Concepts

CONCEPTS, THE REALLY CURRENT VIEW

Anneli Jefferson gave an interesting talk about the subject that I am most confused about: the meaning of concepts. It seems that even within London there is no shared idea of what concepts are at all. This is alarming since philosophy is sometimes thought to be about conceptual analysis.
So here is a brief statement of a view that we can call the epistemological view:
[1] A concept is individuated by its possession conditions.
Fodor apparently calls this the “Current View”
The other option, the “Classical view” is that
[2] A concept is individuated by whatever it is that the concept represents.
I think this could even be called the Current Current view and I’ve got a feeling it is what David Papineau holds.
Anneli seemed to think that the possession conditions of a concept are a list of beliefs that one has that include the concept. Something like a Ramsey sentence. The problems with this are twofold
1. Publicity. What if two people have different beliefs including the same concept?
2. Error. How can a belief containing a concept be wrong?
There are of course various ways of addressing these problems. One being molecularism, which has it that there are a subset of core beliefs that it is necessary to have to possess a concept. These core beliefs then constitute the concept.
Fodor seems to be defending a more extreme Atomism, which is a combination of the Classical view, with the idea that all that is required to possess a concept is to be able to use it to represent the things the concept refers to.
Here is an example of a person who can clearly make statements including the concept that are true or false without any beliefs including the concept at all.
Mary is blind and has been brought up in a language community that were careful to never use colour words around her. Then she is given a spectrometer that tells her what colour things are when she points it at them. Mary can now have the following thought. “I wonder if the rose in the vase is red? I bet it is” I argue that Mary wins the bet if and only if the rose is red. She has no beliefs concerning red things whatsoever. She would still win the bet if and only if the rose is red even if she sold her spectrometer. The mere act of selling a piece of machinery cannot change the truth conditions of your thoughts or utterances.
Also she can wonder if her spectrometer is faulty and reports that green things are red. This thought is true iff her spectrometer is faulty and reports that green things are red. To have a reason to believe this she would need some beliefs about red things, but you don’t need any reasons at all to entertain a hypothesis.
Anneli might argue that Mary does have a red containing belief and that is that the spectrometer detects red things. But Mary can suspend belief in the existence of red things, in which case she can suspend belief in the ability of the spectrometer to detect red things.
What is clear is that she can form hypotheses and make statements involving the concept red that have empirical content. To anybody who has some method of settling whether things are red or not, she can represent things as red, truly or falsely. Neither party need have any beliefs about red things at all, they need not even be committed to the existence of anything red. What is important is that there are beliefs containing the concept red that it is possible for Mary to know. Let’s call this the Really Current view.
[3] Concepts are individuated by bet settlement criteria.

DOES MARY HAVE THE CONCEPT RED? a short play.

JOHN: Pass the red folder.
MARY: Ok, here you are.
JOHN: What colour is your front door?
MARY: Red.
JOHN: What colour shall we paint the kitchen?
MARY: I don’t mind, you choose.

THE END

On Hugh on Two Envelopes, by David Papineau.

On Wednesday Hugh McCormack’s excellent discussion of the two-envelope paradox laid out Sonia’s reasoning as below (if I remember it right).

(For those new to this paradox, Sonia is shown two envelopes, told one contains twice as much money as the other, and is then given one of the envelopes at random, and asked if she wants to swap it for the other. She then reasons . . . )

(1) Let x be the amount in my envelope.

(2) There’s a 50% chance that I’ll lose by swapping and a 50% chance that I’ll win.

(3) If I lose, the other envelope will give me 0.5x. If I win, the other envelope will give me 2x.

(4) The expected result of swapping will thus be 1.25x (50% x 0.5x + 50% x 2x) which is more than x.

(5) So I should swap.

But of course this is a silly conclusion. (If Jim were given the other envelope, he could reason just the same, but there couldn’t be reason for them both to swap.)

Hugh said that Sonia’s calculation must be misapplied because it implies, absurdly, that swapping can lead to an increase in the total money in the envelopes.

That is true enough, but I still hankered to know exactly where the reasoning laid out above goes astray.

I think it’s helpful (as suggested by Hugh in later correspondence) to compare Sonia with Fred. We give Fred an envelope containing a certain amount of money, and then then spin a coin (or something equivalent) to determine whether we put twice or half in the other.

