Naturalism and the Metasemantic Account of Concepts

Mind & Language (Dec. 1994): 469-491.

The word 'concept' is used in a variety of ways, as Frege remarked over a century ago; 'its sense', he said, 'is sometimes psychological, sometimes logical, and sometimes perhaps a confused mixture of both' (Frege, 1960a, p.42). Despite the ambiguity of the word, it has long played a central role in philosophical discussion, and the questions of what concepts are and how we are to undertand talk of them are of central importance to that self-understanding which is one of the peculiar aims of philosophy. And to the extent to which it is correct to conceive of philosophy as mapping out the conceptual structure of the world, and to see that structure as the structure within which empirical variation of theory can take place, these questions are of fundamental importance to all scientific and rational inquiry.

Synthese, 2004

This paper addresses two related questions. First, what is involved in giving a distinctively realist and naturalist construal of an area of discourse, that is, in so much as stating a distinctively realist and naturalist position about, for example, content or value? I defend a condition that guarantees the realism and naturalism of any position satisfying it, at least in the case of positions on content, but perhaps in other cases as well. Second, what sorts of considerations render a distinctively realist and naturalist position more plausible than its irrealist and non-naturalist rivals? The answer here focuses again on theories of content and is wholly negative. I argue that the standard array of arguments offered in support of realist and naturalist theories in fact provide equal support for a host of irrealist and non-naturalist ones. Taken together, these considerations reveal an important gap in the recent philosophical literature on content. The challenge to proponents of putatively realist and naturalist theories is to insure that those theories so much as state distinctively realist and naturalist positions and then to identify arguments that support what is distinctively realist and naturalist about them. ".. . the deepest motivation for intentional irrealism derives. .. from a certain ontological intuition: that there is no place for intentional categories in a physicalistic view of the world; that the intentional can't be naturalized." 1 "Realists about representational states. .. must. .. have some view about what it is for a state to be representational. .. . Well, what would it be like to have a serious theory of representation? Here. .. there is some consensus to work from. The worry about representation is above all that the semantic (and/or intentional) will prove permanently recalcitrant to integration in the natural order. .. " 2 Over the last century, philosophers have puzzled over how best to interpret areas of discourse whose subject matter is in some way normative. Ethicists, for example, have wondered about how best to understand judgments about a thing's goodness, whether to say of something that it is good is, for example, to attribute a property, goodness, to it or simply to recommend it. One apparent difficulty for settling this issue is that goodness, if it exists, would be the kind of thing that ought to motivate us. Realists about goodness are, roughly, those who hold that there is a real property of goodness referred to by our uses of "x is good". The challenge for realists

In Putnam's characterization of metaphysical realism, this position is committed to a correspondence conception of truth as well as to the claim that truth outstrips empirical adequacy. Putnam's model-theoretic argument seeks to refute meta-physical realism by arguing that, on this conception of truth, truth and empirical adequacy must coincide. It has been noted in the literature that the argument involves as an auxiliary premise a thesis sometimes called "Semantic Naturalism," according to which semantics is an empirical science like any other. At the time when the model-theoretic argument was presented, Semantic Naturalism was taken to imply, among other things, that if truth is indeed to be defined in terms of a correspondence relation, then that relation ought to be characterizable in physical terms. This paper argues that metaphysical realists should reject Se-mantic Naturalism as a fundamentally physicalist-reductionist program. It does not follow that they ...

David Chalmers and Frank Jackson have promoted a strong program of conceptual analysis, which accords a significant philosophical role to the a priori analysis of (empirical) concepts. They found this methodological program on an account of concepts using two-dimensional semantics. This paper argues that Chalmers and Jackson’s account of concepts, and the related approach by David Braddon-Mitchell, is inadequate for natural kind concepts as found in biology. Two-dimensional semantics is metaphysically faulty as an account of the nature of concepts and concept possession. It is also methodologically flawed as a guideline for how to study scientific concepts. Proponents of two-dimensional semantics are criticized for not taking seriously semantic variation between persons and for failing to adequately account for the rationality of semantic change. I suggest a more pragmatic approach to natural kind term meaning, arguing that the epistemic goal pursued by a term’s use is an additional semantic property.

Mind & Language, 1994

The word 'concept' is used in a variety of ways, as Frege remarked over a century ago; 'its sense', he said, 'is sometimes psychological, sometimes logical, and sometimes perhaps a confused mixture of both' (Frege, 1960a, p.42). Despite the ambiguity of the word, it has long played a central role in philosophical discussion, and the questions of what concepts are and how we are to undertand talk of them are of central importance to that self-understanding which is one of the peculiar aims of philosophy. And to the extent to which it is correct to conceive of philosophy as mapping out the conceptual structure of the world, and to see that structure as the structure within which empirical variation of theory can take place, these questions are of fundamental importance to all scientific and rational inquiry.

