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The “catastrophe” of pragmatism

Brian Leiter

From Tim Crane’s review of Jerry Fodor’s Hume Variations (OUP) in the Times Literary Supplement, May 7, 2004, p. 4:

“With characteristic hyperbolic gloom, Fodor calls pragmatism ‘the defining catastrophe of analytic philosophy of language and philosophy of mind in the last half of the twentieth century.’ Its attempts to do without (something like) the theory of ideas is ‘a shambles from which philosophy has yet to fully recover.’ But what exactly is pragmatism? The essence of the view is that thinking or having concepts should be understood in terms of abilities: for example, in terms of the ability to classify things, or to make inferences, or to be able to recognize things, and so on. What pragmatism is opposed to is the theory that (in Barry Stroud’s words) ‘having an idea is fundamentally a matter of contemplating or viewing an “object”‘–in other words, that ideas are mental particulars or objects in the mind. The pragmatist argues that this view, supposedly one of the targets of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, is fundamentally flawed because it cannot account for the function of thinking or having concepts; instead this function must be explained in terms of practical or mental abilities….

“The idea that thinking is a kind of ability or activity or capacity is initially attractive; until one starts to try to figure out what kind of ability it might be. Consider the idea that the ability to think about Xs, say, is the ability to distinguish Xs from other things. But what is it to ‘distinguish’ [sort] something from something else?…

“[Fodor’s] objection is that even if one were able to sort the Xs from the Ys–let’s say by putting them into two piles–this would not show that one was sorting Xs from Ys as such. Suppose someone had the task of sorting triangles from squares, by putting all the triangles in one pile and the squares in another. The problem is that though the piles are the result of sorting the triangles from the squares, they would also be the result of sorting the trilaterals from the squares, since all triangles are trilaterals and vice versa. Sorting Xs from Ys is therefore compatible with not sorting them as Xs and Ys.”

Is Fodor right? Comments are open.

(The May 7 issue of TLS, by the way, has lots of good philosophy reviews–see esp. Tamler Sommers’s quite critical review of Susan Hurley’s Justice, Luck and Knowledge, P.F. Strawson’s laudatory review of Wolfgang Kunne’s Conceptions of Truth, Dean Zimmerman’s review of Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra’s Resemblance Nominalism, and Jonathan Wolff’s review of Philip Pettit’s A Theory of Freedom. TLS is really the only general intellectual journal that runs reviews of serious philosophy by serious philosophers on a regular basis. The profession is indebted to Galen Strawson, who advises the TLS on philosophy reviews, and who is thus most responsible for this excellent resource.)

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8 responses to “The “catastrophe” of pragmatism”

  1. Shai

    That definition isn't essential, or unique to, pragmatism. Daniel Dennett of "real patterns" fame claims to be some sort of pragmatist about truth, a mild behaviorist, and scientific realist whose thesis advisor was an ordinary language philosopher. Count the ways his philosophy is different from, say, Richard Rorty, or aspects of his scientism different from John Dewey on the scientific. So, really, Fodor's definition is a mislabel.

    Whatever we label that position, the discussion, to me, resembles a defective pre-experimental psychology. Something best avoided when one could lean on more conclusive work on perception, concepts, object recognition, etc.

    My suspicion is tentatively confirmed from the book's web page:

    "Fodor claims his [Hume's] Treatise of Human Nature as the foundational document of cognitive science: it launched the project of constructing an empirical psychology on the basis of a representational theory of mind. Going back to this work after more than 250 years we find that Hume is remarkably perceptive about the components and structure that a theory of mind requires. Careful study of the Treatise helps us to see what is amiss with much twentieth-century philosophy of mind, and to get on the right track."

    This, to me, looks like something a crank gestalt psychologist would say about cognitive science, except fodor is using the work of Hume rather than the mostly discredited gestalt phenomenological principles. I might be wrong as I havent read any of it.