Now Fred can do Sonia’s calculation as above (it’s 50%-50% whether swapping will win or lose, winning yields 2x, losing yields 0.5x . . . so I should swap). But note that in Fred’s case this is a GOOD conclusion. Fred should indeed swap.

So why exactly does Sonia get a bad answer when she does the calculation? After all, it’s equally true of her (since it was random which of the two envelopes she was given) that it’s 50%-50% that swapping will win or lose.

Here's what I would say about the flaw in Sonia's calculation.

(1) Suppose first we understand 'x' as referring fixedly to the actual amount that is in the envelope Sonia (or Fred) is now holding. Then it is NOT automatically true for Sonia (as it is for Fred) that there is a 50-50 chance that she will double or halve THAT amount. (That depends on the probabilistic pattern governing the placing of the amounts in the two envelopes initially presented to Sonia. So, for instance, if the envelope she’s given actually contains a very large amount, towards the upper end of the range of possible amounts, then it's more likely she has 'big' and will lose by swapping--and conversely if her envelope contains an amount towards the bottom end of the range of possible sums.)

(2) What about the TRUTH that Sonia has a 50-50 chance of winning or losing? Well, that's true enough, but we can't plug those 50-50 odds into her calculation. Think of it like this. Her calculation says there are two 50-50 possibilities--she has the big envelope OR she has the small envelope. And the calculation tries to say that in the first possibility swapping will lose 0.5x and in the second swapping will gain x. But 'x' doesn't refer to the SAME number in each of these possibilities. In the first it refers to the amount in the big envelope, in the second it refers to the amount in the small envelope. No wonder this spurious calculation makes swapping seem attractive—it implicitly supposes that the sum in your envelope when you lose will be the SAME as when you win, when in truth it will be twice as big. (Note that for Fred it IS the same amount in his envelope in the two possibilities that he has 'big' and he has 'small'--that's why it is OK for him to do Sonia's calculation using the 50-50 odds.)

(There’s nothing original in the above—the literature says all this and lots more.)

David Papineau

Is Philosophy Science?

I’ll just post some impressions of tonight’s seminar. I’ll not mention Chris Hughes since he was being too reasonable to warrant comment.

Wilfried made some beautiful statements that I found myself agreeing with. There is no know how/ know that distinction, if knowledge doesn’t have an application then it fails to be right or wrong and there is no criteria for truth. There is no criteria for correctness in philosophy so philosophy is like singing.
But I wasn’t convinced that this made philosophy any different from science. Wilfried also said that in science you stand on the shoulders of giants, whereas in philosophy you bring the giants to their knees. There is a one to one relationship between philosophers and theories. Science created his pen and was the fact that his TV didn’t work. I doubt that the TV repair man is anymore of a scientist than a philosopher, nor that the beautiful fountain pen relied on any scientific principles that weren’t around in Archimedes time.
David Papineau made a couple of interesting outrageous comments: That philosophy did not involve conceptual analysis and that philosophy was unlike science when it concerned itself with modality, but that modality was only peripheral to philosophy anyway.
Of course in a room full of philosophers there was a lot of singing going on about what philosophy was, and a lot of agreement in this regard. But there was no clear idea of what science was.
Science is exclusively modal (I polemically claim) Science tells us what is possible, what is necessary and what is impossible. Water boils at 100 degrees centigrade. A modal claim. It is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light. A modal claim. Scientific laws extend to counterfactual cases, so any statement of scientific law is a statement about what might be, what can be, what can’t be and what couldn’t have been.
Science is not directly practical. Very little technology is developed by scientists. It is true that a good bridge builder, or pen manufacturer will use principles that have been worked out at some point by scientists. But they will also use aesthetic principles and operate within a political environment that has been shaped by ideas of a softer kind. The pen that Wilfried Ostended was as much a product of Bentham and Marx as it was of any science. Einstein, the archetypal scientist, was not a scientist because of Hiroshoma, he wasn’t even a scientist because of the motion of Mercury. If his theory had been proven false he may not have been so famous, but he would still have been doing science. Science without application is not thereby philosophy and philosophy with application is not thereby science.