The Ethics of Wilfrid Sellars

In Chapter 2 I turn to Sellars’s claim that the normative is causally reducible, but logically irreducible to the natural. This means that while (for example) the behavioral or neurological information conveyed by a belief-ascription can in principle be wholly captured by an (ideal) scientific theory, such a theory wouldn’t say what intentional language said (in that it wouldn’t ascribe beliefs per se). What normative expressions say, can only be said using normative language, even if what they convey can be reduced to empirical psychology, or neurology, or some other branch of science. Serious objections have been raised against the tenability of Sellars thesis of the “causal reducibility, but logical irreducibility” of the normative. Just as critically, Sellars’s powerful argument for scientific realism can be turned against his argument for the causal reducibility of the normative, so that the normative turns out to be both logically and causally irreducible. I will demonstrate that this conclusion leads to a more complicated naturalism, but one that is still compatible with Sellars’s austere nominalism. The thesis of causal irreducibility will turn out to be helpful in explaining, among other things, moral motivation (as we will see in chapter 10).

In this chapter I lay out a notion of philosophical naturalism that aligns with pragmatism. It is developed and illustrated by a presentation of my views on natural kinds and my theory of concepts. Both accounts reflect a methodological naturalism and are defended not based on metaphysical considerations, but in terms of their philosophical fruitfulness. A core theme is that the epistemic interests of scientists have to be taken into account by any naturalistic philosophy of science in general, and any account of natural kinds and scientific concepts in particular. I conclude with general methodological remarks on how to develop and defend philosophical notions without using intuitions.

Contemporary science seems to be caught in a strange predicament. On the one hand, it holds a firm and reasonable commitment to a healthy naturalistic methodology, according to which explanations of natural phenomena should never overstep the limits of the natural itself. On the other hand, contemporary science is also inextricably and now inevitably dependent on ever more complex technologies, especially Information and Communication Technologies, which it exploits as well as fosters. Yet such technologies are increasingly " artificialising " or " denaturalis-ing " the world, human experiences and interactions, as well as what qualifies as real. So the search for the ultimate explanation of the natural seems to rely upon, and promote, the development of the artificial, seen here as an instantiation of the non-natural. In this article, I would like to try and find a way out of this apparently strange predicament. I shall argue that the naturalisation of our knowledge of the world is either philosophically trivial (naturalism as anti-supernaturalism and anti-preternaturalism), or mistaken (naturalism as anti-constructionism). First, I shall distinguish between different kinds of naturalism. Second, I shall remind the reader that the kinds of naturalism that are justified today need to be protected and supported pragmatically, but they are no longer very interesting conceptually. We know how to win the argument. We just have to keep winning it. Whereas the kind of naturalism that is still interesting today is now in need of revision in order to remain acceptable. Such a kind of naturalism may be revised on the basis of a realistic philosophy of information, according to which knowing is a constructive activity, through which we do not merely represent the phenomena we investigate passively, but create more or less correct informational models (semantic artefacts) of them, proactively and interactively. I shall conclude that the natural is in itself artefactual (a semantic construction), and that the information revolution is disclosing a tension not between the natural and the non-natural, but a deeper one between a user's and a producer's interpretation of knowledge. The outcome is a philosophical view of knowledge and science in the information age that may be called constructionist and a revival of philosophy as a classic, foundationalist enterprise. Keywords Constructionism · Closure · Level of abstraction · Naturalism · Naturalisation · Open question argument · Reasonably reiterable query test

Russian Journal of Philosophical Sciences, 2019

The innate knowledge problem is a classical problem in philosophy, which has been known since the classical antiquity. Plato in his dialogues Meno and Phaedo formulated the doctrine of innate ideas and proposed an early version of the poverty of the stimulus argument, which is the most frequently used argument in innate knowledge debates. In the history of philosophy there was also an opposite view. This approach is often associated with J. Locke’s philosophy. Locke thought that all our knowledge about the world is a product of the universal learning mechanisms whose functioning is based on perception. The question about the presence of innate ideas in the human mind still remains relevant. New findings in cognitive science and neurosciences and also some recent arguments from philosophers contribute to the contemporary discussion between the spokesmen of the rival approaches to this problem. The paper presents the investigation of one of the approaches to solving the problem of inn...

Philo, 12.2,188-199, 2009

I develop the conjecture that “naturalism” in philosophy names not a thesis but a paradigm in something like Thomas Kuhn’s sense, i.e., a set of commitments, shared by a group of investigators, whose acceptance by the members of the group powerfully influences their day-to-day investigative practice. I take a stab at spelling out the shared commitments that make up naturalism, and the logical and evidential relations among them.