Recursos tecnológicos

So far we have (i) looked at the transition from percepts to lexical items, (ii) distin- guished (mental) representation from reference, and (iii) distinguished the lexical content of lexemes or roots, which is specified in terms of perceptual features, from the grammatical meaning that words acquire when they occur in a grammatical

context and are used to refer. We have referred the term ‘concept’, but generally concluded that what we were really talking about were either percepts (or at least entities continuous with percepts), mental representations, or lexemes. If so, the notion of a‘concept’ is of little use, no case for prelinguistic concepts distinct from percepts remains, and we arrive at what is generally considered a‘harsh’ stance on the animals. Our stance effectively assumes the existence of concepts only where there are lexemes, and indeed only where such lexemes enter into acts of intentional and intensional reference, which in turn require grammar. It is this correlation that the title of this section expresses, and we will use the term‘concept’ in what follows with this meaning: there are concepts in this sense only where there are lexemes, there is grammar, and there is intentional and intensional reference. This is our answer to the question of what‘concepts’ really are, who has them, and what their semantics is.

To defend this answer, let us start from a natural suggestion: a concept is always involved when we use a word to refer to a thing. The speaker will always have some ‘concept’ of what it is he is referring to, viewing it as a person, a kiss, an emotion, a conversation, etc. We have suggested that even acts like referring with such a word as ‘this’ or index finger pointing depend on some such descriptive concept of what it is we are pointing to, and they would not work without it. As in the case of perception, the objects of such acts of reference are also never individuated in terms of their physical properties, as noted in Chapter1 (and cf. Chomsky, 2000a), and this would follow if, instead, their identities are grounded in what concepts we apply to them, or how we think of them: as a person, a city, a river, etc., where usually multiple such choices can be made for any one external object. Thus we can refer to a building as‘a house’, ‘the university’, or ‘Old Shire Hall’, among an indefinite number of other possibilities. None of these are physical descriptions, or descriptions of an object as a physical one. When the building is destroyed through an earthquake, the university need not be: it may retain its identity. The house by contrast will most likely be taken to be destroyed. As for Old Shire Hall, it may or may not go out of existence: for it may be rebuilt stone by stone or otherwise, retaining its name. What causes these facts? What explains that houses get destroyed by earthquakes, while named build- ings need not be? Plainly, the concepts we have of these things, and not any independ- ent fact about the external world as physically described. Concepts in the substantive lexicon have descriptive contents—person, house, kiss, etc.—which determine iden- tity conditions of objects of reference: viewed as persons, they change in other ways than viewed as bodies.

Any act of reference, then, contains an identifying description, however reduced it may be, which as such must involve a concept, which is what supplies the descriptive content in question, and hence the identity conditions for the referent (we return to so-called ‘rigid’ or ‘direct’ reference, which is often taken to be unmediated by a description and seemingly contradicts the claim just made, in Chapter4). Because the act of reference is anchored in the description, the thing referred to therefore need

not causally affect us when we refer to it, and it need not be perceivable or characterizable in sensory-motor vocabulary: for it is grounded in the concept involved, as a basis for the act of reference. For the same reason, the referents of the words, as characterized independently of how we refer to them, will never exhaust the words’ meaning, and thus intensionality arises: what we mean can never be gleaned from what we refer to as independently described, since how we describe a thing systematically affects what we can be truthfully said to refer to. Lois Lane may refer to Clark Kent as‘Superman’, yet it may be false to say of her that she referred to Clark Kent. We may refer to a building as Fountains Abbey or as The Wonder of the North, and then, as in the case of Lois, circumstances may arise in which it might not be right to report us as attributing this property to the ruin in North Yorkshire that we can see as the speech act takes place.

So if human linguistic reference is structurally based on concepts, and concepts have a semantics independently of what they are used to refer to (as independently described), we predict that human linguistic reference will systematically exhibit intensionality. If reference depends on concepts, it is sensitive to a description, and hence it need not be transparent in relation to the object referred to. But even if acts of reference are necessarily based on concepts, it is not yet clear that without reference, there will be no concepts. Maybe there are some concepts, but they simply aren’t used to refer. In that case, they might not be lexemes, and independent of language and words. Qua concepts they would have a descriptive content, but maybe there can be description without reference. This, however, does not seem intuitively right: whoever describes, describes something, an object of reference, even if the object is not named or directly referred to.7Let us explore, then, the opposite thesis, which is entailed by the following claim:

The Correlation Claim:

There are concepts if and only if there is intensionality.

