Externalism cannot work as a theory of concepts without explaining how we reidentify substances as being of the same kind. Yet this process implies just the level of descriptive content to which externalism seeks to deny a role in conceptual content

Hampton, J. A.

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Hampton, J. A. (1998). Staying in touch: Externalism needs descriptions. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21(1), 74 - 74.City Research OnlineOriginal citation: Hampton, J. A. (1998). Staying in touch: Externalism needs descriptions. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21(1), 74 - 74.Permanent City Research Online URL: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/943/ Copyright & reuseCity  University  London has developed City  Research Online  so that  its  users  may access the research outputs of City University London's staff. Copyright © and Moral Rights for this paper are retained by the individual author(s) and/ or other copyright holders. Users may download and/ or print one  copy  of  any  article(s)  in  City  Research  Online  to  facilitate  their  private  study  or  for  non-commercial research. Users may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. All material in City Research Online is checked for eligibility for copyright before being made available in the live archive. URLs from City Research Online may be freely distributed and linked to from other web pages. Versions of researchThe version in City Research Online may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check the Permanent City Research Online URL above for the status of the paper.EnquiriesIf you have any enquiries about any aspect of City Research Online, or if you wish to make contact  with the author(s) of this paper, please email the team at publications@city.ac.uk. Commentary/Millikan: A common structure for concepts of individuals, stuffs, and real kinds74 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1998) 21:1to take the form of individual relations between reified “concepts”and real kinds.We can expect, however, that the external objects will play acrucial role in learning in the very bootstrapping processes I justdescribed. Somehow our interactions with the external world leadus to form one set of ontological convictions, one theory, ratherthan another. Even if knowing our theories is all we need to explainour current psychological functioning, we may well need to invokerelations to the external world to explain why we have thosetheories rather than others. These learning processes have beenalmost completely neglected in cognitive psychology. If Millikan’sexternalism forces us to solve the problem of how our interactionswith the world lead to conceptual change, she will have providedan important service to psychology as well as philosophy.Staying in touch: Externalism needsdescriptionsJames A. HamptonDepartment of Psychology, City University, Northampton Square, LondonEC1V 0HB, UK. j.a.hampton@city.ac.ukAbstract: Externalism cannot work as a theory of concepts withoutexplaining how we reidentify substances as being of the same kind. Yet thisprocess implies just the level of descriptive content to which externalismseeks to deny a role in conceptual content.The recent antidescriptionist, externalist program for concepts hasimpressed few empirical psychologists, as might be expected giventhat it takes the most interesting question – Why do we have theconcepts that we do? – and seeks to provide an answer that haslittle use for (or of ) psychological inquiry. The question is whattruly constitutes or defines the content of a concept. Description-ists look to answer the question by identifying the collected set ofbeliefs that a person has gathered about a class or type of thing.Thus, to a descriptionist the concept “milk” is the set of propertydescriptions which tend (generally) to hold true of a particularclass of stuff. According to which descriptionist theory you es-pouse, these descriptions may involve a greater or lesser degree oftheoretical elaboration or stored experience. They may also bepartial or incomplete.The problem with this descriptionist view, as identified byMillikan and others, appears to be that it puts the cart before thehorse. How are we able to accumulate a set of beliefs about asubstance concept, if we cannot first have a reasonably reliablemeans of knowing that a new experience is of the same kind as anearlier one? How can we add a new belief to the set withoutindependently first identifying what our belief is about? To Milli-kan the ability to reidentify something as an instance of the sameclass is logically prior to the acquisition of descriptive propertiesthat may be generally true of the class. Conceptual content isconstituted by the real nature of the class that gives rise to these(fallible) acts of reidentification. All our internal concepts do ispoint to real classes in nature.The problem of reidentification is clearly central to Millikan’sargument. Yet how exactly can the process occur without involvingsome form of descriptive representational format? As