    I'm reluctant to even pick the book up after the disaster that was "The Mind Doesn't Work That Way" (see Pinker's recent article "So How Does the Mind Work?" http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/papers/So_How_Does_the_Mind_Work.PDF).

    signed,

    only an undergraduate

    Reply
  2. Jeff Glick

    One need not read this recent work of Fodor's to hear his opinions on the matter. Fodor deals with this issue in his book Concepts. If memory serves, that work does not address the pragmatism issue, but certainly does address the difficulties of treating the phenomenon of thinking about F's as an ability to sort F's from other things.

    Reply
  3. Shai

    I haven't read Fodor in a while, but isn't his "objection" just a restatement of a common objection to his causal covariation account of meaning reference?

    From the following powerpoint:

    http://shorst.web.wesleyan.edu/ppt/concepts2.ppt

    "Basic idea: the semantic value of a “symbol in mentalese” is its (characteristic) cause

    More formally: there is an asymmetric causal covariation relation between cows and symbols that mean ‘cow’, and this explains why ‘cow’-symbols mean ‘cow’.

    Problems

    At best, an explanation of meaning-assignments, not of meaningfulness

    Account (putatively) distinguishes things that mean cow from those that mean horse

    Does not distinguish things that are meaningful from those that are meaningless–causal covariation is pandemic

    E.g., there is a causal covariation relation between cows and cowpies, but cowpies do not mean ‘cow’. Such a theory only explains meaning-assignments once meaning is already in the picture to begin with!
    "

    So read Fodor's "There Are No Recognitional Concepts; Not Even RED*"

    http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/concepts/FodorCh4.htm

    And then check out e.g. Lawrence Barsalou's work on ad hoc categories.

    Let me qualify my previous post. Fodor is an important thinker. I just think the problem described in the powerpoint file would be more readily solved if the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind junction became more interdisciplinary, to put it gently.

    misc link:

    Palmeri, T.J., & Noelle, D. (2002). Concept Learning. To appear in M.A. Arbib (Ed.), The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks, MIT Press.

    http://www.psy.vanderbilt.edu/faculty/palmeri/vita/pn02.html

    Reply
  4. Strange Doctrines

    "The problem is that though the piles are the result of sorting the triangles from the squares, they would also be the result of sorting the trilaterals from the squares, since all triangles are trilaterals and vice versa. Sorting Xs from Ys is therefore compatible with not sorting them as Xs and Ys."

    I could be missing the point, but it seems to me you could easily recast the competence (in quasi-reliabilist fashion, I guess) as one to distinguish Xs, Ys, Zs and As, where a Z is any object that is neither an X nor a Y but has some property in common with Xs and not with Ys, and where an A is any object that is neither an X nor a Y but has a property in common with Ys but not in common with Xs.

    A person endowed with this competence will therefore sort an object into the X pile only in the case that that object is an X, and an object into the Y pile only in the case that the object is a Y.

    Reply
  5. Chris

    I apologize if I am making a gross oversight here, but it seems to me that Fodor has just engaged in a cheap semantic trick.

    "[Fodor's] objection is that even if one were able to sort the Xs from the Ys–let's say by putting them into two piles–this would not show that one was sorting Xs from Ys as such. Suppose someone had the task of sorting triangles from squares, by putting all the triangles in one pile and the squares in another. The problem is that though the piles are the result of sorting the triangles from the squares, they would also be the result of sorting the trilaterals from the squares, since all triangles are trilaterals and vice versa. Sorting Xs from Ys is therefore compatible with not sorting them as Xs and Ys."

    I don't understand why this is an objection to the pragmatist view. It seems to me that it just shows that if a person has the concept TRIANGLE then he has the concept the word "trilateral" refers to as well since the capability is the same. Namely distuingishing the triangle/trilateral from the squares. The terms are synonymous. Someone may not know the definition of the word "trilateral" but if they have the concept TRIANGLE, it seems clear to me that they understand the concept that the word "trilateral" refers too.

    Reply
  6. Strange Doctrines

    Chris, I think Fodor tripped himself up with a faulty example. He meant something like: the fact that someone sorts horses and turtles into distinct groups doesn't mean that person has the concepts 'horse' and 'turtle' since his sorting behavior is consistent with someone distinguishing, say, horses and reptiles.

    Either way, though, it seems like a weak objection.

    Reply
  7. Chris T.

