single encounter – and you can safely generalize [that is what induction means] what you learned to future encounters. Mama will continue to be nice next time you see her. Water will still be wet. ‘…knowledge will remain good ’ [p 528].
It makes sense to pay attention to substances then. They allow you to have at least some initial grip on the world. This is possible because having concepts of substances is not a matter of how your mind decides to cut up things, but depends on the real structure of the world: ‘It is not a matter of logic, of course, but rather of the makeup of the world’ [p. 528].
Note: by ‘the makeup of the world’ one should understand physical structure to which we are sensitive [what we can see, hear etc], but also socio-cultural structure. See e.g. the discussion of design and copying patterns on p. 529.
The project restated: ‘Throughout the history of philosophy and psychology, the tendency has been to project into the mind itself the structure of the object grasped by thought. I will argue the contrary, namely that substances are grasped not by understanding the structures or principles that hold them together but by knowing how to exploit these substances for information gathering purposes.’ [p. 530]
Section #3
‘The “concept” of a substance […] is the capacity to represent the substance in thought for the purpose of information gathering and storage, inference, and ultimately the guidance of action.’ [pp 530-531]
Here is how I think we should read this: the emphasis should be placed on ‘capacity’, not on ‘represent’. The concept is an ability to do certain things – e.g. guide action. This capacity depends on representing some of the stable properties of a substance. For example, we represent the wetness of water. But the capacity depends on representing some properties, not on having a certain representation. The capacity survives as representations change. So the concept is not the representation that supports re-identification.
Indeed, the representations do chance [again, see ‘The problem of ignorance and error’] as we learn new things about substances. We learn, for example, that water boils or freezes, that it can stop being wet. We still identify water as water throughout these changes. Remember that substance refers also to individuals. Maybe such an example is easier to follow: you re-identify your mother as your mother even though she – and what you know about her – changed a lot in 20+ years.
‘Information gathering’ says just this: we maintain some (minimal) label for the substance and we attach knowledge to it as that knowledge becomes available to us. We can ‘track’ a substance – this is primary. We can recognize water. The descriptions that we acquire in time are secondary. They do not belong to the nature of the concept of that substance. It doesn’t matter that we learn very late in our development that (pure) water is H2O.
‘Now think why a child, or animal, needs to carry knowledge of the properties of a substance from one encounter to another. If all of a substance’s properties were immediately manifest to the child upon every encounter there would be no need to learn and remember what these properties were. Carrying knowledge of substances about is useful only because most of a substance’s properties are not manifest but hidden from us most of the time. This is not, in general, because they are “deep” or “theoretical” properties, but because observing a property always requires a particular relation to it.’ [p. 532]
Carrying knowledge must be a robust process, since different properties of substances will be ‘visible’ on different encounters and in varying contexts. I could see the color of an object, but fail to taste it. I could see someone, but fail to hear her voice. But I must be able to ‘track’ the object and the person in situations where things change: say taste and not sight is available. As Millikan is saying, different representations are assigned ‘the same semantic value’ [p. 532]- they are representations of the same things [roughly, semantic value of a representation of object x = x].
A problem with this account that makes agents track/re-identify substances under various representations is that the connection between substances and agents might be too strong. That is, it might be hard to explain why agents are sometimes wrong in applying concepts of substances. Millikan’s answer is that our tracking capacities are generally reliable – because we use reliable indicators/cues – but not infallible – because cues can be misleading. We can take alcohol to be water if we fix on the substance just by using visual information/cues. But note that this is less likely to happen on multiple encounters. Next time we might taste the watery stuff – the mistake will surely be revealed.
Bottom line: don’t start by asking what a concept is, but what it is to have a certain concept. Millikan’s suggestion is that the answer to the second question is that to have a concept is to have a practical ability or skill – the ability to re-identify or track the substance throughout many encounters. If you find that convincing, it implies an answer for what a concept is: this very capacity of re-identification that makes use of a dynamic and evolving set of representations – see again the quote at the beginning of this section.
One problem to think about: if tracking depends on certain cues that are maximally – though not completely – reliable, what stops us from identifying the concept not with the ability, but with the description consisting of representations of those cues? Possible answer: the criticism of descriptionism put up by Krikpe and Putnam – a concept can survive a radical change in associated descriptions. But think of the example given by Millikan on p. 533 – when a child calls a tiger ‘kitty’ and then realizes that tigers are not cats, what is it that changes – what ‘cat’ means [i.e. the concept] or the cues used to recognize cats? Can we really maintain, as Millikan seems to, that the meaning of ‘cat’ is not affected?
I will not discuss section # 4-6, but I encourage you to read them.
3. Consequences
This is already too long, so I will just remind you an example we discussed briefly. What changes in re-branding and what are the expected – and the real consequences of such a procedure? Intuitively, what is meant to change is a description of, say, a product [it may be a symbolic object - whatever]. But if what guides action is not a specific representation, but an ability to see what is similar ‘through’ various representations, than we might need to think again. I will e-mail you a paper that seems to show that brand attributes [values etc – note these are all descriptive] don’t have a very strong impact in decision making @ consumers.
