Fodor Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong other variant

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conceptual identity can't be maintained even across time slices of the same individual.
end p.29
There is, however, a widespread consensus (and not only among conceptual relativists)
that intentional explanation can, after all, be preserved without supposing that belief
contents are often or even ever literally public. The idea is that a robust notion of
content similarity would do just as well as a robust notion of content identity for the
cognitive scientist's purposes. Here, to choose a specimen practically at random, is a
recent passage in which Gil Harman enunciates this faith:
Sameness of meaning from one symbol system to another is a similarity relation rather
than an identity relation in the respect that sameness of meaning is not transitive . . . I am
inclined to extend the point to concepts, thoughts, and beliefs . . . The account of
sameness of content appeals to the best way of translating between two systems, where
goodness in translation has to do with preserving certain aspects of usage, with no appeal
to any more robust notion of content or meaning identity . . . [There's no reason why]
the resulting notion of sameness of content should fail to satisfy the purposes of
intentional explanation. (1993: 169 79)4
It's important whether such a view can be sustained since, as we'll see, meeting the
requirement that intentional contents be literally public is non-trivial; like
compositionality, publicity imposes a substantial constraint upon one's theory of concepts
and hence, derivatively, upon one's theory of language. In fact, however, the idea that
content similarity is the basic notion in intentional explanation is affirmed a lot more
widely than it's explained; and it's quite unclear, on reflection, how the notion of
similarity that such a semantics would require might be unquestion-beggingly developed.
On one hand, such a notion must be robust in the sense that it preserves intentional
explanations pretty generally; on the other hand, it must do so without itself presupposing
a robust notion of content identity. To the best of my knowledge, it's true without
exception that all the construals of concept similarity that have thus far been put on offer
egregiously fail the second condition.
Harman, for example, doesn't say much more about content-similarity-cum-goodness-of-
translation than that it isn't transitive and that it preserves certain aspects of usage .
That's not a lot to go on. Certainly it leaves wide open whether Harman is right in
denying that his account of content similarity presupposes a robust notion of content
or meaning identity . For whether it does depends on how the relevant aspects of
usage are themselves supposed to be individuated, and about this we're told nothing at
all.
Harman is, of course, too smart to be a behaviourist; usage , as he uses it, is itself an
intentional-cum-semantic term. Suppose, what surely seems plausible, that one of the
aspects of usage that a good translation of dog has to preserve is that it be a term that
implies animal, or a term that doesn't apply to ice cubes, or, for matter, a term that means
dog. If so, then we're back where we started; Harman needs notions like same
implication, same application, and same meaning in order to explicate his notion of
content similarity. All that's changed is which shell the pea is under.
At one point, Harman asks rhetorically, What aspects of use determine meaning?
Reply: It is certainly relevant what terms are applied to and the reasons that might be
offered for this application . . . it is also relevant how some terms are used in relation to
other terms (ibid.: 166). But I can't make any sense of this unless some notion of same
application , same reason , and same relation of terms is being taken for granted in
characterizing what good translations ipso facto have in common. NB on pain of
circularity: same application (etc.), not similar application (etc.). Remember that
similarity of semantic properties is the notion that Harman is trying to explain, so his
explanation mustn't presuppose that notion.
I don't particularly mean to pick on Harman; if his story begs the question it was
supposed to answer, that is quite typical of the literature on concept similarity. Though
it's often hidden in a cloud of technical apparatus (for a detailed case study, see Fodor and
Lepore 1992: ch. 7), the basic problem is easy enough to see. Suppose that we want the
following to be a prototypical case where you and I have different but similar concepts of
George Washington: though we agree about his having been the first American President,
and the Father of His Country, and his having cut down a cherry tree, and so on, you
think that he wore false teeth and I think that he didn't. The similarity of our GW
concepts is thus some (presumably weighted) function of the number of propositions
about him that we both believe, and the dissimilarity of our GW concepts is
correspondingly a function of the number of such propositions that we disagree about. So
far, so good.
But the question now arises: what about the shared beliefs themselves; are they or aren't
they literally shared? This poses a dilemma for the similarity theorist that is, as far as I
can see, unavoidable. If he says that our agreed upon beliefs about GW are literally
shared, then he hasn't managed to do what he promised; viz. introduce a notion of
similarity of content that dispenses with a robust notion of publicity. But if he says
end p.31
that the agreed beliefs aren't literally shared (viz. that they are only required to be
similar), then his account of content similarity begs the very question it was supposed to
answer: his way of saying what it is for concepts to have similar but not identical contents
presupposes a prior notion of beliefs with similar but not identical contents.
The trouble, in a nutshell, is that all the obvious construals of similarity of beliefs (in fact,
all the construals that I've heard of) take it to involve partial overlap of beliefs.5 But this
treatment breaks down if the beliefs that are in the overlap are themselves construed as [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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