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these theories have traditionally wanted to distance themselves as much as
possible from supporters of the others, still all three theories are really
versions of one and the same idea about content. I want to stress this since
I m going to argue that it is primarily because of what they agree about
that all three fail.
The theories of concepts we ll be considering all assume a metaphysical
thesis which, as I remarked in Chapter 1, I propose to reject: namely, that
primitive concepts, and (hence) their possession conditions, are at least
partly constituted by their inferential relations. (That complex concepts
BROWN COW, etc. and their possession conditions are exhaustively
constituted by their inferential relations to their constituent concepts is
not in dispute; to the contrary, compositionality requires it, and
compositionality isn t negotiable.) The current near-universal acceptance
of Inferential Role Semantics in cognitive science marks a radical break
with the preceding tradition in theories about mind and language: pre-
modern theories typically supposed that primitive concepts are
individuated by their (e.g. iconic or causal) relations to things in the world.
The history of the conversion of cognitive scientists to IR semantics would
make a book by itself; a comedy, I think, though thus far without a happy
ending:
In philosophy, the idea was pretty explicitly to extend the Logicist
treatment of logical terms into the non-logical vocabulary; if IF and
SOME can be identified with their inferential roles, why not TABLE and
TREE as well?
In linguistics, the idea was to extend to semantics the Structuralist
notion that a level of grammatical description is a system of differences :
if their relations of equivalence and contrast are what bestow phonological
values on speech sounds, why shouldn t their relations of implication and
exclusion be what bestow semantic values on forms of words?
In AI, the principle avatar of IRS was procedural semantics , a
deeply misguided attempt to extend the principle of methodological
solipsism from the theory of mental processes to the theory of meaning:
if a mental process (thinking, perceiving, remembering, and the like) can
be purely computational why can t conceptual content be purely
computational too? If computers qua devices that perform inferences can
think, why can t computers qua devices that perform inferences mean?
I don t know how psychology caught IRS; perhaps it was from
philosophy, linguistics, and AI. (I know one eminent developmental
psychologist who certainly caught it from Thomas Kuhn.) Let that be an
object lesson in the danger of mixing disciplines. Anyhow, IRS got to be
Chaps. 1 & 2 11/3/97 1:13 PM Page 36
36 Unphilosophical Introduction
the fashion in psychology too. Perhaps the main effect of the cognitive
revolution was that espousing some or other version of IRS became the
received way for a psychologist not to be a behaviourist.
So, starting around 1950, practically everybody was saying that the
Fido Fido fallacy is fallacious,7 and that concepts (/words) are like
chess pieces: just as there can t be a rook without a queen, so there can t
be a DOG without an ANIMAL. Just as the value of the rook is partly
determined by its relation to the queen, so the content of DOG is partly
determined by its relation to ANIMAL. Content is therefore a thing that
can only happen internal to systems of symbols (or internal to languages,
or, on some versions, internal to forms of life). It was left to literary
theory to produce the reductio ad absurdum (literary theory is good at
that): content is constituted entirely by intra-symbolic relations; just as
there s nothing outside the chess game that matters to the values of the
pieces, so too there s nothing outside the text that matters to what it means.
Idealism followed, of course.
It is possible to feel that these various ways of motivating IRS,
historically effective though they clearly were, are much less than
overwhelmingly persuasive. For example, on reflection, it doesn t seem that
languages are a lot like games after all: queens and pawns don t mean
anything, whereas dog means dog. That s why, though you can t translate
the queen into French (or, a fortiori, into checkers), you can translate dog
into chien . It s perhaps unwise to insist on an analogy that misses so
glaring a difference.
Phonemes don t mean anything either, so prima facie, pace Saussure,
having a phonological value and having a semantic value would seem
to be quite different sorts of properties. Even if it were right that phonemes
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