We just argued for the right-to-left direction: Where intensionality exists—there is reference and it is sensitive to a description—concepts must be involved: the ones that provide for the lexical content of the description used. No human act of reference is ever fully free of intensionality in this sense, interjections and indexicality included, a point to which we return. Intensionality is thus a plausible sufficient criterion for concept possession. The left-to-right direction, however, is much less obvious, especially on‘internalist’ conceptions of concepts such as Chomsky (2000a) or Pietroski (2008). Intensionality, we may grant, requires two things: that words are used referentially, and that different concepts can be involved in such acts that are

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And even if, as it may later turn out, we make an informed judgement that such objects of reference do not in fact exist. Existence claims arise at the level of full propositions, not acts of reference, where existence is presupposed but not judged (see further pp.99–100 below).

true of the same external referent. A creature to which we ascribe intensionality thus needs both a sense of extensional reference and truth, and it needs to engage in such acts of reference under the kind of perspectives that concepts encode. But why should this link between concepts and reference be made, which will exclude concepts along with intensionality from non-pointing and non-(intentionally-)referring creatures? There would then be no concepts, in particular, in core cognition (Carey, 2009), and they would have to be called by a different name, and maybe be aligned with percepts. Why burden, the internalist might ask, a theory of concepts with a notion of reference that Chomsky (2000a) doesn’t even consider to apply to natural language? Yet it is a virtual triviality to state that to have a concept is to know what it applies to—apply truly, that is, for a concept applies to a thing if it is true that the thing referred to with the concept falls under the concept.8How can we avoid a connection between concepts and reference/truth if it amounts to a virtual triviality? What is a concept if it is not true of something? How is saying that the concept of a book applies truly to books even different from saying that‘book’ refers to books?9How else would we state what the content of a concept is? And how could we do so more minimally than by saying that‘book’ applies to books? Clearly we couldn’t say: ‘book’ applies to books if it appears to us to so apply. This would not only be incorrect, but the notion of appearance is in fact more complex than that of truth, presupposing it analytically. The truth, however, is independent of what we think—nothing is true because we think it is, and this is constitutive of what truth means for us. Similarly, reference on occasions of language use is to objects that are (taken to be) independent of the speaker and hearer—this again being constitutive of what reference means. So if there is an intrinsic nexus between concepts and reference/truth, then knowing a concept requires a notion of ‘the world’ as independent of (or to be distinguished from) what we think about it. Without such a notion, we wouldn’t be thinking at all. Thinking requires both a notion of the world and of thought; and concepts, as involved in thinking (as opposed to perception), must therefore be used to refer.

This is our argument. If, in all acts of reference, concepts are involved, and in order for there to be concepts they have to be used to refer, concepts and intensionality arise together, grounding the correlation claim above.10Where intensionality cannot be established, a case for non-human concepts (in the same sense of this term)

8 _{This is to say absolutely nothing about how we know when a concept applies truly.}

9 _{This is again to say absolutely nothing about what books are—and in particular whether they are}

viewed as abstract (‘Bill and Bob have both read Buddenbrooks’) or concrete objects (‘Bill wrapped Buddenbrooks in Christmas paper’) (see Chomsky, 2000a). These are conceptual distinctions arising when words are used to refer on occasions of language use, not at the level of stating their lexical content: both of the above sentences refer to what is (lexically or descriptively) a book.

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Crucially, though, the descriptive content of the concept involved can enter into the act of reference in different ways, giving rise to the different forms of reference that we distinguish in Chapter4. In purely predicative forms of reference, the concept is the main determinant of the referent; in‘rigid’ forms of reference, it plays a minimal role; definite and quantificational forms are in the middle between these.

cannot be made. That it cannot be established in the non-human case follows from the well-known observation (Hauser,1996; Fitch, 2005) that while functional refer- ence is quite ubiquitous in animal communication, reference in the present sense (intentional reference) is present only in Homo sapiens. We return to these data in the next subsection. Concepts, then, along with reference, present an evolutionary novelty, and their connection with words may be intrinsic.

