What Is a Concept? 1

Abstract

Lynne Baker was a staunch defender of intentional realism – the view that beliefs and other intentional states are no less real than the entities studied by biology, chemistry, and physics. In this paper, I attempt to extend Baker’s defense of intentional realism by responding to three interrelated objections that she never addressed. All three have roots in the work of W. V. Quine, though they have since been amplified by other authors. One is based on skepticism about the individuation of propositions, the objects of belief and other intentional states. Another maintains that attributions of intentional states are so radically underdetermined by behavioral and other forms of empirical data that they should not be considered epistemically robust. The third promotes intentional holism, which asserts that intentional states are tied together so seamlessly by inferential networks that there are problems with attributing the same state to different people, and with attributing a state to the same person at different times. I argue that all three of these objections turn on inadequate views about the scope and power of the laws governing intentional states that we find in folk psychology and cognitive science.