0199285489.pdf by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0199285489
Published: 2008-06-05T12:41:45+00:00

8.3

C O N C E P T P O S S E S S I O N I S N OT A L L - O R - N OT H I N G

Cats, babies, and many much less sophisticated organisms perceive, learn about,

and represent their environments. To be accessible for use the information they

acquire must be organized, if only in rudimentary ways. That organization

involves, among other things, their tending to group different items together, so

that they can treat them similarly. And that starts to seem like conceptualization,

at least in a rudimentary sense, although, as the example of the bees suggests, even

very complex systems of classification may fail to involve genuine interpretation,

assessment, and decision-making by the system as a whole.

However, Evans is not alone in refusing to allow any system to count as having

concepts unless it also has complex and demanding other abilities. John Campbell

claims that concept possession is ‘defined by’ a certain ‘core set of abilities’ which among other things includes self-consciousness in a strong sense.² José Bermúdez

requires possession of language: according to his ‘Priority Principle’, ‘Conceptual

abilities are constitutively linked with linguistic abilities in such a way that con-

ceptual abilities cannot be possessed by non-linguistic creatures’ (1998: 42).

Those certainly appear to be strong claims. But it turns out that these philo-

sophers are mostly legislating for the use of ‘concept’, ‘belief ’, and related words rather than making substantive claims about the limits of thought. They find it

helpful for their purposes to impose strong conditions on concept possession and

believing, without denying that languageless creatures can have something like

beliefs and concepts.

Bermúdez, for example, appeals persuasively to animal studies to support

the view that non-linguistic creatures may be aware of themselves. Self-aware

psychological subjects will be ‘aware of themselves as perceivers, as agents, and as

having reactive psychological states’ (247). He brings evidence from develop-

mental psychology in support of his view that non-linguistic infants acquire

this sort of awareness between 9 and 10 months. However, because he insists

that genuine beliefs must have ‘conceptual’ contents, he refuses to admit that lan-

guageless creatures also have beliefs: they have only ‘proto-beliefs’. His Priority

Principle would do powerful work indeed if we had good reason to accept it. His

main justification seems to be that having genuine beliefs and concepts requires

the ability to justify inferences; and he cannot see how a creature without

language could do that. He leads up to this point via consideration of empirical

evidence which seems on the face of it to show that languageless infants have the

² J. Campbell (1994: 3). John McDowell says, ‘Creatures without conceptual capacities [sc. in the demanding sense he favours] lack self-consciousness and . . . experience of objective reality’ (1994: 114).

Susan Hurley says that ‘if the information that a given object has a certain property is conceptualized, . . .

it has a structure that enables the person . . . [to] quantify and make inferences that depend on such decompositional structure and context-freedom’ (1997: 207).

De-sophisticating the Framework

123

elements of the concept of an object (roughly: of something bounded, more or

less impenetrable, and spatiotemporally continuous).

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