Whenever concepts are used to refer, words are normally involved (though they need not always be, as in acts of pointing). In philosophical and psychological practice, concepts effectively are identified as the meanings of words, and there does not appear to be any other way to name or identify concepts than through the words that express them. Concepts identified with word meanings, however, already reflect processes of lexicalization and grammaticalization. The assumption that these are irrelevant to the existence or identity of the concept involved begs the question against the possibility we entertain here: that the grammaticalization of the brain may affect the organization of meaning. By now we have afirst indication of how it may do: through the evolution of reference, which, we have argued above, is, in fact, a co-evolution of reference and concepts, for one depends on the other. The intrinsic semantics of concepts, as a novelty in evolution that arose with or in our species, is a referential semantics, where the notion of reference is intentional reference.

We could, of course, if we wished, simply abstract the meanings that words have in the human lineage from them—abstracting from the fact that they are linguistic, as most discussion of‘concepts’ in philosophy and psychology tends to do—call them concepts, and ascribe them to non-human species. But this is to impose our concep- tual scheme on the cognitive systems we study. Since non-human animals never respond linguistically to what we say about their minds, it is unclear how to test whether they share this conceptual scheme with us or not. Put differently, if they had concepts, they would necessarily share our conceptual scheme—for there is no other way we could understand them except by mapping their scheme onto ours. But then there is no empirical question of whether they share our scheme or not (Davidson, 2004), and the question of animal concepts is unresolvable.

The question, in turn, of whether they have our conceptual scheme, arguably reduces to whether we can interpret them using our scheme: and the fact is we cannot. Pet owners and their pets can without doubt communicate and coordinate on many things, like a ball to be fetched or a game to be played. Nonetheless, the point of owning a pet is not that the pet has a mind like ours, but that it does not. What makes it so charming to have a dog—as opposed to a human pet (or slave)—is that we precisely don’t share a world with him/it: a realm in which thoughts can be true independently of whether we think them, and words are true of things that are

independent of these words. Contrary to popular opinion, imposing our mind on non-human animals is not a sign of our respect for them: perhaps it is the opposite, to colonize a territory that we cannot chart.

Do we perhaps lack the means to chart it, even in the case of our fellow-humans? Might‘other minds’ be like a foreign country whose customs are completely differ- ent? What if we cannot establish intensionality—shared reference and concepts, even if the chosen concepts are not always the same when reference takes place—even in human communication? Have we not learned that external behavioural and other physical data, no matter how rich, cannot uniquely determine or fix any concept involved in an act of reference? Is it not that nothing a person says or does will ever possibly conclusively determine the concepts she expresses, leaving an infinity of interpretive options (Kripke,1982)? Not if we are right that reference to a world that is independent of how we think of it is a precondition of having concepts and thought in thefirst place. Divergence in concepts when faced with a given referent is then based on sameness of reference. Concepts are objectively anchored. For concepts to exist, we must be aware that thoughts that involve them can be wrong, which in turn means that we must have a concept of thought. That concept in turn entails that a thought that I think need not be a thought that you think, and we both can be wrong—at least in particular cases. But then, I have to distinguish the 1st Person (‘me’) from the 2nd Person (‘you’), and both of these from the ‘it’—the object of reference. These are distinctions involving the system of grammatical Person, and hence are linguistic ones.11If so, in order for there to be thought, I have to have language.

This gives an indication of the direction of our answer to the Kripkean sceptic: no, concepts are not inscrutable even in the human case, for it is a condition on having them that we use them to refer, which not only requires a shared world but also an intersubjective dimension that is linguistically configured. Reference underdeter- mines concepts, leading to intensionality; but intensionality presupposes reference. Intensionality in word reference means that we can distinguish concepts, as some- thing that we share with others, from the referents to which these concepts may or may not apply, independently of what we think. This is why Lois Lane can be confused about who is Superman and who is Clark Kent. But then, her concept when she references Superman is just the one we would have, if we had the beliefs that she does. Moreover, such confusions are typically short-lived.

Language, then, we will assume, enables reference and truth, and via reference and truth enables concepts, which can enter into thoughts but in a way that the

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They are not non-grammatical semantic ones, as the same external object (me, say), can be the referent of‘I’, ‘you’, or ‘he’. But acts of reference to the same person involving these items differ in grammatical meaning, and hence use (see Section4.4).

truth of these thoughts (or external circumstances) does not determine which concept is chosen. This in itself is an indication of thought taking place.