Greetings
Dirk

cheers, Balance.

Diana:
1. Short answer – it doesn’t seem so. But it all really depends on the desiderata – what we want or need from our theory of concepts. PT was motivated by some psychological data – and it seems to fare well enough in that area. But there is a semantic and logical cost to this. See the ‘refuge’ of dual-factor theories as discussed by M&L.
And another thing – be careful with the restriction. Most people would like a general theory of concepts. Moreover, PT has troubles with natural kind concepts – see the problem of ignorance and error @ PT.

2. Some difficulties seem to be general. Consider the question: are prototypes constitutive of, or merely associated with concepts? It might be just a trivial fact about complexity that it’s easier to run the argument for BIRD.

3. I guess you’re thinking of the examples quoted by M&L @ p 35? But the point is general, as you can see even in the final part of that quote [grandmothers...dentists]. So no, it goes for general terms as well. The pet example here is… PET FISH. As general as you may like; in fact, concepts expressed by singular terms are secondary in the discussion.

Fodor’s main criticism is related to compositionality; that’s what matters. See e.g.
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/tech_rpt/herring17.pdf

Let’s talk about your previous comment next time.

(1) It was quite difficult to talk about science, but I see no difficulty in talking about birds.
(2) Fodor’s criticism to Prototype Theory refers only to singular terms (proper names, definite descriptions – ex: the town east form Tennessee). But can the PT be criticised when it comes to general terms?

An intuitive answer to the question “What is the meaning of a word (lexical concept)?” or to the question “When can we say that we know the meaning of a word?”. This intuitive answer is given by H. Putnam; Putnam says that to know the meaning of a word is to understand that word and to know how to use that word – these two conditions are the neccesary and sufficient conditions for a word to have meaning. But the question that arises is “What are the condititons for someone to understand something, how can we understand understanding?”.

Theories of meaning give different answers to these questions. But these theories do not differ only because they give specific answers to these questions, but also because they have a different purpose. Some theories are trying to explain which is the nature, the source of meaning, and other theories are functional, they try to explain how meaning works. Some theories take into account the source of meaning and others the justification of meaning. For example, The Referential Theory (according to which linguistic expressions have the meanings they do because they stand for things; what they mean is what they stand for) or The Ideational Theory (linguistic expressions are ideas in the mind) are theories which try to identify the source of meaning, while a use theory of meaning explains the way meaning works and evolves. Like Quine says, there is a difference between investigating meaning and knowing the nature of meaning, what is meaning:

“Lexicography is concerned, or seems to be concerned, with change of meaning. Pending a satisfactory explanation of the notion of meaning, linguists in semantic fields are in the situation of not knowing what they are talking about. There is not an untenable situation. Ancient astronomers knew the movements of the planets remarkably well without knowing what sort of things the planets were. But it is a theoreticallu unsatisfactory situation.” (Quine, Willard O, “The Problem of Meaning in Linguistics”, in “The Structure of Language. Readings in the Philosophy of Language”, edited by Jerry Fodor and Jerrold Katz)

So a theory of meaning should explain both the source of meaning and its justification. I don’t know if this is relevant, but that’s what I thought after reading a little bit about some various theories of meaning.

First, in # 43, Wittgenstein says that the meaning of an expression is its use ‘for a large class of cases, though not for all’. It is perhaps not fair to talk about a ‘use THEORY of meaning’ in Wittgenstein.

If appropriate deployment is not enough, what’s missing? You can see how Wittgenstein approaches and attacks systematically what leads to, and follows from, such questions.

1. Take Chomsky’s example: ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.’ Compositionality doesn’t help much here. Syntactically the sentence is ok. But it is nonetheless a semantic mess. One could say that no conventions have been laid down for the use of these words in this sequence. I’m not myself sure that one SHOULD say that. Compositionality is, I think, a requirement, but it is not the only one. Moreover, if we care about psychological data, it is not clear that we can deal with most completely novel sentences.

2. Think of Searle’s Chinese Room Argument:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/

http://host.uniroma3.it/progetti/kant/field/chinese.html

Could you perhaps write a few lines on this in the following days? What is missing in a ‘mechanical’ but correct use of an expression? What does the word ‘understanding’ capture? How can we tell that other people really understand? Perhaps they’re zombies:

http://host.uniroma3.it/progetti/kant/field/zombies.htm

3. There are some other good readers and books, e.g.:

http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Language-P-Martinich/dp/0195188306/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206190691&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Contemporary-Analytic-Philosophy-Core-Readings/dp/013099068X/ref=pd_sim_b_title_2/104-0860202-2350364

http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Language-Fundamentals-Alex-Miller/dp/077351709X

Wittgenstein’s ideas were the basis of the “use” theory of meaning, according to which to know an expression’s meaning is just to know how to deploy the expression appropriately in conversational settings (language takes the form of social practice).

Here are some brief objections to the “use” theory of meaning. What do you think?

1. A sentence’s meaning is not simply a matter of there being conventional norms directed upon that sentence’s deployment, for the sentence’s meaning is in large part a function of its internal structure as well.
How can this explain speakers’ amazing ability to understand long, utterly novel sentences at first hearing without a moment’s thought? Our ability to understand and act on long novel sentences cannot be the product of our knowing conventions directed upon those utterances, for no conventions have ever been directed upon those utterances. We can say that we understand novel sentences compositionally, in virtue of understanding the individual words that occur in them and working out the sentences’ overall meanings from the way in which the individual words are strung together.

2. Could I not know the use of an expression and fall in with it, mechanically, but without understanding it? Someone can use a certain word or expression approrpiately, but without understanding it, without grasping the meaning of that word / expression. Lycan gives the example of a student who was able to fool his teachers by using expressions which he did not understand.

For more details, check out William G. Lycan – “Philosophy of Language”, a great introduction to theories of meaning.

http://crl.ucsd.edu/innate/tlearn.html

Note: it is not exactly easy to say in what sense neural networks contribute to our topic. The question is: are they a model of the structure of concepts, or are they just a model of how concepts happen to be represented in the brain? The structure part is the one that matters, because concepts can be BOTH definitional AND represented by patterns of activations in [biological] neural networks. So only if neural networks are models of conceptual STRUCTURE they constitute an alternative to the definitional/containment model.