Bases conceptuales

Finally, a few words about basic concepts. As mentioned, Pettit remains neutral on which concepts are basic for the purposes of the ethocentric concept acquisition of individuals, but stresses that they can be different for different people. In the light of the community version of the ethocentric story, we might add that the concepts that are basic for a community may differ from those that are basic for individuals. Obvious candidates for basicness in the community version (as well as the individual version) are concepts of traditional secondary qualities – colour concepts, and concepts of smells, sounds, pains and other bodily sensations. Also, basic inference patterns like modus ponens seem so fundamental to our thinking that it is hard to imagine how they could be acquired if not in something like the ethocentric way (i.e. primitive pattern recognition and dispositions to proceed in particular ways, given that nothing disturbs the normal course of things). It is also natural to imagine this sort of mechanism at play in very early ‘concept’ formation relevant to survival –

35

Occasionally, he mentions ‘orders’ of properties in the functionalist sense (e.g. 1998, p. 116), but as we saw in Ch. 3, this is something quite different.

good to eat, bad to eat, dangerous, predator, water, etc. However, all this remains speculation. The story is intended as an in-principle-story, and pronouncing particular concepts to be basic and ethocentrically evolved would take us firmly across the boundary and into the domain of empirical science. Who knows which concepts have evolved in what way? This is definitely not a question to be settled from the armchair, even if, while comfortably seated, we are free to consider how such a thing as concept evolution could be possible.

4. Summary

Pettit’s version of response-dependence offers very interesting prospects. It provides an interesting response to a version of the Wittgensteinian rule-following problem – ‘how can a finite set of examples enable a subject to grasp a rule with a potentially infinite range of applications?’ – though it has been impossible to do justice to this issue here. It also contains the materials for a promising account of the genealogy of concepts, and whether or not an ethocentric story of concept evolution was intended by Pettit, the story provides many useful results. In particular, it provides answers to our three ‘hard questions’. Let us sum up the answers that have emerged from our discussion.

- How can concepts come into existence, be used, and be in good standing before the exact nature of the referent, or even its level, is known?

All it takes for a concept to form is a salient similarity and sufficient constancy in responses for a stable set of C-conditions to form and provide a seems/is-distinction. This leaves open the question of the location of the referent. It could be a low level property; such properties can have their say in determining concepts’ extensions, and can serve as their referents. Or, if no appropriate low level referent exists, or if the concept works in such a way as to make high level location preferable, it can be located on a high level. None of these options are either precluded or preferred by the core components of the ethocentric story.

- How can concepts made of ‘for us’-material come to refer to independently

existing properties and kinds?

For essentially the same reasons as above; the ethocentric story allows that a concept developed on the basis of a response-pattern can refer to a property that is

independent of this response-pattern, e.g. the low level property correlated with responses in C-conditions, and causally responsible for these. So on the basis of our response-dispositions, we can acquire concepts that refer to response-independent properties, and yet be confident that our applications of the concepts are often correct (since a property only gets to be the referent of the concept if it is (roughly) correlated with responses in C-conditions; if there is no such property, then higher level locations provide a fallback option).

- Can we tell a unified story about how different kinds of concepts – natural kind concepts, concepts of response-dependent subject matters, and relativist concepts – come into being?

Yes, the ethocentric story of concept evolution provides such a unified story. The recipe of salient similarity patterns and a discounting practice aimed at identifying perturbing and favourable factors and seeking as much constancy as possible fits concepts of all three sorts, depending on the existence of appropriate low-level reference candidates, and the amount of constancy feasible for the subject matter in question before the discounting practice breaks down.

The account has a further advantage that we shall pay more attention to in Ch. 6: It offers a useful way to distinguish between different routes to a response- dependence thesis of subject matter.

The account of concept evolution suggested in this chapter is just a rough outline and needs further work, and objections will almost certainly be forthcoming. However, it offers very interesting prospects if it can be made to work. In this chapter, I have focussed on the advantages of the proposal in keeping with the aim of making sense of response-dependence.

Ch. 6: Response-dependence of subject

matter

This chapter, like Ch. 4, is mainly concerned with response-dependence theses of subject matter. The main questions to be considered are these:

- how should we formulate (i.e. capture the intuitive content of) the distinction between response-dependent and –independent subject matters? and

- how can the distinction be made operational?

Though I offer no final verdict on how a response-dependence thesis of subject matter should best be formulated, it should come as no surprise that I suggest a level- based way of thinking about the distinction: response-dependence theses are theses of high level location. In the first part of the chapter, I describe two routes by which we might arrive at a conclusion of response-dependence of subject matter. One is an a posteriori route via low-level reference failure of level-flexible concepts. The other is an a priori route via transparency intuitions etc. to the conclusion that the concept is high-level rigid and criterially governed. I discuss how these routes combine with the versions of response-dependence from the literature.

The second part of the chapter concerns two points of disagreement between Johnston and Wright: the question whether response-dependence theses should be formulated in terms of dispositions or subjunctive conditionals, and the question

whether response-dependent concepts are criterially governed concepts or

referentially governed concepts that refer to response-dispositions. I argue that there are no big decisions to be made regarding these matters, as both disagreements make less of a difference than normally assumed. A brief introduction to the location dispute for dispositions forms the backdrop of this discussion.

The third and largest part of the chapter concerns the question how to make the distinctions operational, i.e. helpful in determining the response-dependence status of a domain about which we are in doubt. I examine two of the conditions normally thought useful for this purpose: the a priority and necessity conditions (most of the other relevant parameters have been or will be discussed elsewhere in the thesis). I argue that to the extent that these conditions will serve the purpose, they will do it by means which can do the job independently of the necessity/a priority conditions. I

suggest that in order to determine whether a domain is response-dependent, we should also take into consideration a broader range of features that are normally considered in location disputes, such as transparency intuitions and similar. The criteria we settle on do not guarantee a clear-cut judgement for every concept, however, as many everyday concepts come with conflicting intuitions.