Conceptual Role Semantics Research Articles

The Euthyphro challenge in metasemantics

AbstractThis paper argues that functionalist metasemantic views, such as Conceptual Role Semantics and Interpretivism, face a Euthyphro challenge. The challenge, put roughly, is this: functionalist metasemantic views reverse the order of explanation. According to such views, representational mental states have the contents that they do partly because they play certain roles in our mental lives. According to an intuitive picture of the roles that representational mental states play in our mental lives, however, these states play the roles they do partly because they have the contents that they do. Since explanations—even partial ones—are asymmetric (call this principle ‘the Euthyphro Principle’), we can't accept both this intuitive picture and a functionalist metasemantics. Hence, we should reject all versions of the latter. This paper can be seen as an attempt to better articulate an intuition that has been suggested in various forms in the literature. The paper proceeds as follows. First, it shows that functionalist metasemantic views imply certain ‘partly because’ claims. Second, it argues for the Euthyphro Principle. Third, it defends the intuitive picture of representational mental states and shows that it implies ‘partly because’ claims that conflict with those made by functionalist metasemantic views. Finally, it considers ways of relaxing the intuitive picture and finds them all wanting.

Armchair Methods in Philosophy of Mind

Jaegwon Kim relied principally on armchair methods in approaching problems in philosophy of mind. This paper is concerned with the nature of such methods and their prospects of success. Identifying the main armchair methods as introspection, modal reasoning involving conceivability tests, and conceptual analysis, the paper argues that insofar as the first two members of this trio aim to reveal the constitutive metaphysical natures of mental states, they are unable to reach their objective. In contrast, it defends conceptual analysis, arguing that Quine’s attempt to discredit it fails. More specifically, it maintains that a certain form of conceptual role semantics is immune to Quine’s strictures against meaning, and that this conception of meaning allows room for armchair discoveries about the meanings of our words (though it has no tendency to provide access to deep facts about the constitutive metaphysical natures of extralinguistic entities).

Ways of Unworlding: Against Aesthetic Inferentialism

I consider and support two claims about aesthetic experience: 1) that it involves encounters with a reality that is not conceptualized via such encounters; 2) that it can generate ruptures in established norms or in the production of shared worlds. This thesis is developed in the teeth of contemporary rationalist inhumanisms that draw on Nelson Goodman’s cognitivist aesthetics and his irrealist account of ‘worldmaking’ to translate the logical insights of inferentialism (or conceptual role semantics) into an aesthetics oriented towards concept-laden practices and their revision through the techniques of experimental art. I employ Derrida’s iterability argument to show that inferentialism presupposes a realist metaphysics that treats repetition and event individuation as independent of constitutive rules, conceptual schemes or ‘world versions’; indicating one way in which aesthetic material remains outside of, even recalcitrant to, the conceptual order. The aesthetic implications of this metaphysics of undecidable events are further explored by considering Jean-Pierre Caron’s recent discussion of Henry Flynt’s idea of ‘constitutive dissociations’ and, finally, the concept as, ambivalently, victim or suicide in the experimental horror of Gary Shipley’s novel Warewolff! and my own Snuff Memories.

The computational origin of representation.

Each of our theories of mental representation provides some insight into how the mind works. However, these insights often seem incompatible, as the debates between symbolic, dynamical, emergentist, sub-symbolic, and grounded approaches to cognition attest. Mental representations-whatever they are-must share many features with each of our theories of representation, and yet there are few hypotheses about how a synthesis could be possible. Here, I develop a theory of the underpinnings of symbolic cognition that shows how sub-symbolic dynamics may give rise to higher-level cognitive representations of structures, systems of knowledge, and algorithmic processes. This theory implements a version of conceptual role semantics by positing an internal universal representation language in which learners may create mental models to capture dynamics they observe in the world. The theory formalizes one account of how truly novel conceptual content may arise, allowing us to explain how even elementary logical and computational operations may be learned from a more primitive basis. I provide an implementation that learns to represent a variety of structures, including logic, number, kinship trees, regular languages, context-free languages, domains of theories like magnetism, dominance hierarchies, list structures, quantification, and computational primitives like repetition, reversal, and recursion. This account is based on simple discrete dynamical processes that could be implemented in a variety of different physical or biological systems. In particular, I describe how the required dynamics can be directly implemented in a connectionist framework. The resulting theory provides an "assembly language" for cognition, where high-level theories of symbolic computation can be implemented in simple dynamics that themselves could be encoded in biologically plausible systems.

Conceptual Role Semantics and Rationality

Conceptual role semanticists argue that concepts are individuated in terms of their roles in cognition. Some prominent conceptual role semanticists argue for the further claim that concepts are individuated in terms of their rational roles in cognition. This further claim places substantive normative constraints on concept-constitutive roles. I argue that conceptual role semanticists can and should resist the claim that conceptual roles must be specified in inherently normative terms.