Millikanpoints out, the ways in which we reidentify Mama, a cat, or a glassof milk will all depend on different aspects of the perceptual andsensorimotor information presented to us. Yet how are we to knowanything at all about a newly experienced object without transduc-ing its physical characteristics through our sensory organs andperceptual apparatus, thereby deriving a mental representation ofit? There can surely be no identification or reidentification with-out a concomitant creation of a mental description.Millikan answers this question by stating that such a descriptionneed not imply property concepts since “the thought of a propertyis not just a reaction caused by a property; it must play anappropriate representational role ” (sect. 5, para. 7). She proposesthat descriptions may be used in reidentification, but that theyshould not be representable in thought. It is puzzling how thisdistinction between the “aspects” of objects used to identify themand true “property concepts” that can also be represented inthought is meant to be cashed out. Perhaps being representable inthought means that a property can be isolated by attending to it asa separable dimension (i.e., making judgments about it indepen-dently of other dimensions), as well as being able to label it with alanguage term.Yet why should descriptionist accounts of concepts be limited intheir descriptive vocabulary to such a limited range of descriptivepower? It should be clear that there are many crucial aspects ofconceptual knowledge that fail this test. The way that we representthe shape of “cat,” or the taste of “milk,” or the face, voice, andsmell of “Mama” are most unlikely to involve independentlyisolated features or dimensions representable in thought. But whyshould we not consider these concepts to involve descriptiveinformation, and why should we suppose that we perform therecognition independently of the descriptive information we havealready stored with the concept?A descriptionist account of concepts could not possibly get offthe ground if its representational power did not include the abilityto store and represent this kind of imagistic information. We areclearly capable of representing a wide range of information thatcould not be expressed in language. Verbal concepts must begrounded in experience at some level. Given a realistic version ofdescriptionist concept representation, it is hard to make sense ofMillikan’s distinction between unanalysed reidentification aspectsand “concepts of properties.” Millikan’s argument relies on anotion of description that is so restrictive as to rule out any accountof concepts other than those nominal concepts with explicitdefinitions such as prime number.The target article also fails to address a major critique ofexternalist theories, which should be familiar to all followers of thisdebate. It is just not true that all of our concepts are tracking realclasses in the world. We may concede that natural kinds have anindependent existence as classes, but the majority of conceptsinvolved in everyday thought are not natural kinds. Take some ofthe political and moral issues that have divided society in recentyears. Externalism seems to require that in each and every casethere be a real and objective answer as to which side is correct;there is an external “good,” which we attempt to track through ourfallible concepts. This is an extreme position to be forced into.Other concepts are defined relative to the possessor. Thus “hometown” and “favorite food” are defined relative to the person whosehome town or favorite food it is. For these concepts it is clearly falseto say that each concept possessor is tracking the same externallyreal class. Yet how could the concepts then be defined exceptthrough their descriptions, as they exist within that individual?In summary, whatever the merits of the “pointing” view ofconcepts as an account of very young children’s first attempts toconstruct concepts, any psychologically adequate theory of the fullrange of adult concepts will need to incorporate a strong descrip-tionist component.Reidentification and redescriptionMarc D. Hausera and W. Tecumseh FitchbaDepartments of Anthropology and Psychology, Harvard University,Cambridge, MA 02138. hauser@wjh.harvard.eduwjh.harvard.edu/,mnkylabbSpeech and Hearing Sciences Program, Harvard-MIT, Cambridge, MA02138. tec@wjh.harvard.edu wjh.harvard.edu/,mnkylabAbstract: Millikan’s account of substance concepts fails to do away withfeatures. Her approach simply moves the suite of relevant features into anencapsulated module. The crux of the problem for scientists studyinghuman infants and nonhuman animals is to determine how individualsreidentify objects and events in the world.

Staying in touch: Externalism needs descriptions

Externalism cannot work as a theory of concepts without 
explaining how we reidentify substances as being of the same kind. 
Yet this process implies just the level of descriptive content to 
which externalism seeks to deny a role in conceptual 
content.</jats:p

Staying in touch: Externalism needs descriptions

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