    I'm not sure a.) that Fodor's stalking horse is a complete form of pragmatism, because it seems to leave out instrumentalism, including which would make his example dilimma irrelevant, and b.) Fodor's example isn't really a problem even if you're not an instrumentalist. Even if you use horses and turtles, you can perform other tests do determine with the person's concept is more specific than "reptiles." In fact, you can perform a bunch of direct and indirect tests to get a good picture of what the person is representing about a particular concept, at least in particular contexts. Cognitive scientists do so all the time. Obviously this wouldn't help with the triangle-trilateral distinction, but that's because the two categories are, by definition, exactly coextensive. But that sort of makes a distinction cognitively unimportant, doesn't it?

    Reply
  8. dweisk

    I don't believe this particular argument against concept pragmatism is a good one. Fodor recently published a target article in Mind & Language (Fodor, 2004) in which he laid out the sorting argument against concept pragmatism (CP), to which Bill Bechtel and I replied in the same issue (Weiskopf & Bechtel, 2004). For the full discussion, see:

    http://mechanism.ucsd.edu/~bill/research/remarksonfodoronhavingconcepts.pdf

    (The other replies, by Prinz & Clark, Peacocke, and Rey, are all terrific, too.)

    The gist of our reply is as follows. Fodor argues that, according to CP, having concept C depends on sorting Cs. But sorting Cs depends on having concept C. Hence CP is circular, and the way out of the circle is to reject its claim about concept possession.

    Distinguish "mechanical sorting" (M-sorting) from "intentional sorting" (I-sorting). M-sorts can be carried out (to a first approximation) by any device that differentially responds to inputs by varying its state. M-sorts are as coarse-grained as extensions. Hence something that's M-sorting triangles is ipso facto M-sorting trilaterals. Something that's M-sorting dogs is ipso facto M-sorting barking quadrupeds; etc. I-sorts, however, are more fine-grained. What something is I-sorting depends on the way the object of the sort is conceived of. If I am thinking "triangle… triangle…" as I pile up triangles, then I am I-sorting triangles, not trilaterals. I-sorting cuts more finely than M-sorting.

    Digression: the idea behind Fodorian informational semantics is to ground I-sorting in the ability (or disposition, or what have you) to carry out various kinds of M-sorts. That's why Fodor's remarks on the connections between his own semantic theory and Skinner's view. It's also why he at one time thought that it commits one to a kind of verificationism. So there is a sense in which Fodor's own view tries to do what he thinks CP shouldn't be trying to do. As Fodor notes in his replies to the discussions of his (2004) paper, this is ad hominem. True, but one would like to know what Fodor is thinking about informational semantics these days. End of digression.

    Now, is CP circular? Not clearly. For suppose it claims that having concept C depends on being able to M-sort Cs. That seems like a plausible way to express its commitments, given Fodor's way of describing the view. The second claim, though, appears to state that being able to I-sort Cs depends on having the concept C. This seems true, supposing that concepts are the constituents of intentional states, and I don't see that CP needs to deny this. But it doesn't get you a circularity when conjoined with the first claim. And CP need not say that M-sorting Cs depends on having the concept C. Given the characterization of M-sorting, what could be the argument for that claim? (It's doubtful that Fodor would want to make that claim, for reasons sketched in the above digression.) Hence there is no circularity here, once we adequately distinguish the senses of sorting.

    As I said, that's the gist of the reply. In his reply to us, Fodor says that the issue really turns on the fact that M-sorting underdetermines content. But of course it does. That's why everyone (Fodor included) adds Factor X to sorting. In Fodor's case, it's "syntax", or the "shape" of mental symbols, or sometimes constituency relations. (For critique of the notion of syntax, see several papers by Murat Aydede.) CP could adopt any of these notions, or they could appeal to inferential tendencies of symbols, or any number of other possibilities. If Fodor needs Factor X, surely CP can have some, too. Interested readers should head to the target article, commentaries, and replies for more discussion.

    References:

    Fodor, J. (2004). Having concepts. Mind & Language, 19, 29-47.

    Weiskopf, D. A. & Bechtel, W. (2004) Remarks on Fodor on having concepts. Mind & Language, 19, 48-56.

    Reply

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