Belief, Desire, and Giving and Asking for Reasons

We adjudicate a recent dispute concerning the desire theory of well-being. Stock counterexamples to the desire theory include “quirky” desires that seem irrelevant to well-being, such as the desire to count blades of grass. Bruckner (2016) claims that such desires are relevant to well-being, provided that the desirer can characterize the object in such a way that makes it clear to others what attracts the desirer to it. Lin (2016) claims that merely being attracted to the object of one’s desire should be sufficient for it to be relevant to one’s well-being. The capacity to characterize the desire as Bruckner requires does no work in the explanation of the welfare-relevance of the desire, Lin claims, especially since Lin’s account and Bruckner’s account are extensionally equivalent. In response, we provide a conceptual analysis of desire based on conceptual role semantics. Our analysis shows the plausibility of and motivation for Bruckner’s account. As well, it shows that the extensional equivalence of the accounts is no accident, but due to what it is to have a desire. Lin has not succeeded in providing an alternative to Bruckner’s account, but merely reformulated it, though in an illuminating way that supports Bruckner’s original case.

Conceptual Role Semantics and the Reference of Moral Concepts

AbstractThis paper examines the prospects for a conceptual or functional role theory of moral concepts. It is argued that such an account is well‐placed to explain both the irreducibility and practicality of moral concepts. Several versions of conceptual role semantics for moral concepts are distinguished, depending on whether the concept‐constitutive conceptual roles are (i) wide or narrow (ii) normative or non‐normative and (iii) purely doxastic or conative. It is argued that the most plausible version of conceptual role semantics for moral concepts involves only ‘narrow’ conceptual roles, where these include connections to motivational, desire‐like, states. In the penultimate section it is argued, contrary to what Wedgwood, Enoch and others have claimed, that such an account of moral concepts cannot plausibly be combined with the claim that moral concepts refer to robust properties.

Что нам дает концептуально-ролевая семантика?

Что нам дает концептуально-ролевая семантика?

目的意味論について

Philosophers of mind have advanced three approaches in the project of naturalizing semantics: information semantics, conceptual role semantics, and teleo-semantics. This paper examines the most celebrated but complicated version of teleo-semantics, that is, Millikan's theory of representations. The first half of this paper (section 1-3) motivates and formulates her theory. The latter half (section 4-6) provides clarification of the two technical notions in terms of which Millikan's theory is formulated. One is the cooperation among the producers and the consumers of the representations. The other is the Normal conditions where the consumers of the representations function properly.

Compositional Semantics for Expressivists

I here propose a hitherto unnoticed possibility of solving embedding problems for noncognitivist expressivists in metaethics by appeal to Conceptual Role Semantics. I show that claims from the latter as to what constitutes various concepts can be used to define functions from states expressed by atomic sentences to states expressed by complex sentences, thereby allowing an expressivist semantics that satisfies a rather strict compositionality constraint (as well as a further, substantial explanatory constraint). The proposal can be coupled with several different types of concept individuation claim (e.g., normative or causal-functional), and is shown to pave the way to novel accounts for, e.g., negation.

Nurse–patient communication: language mastery and concept possession

Influential holistic analyses of patient perspectives assume that the concepts that patients associate with medical terms are formed by their total social and cultural contexts. Holistic analyses presuppose conceptual role semantics in the sense that they imply that a medical term must have the same role for a nurse and a patient in order for them to associate the same concept with the term. In recent philosophy of mind, social externalism has emerged as a non-holistic alternative to conceptual role theories. According to social externalism, a nurse and a patient express the same concept by a term if they both have a minimal or better understanding of the term. Three arguments in favour of social externalism are presented in connection with nurse-patient interaction. The first concerns successful communication, the second focuses on belief reports made by patients and the third centres on the need for including medical terms in medical discourse. Finally, the practical implications of the arguments are clarified. The most important of these is that, in cases of misunderstanding, a nurse should not conform to a patient's idiosyncratic understanding, but instead correct the mistaken applications of the term in question.

A Slim Semantics for Thin Moral Terms?

This paper is a critique of Ralph Wedgwood's recent attempt to use the framework of conceptual role semantics in metaethics. Wedgwood's central idea is that the action-guiding role of moral terms suffices to determine genuine properties as their semantic values. We argue that Wedgwood cannot get so much for so little. We explore two interpretations of Wedgwood's account of what it takes to be competent with a thin moral term. On the first interpretation, the account does not warrant the assignment of a normative property as the semantic value of the target expression. On the second interpretation, the account presupposes that the subject has a prior understanding of normative notions.

Holism, Conceptual-Role Semantics, and Syntactic Semantics

This essay continues my investigation of `syntactic semantics': the theory that, pace Searle's Chinese-Room Argument, syntax does suffice for semantics (in particular, for the semantics needed for ...

Conceptual Role Semantics for Moral Terms

One of the central questions of metaethics is semantical. An answer to this semantical question would be an account of the meaning of moral statements. There are three main approaches to this semantical question that are most familiar in contemporary metaethics: (i) noncognitivism or expressivism, (ii) noncircular analysis, and (iii) the causal theory of reference. In this paper, I shall present a new approach to this question, an approach that I call conceptual role semantics for moral terms. In conclusion, I shall try to indicate briefly why my approach is preferable to those three more familiar alternatives. First, however, I shall say something about this semantical question, and why it matters to the rest of metaethics.

Conceptual Role Semantics for Moral Terms

Conceptual Role Semantics for Moral Terms

Precis of Making It Explicit

The book is an attempt to explain the meanings of linguistic expressions in terms of their use. The explanatory strategy is to begin with an account of social practices, to identify the particular structure they must exhibit in order to qualify as specifically linguistic practices, and then to consider what different sorts of semantic contents those practices can confer on states, performances, and expressions caught up in them in suitable ways. The result is a kind of conceptual role semantics that is at once firmly rooted in actual practices of producing and consuming speech acts, and sufficiently finely articulated to make clear how those practices are capable of conferring a rich variety of kinds of content. Claims about the relations between meaning and use only have a clear sense in the context of a specification of the vocabulary in which that use is described or ascribed. At one extreme, use clearly determines meaning in the strongest possible sense if admissible specifications of the use can include such phrases as using the word 'not' to express negation, or using the term 'Julius Caesar' to refer to Julius Caesar. At an opposite extreme, if admissible specifications of use are restricted to descriptions of the movements of particles expressed in the vocabulary of physics, not only will the use, so described, fail to settle what is meant or expressed by various noises or inscriptions, it will in general fail to settle even that anything is meant or expressed by them. The specification of use employed here is neither so generous as to permit semantic or intentional vocabulary, nor so parsimonious as to insist on purely naturalistic vocabulary. Instead, it makes essential use of normative vocabulary. The practices that confer propositional and other sorts of conceptual content implicitly contain norms concerning how it is correct to use expressions, under what circumstances it is appropriate to perform various speech acts, and what the appropriate consequences of such performances are. Chapter One introduces and motivates this normative pragmatics, which is rooted in considerations ad-

Holism: A Shopper's Guide.

Preface. 1. Introduction: A Geography of The Issues. 2. Confirmation Holism and Meaning Holism: W. V. O. Quine. 3. Meaning Holism and Radical Interpretation: Donald Davidson. 4. Meaning Holism and The Inextricability Thesis: David Lewis. 5. Meaning Holism and The Normativity of Intentional Ascription (and A Little More about Davidson): D. C. Dennett. 6. Meaning Holism and Conceptual Role Semantics: Ned Block. 7. State Space Semantics (and A Brief Conclusion): Paul Churchland.

On a Semantic Argument against Conceptual Role Semantics

Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore have announced the discovery of a 'crack in the foundations of the structure in which semanticists and philosophers of language have been cohabiting' ([5], p. 342). They go on to 'urge that somebody do something about' this crack in the foundation of semantics 'not later than sometime before the roof falls in'. I argue in this paper that Fodor and Lepore have triggered a false alarm. The trouble starts, according to Fodor and Lepore, with the following traditional question that arises for a theory of meaning: Where do semantic properties come from? Fodor and Lepore, following contemporary practice, replace this traditional question with the following question: What do the semantic properties of symbols supervene upon? We are told that there have been two main answers to this question. 'Old Testament Semantics' claims that the meaning of an expression supervenes on the relations that the expression bears to things in the world. 'New Testament Semantics' claims that the meaning of a term supervenes on its role in a language. Although Hume, Skinner, Dretske, Fodor, and others are cited as Old Testament Semanticists, New Testament Semantics, due in part to the Fregean Evening Star/Morning Star objection, is said to be 'held practically as gospel not only in linguistics and philosophy, but throughout the Cognitive Sciences' ([5], p. 331). This near universal acceptance of New Testament Semantics persists, we are told, in spite of powerful objections to New Testament Semantics, objections centring around claims that New Testament Semantics implies semantic holism.1 The 'holism' objections to New Testament Semantics, though 'serious',

On a Semantic Argument against Conceptual Role Semantics

On a Semantic Argument against Conceptual Role Semantics

Conceptual role semantics and the explanatory role of content

I've tried to argue that there is more to representational content than CRS can acknowledge. CRS is attractive, I think, because of its rejection of atomism, and because it is a plausible theory of targets. But those are philosopher's concerns. Someone interested in building a person needs to understand representation, because, as AI researchers have urged for some time, good representation is the secret of good performance. I have just gestured in the direction I think a viable theory of representation must take. I hope, however, to have created some advance sympathy for the gesture by distinguishing the problem of representation from the problem of targets on the one hand, and from the problem truth-conditions for the attitudes on the other.