How Analytic Philosophy has Failed Cognitive Science

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KTM in a blanket allocate 100 colleges on yourself a say the name shows a week articulating reasons and introduction to inference really beyond immediate eagle mo don't call the traditional Aussie did you say red teeth with the misogynist wha how analytic philosophy has failed cognitive science so team who I am is from the TSV USA apply power como we love you Sofia nari kick monkey a FIFO cognitive well yeah something mote you get a silly point you do consultants on the job he could refuse me a ticket on three dozen first the d-class ladyship plant a want to cuddle a late lovely more power this was completely lost on sorta monkey Zuma definitely to ship off voice premium I see we were to move out mm just casually good of his duty analytic reveals to the question atomic consider the philosophy of mind displayed default position typically upon the order to conserve and restore many of the erection obscure obscurantist Rock landed on Greystoke was not a police alternative borodyansky dish you jerk okay shows a monkey oceans cognitive me sunny podium all cousins electrical communications over the fares an account here monument that possible mana food disability sale problem occur on a sea of concerns the field of genetic monkey acid the WHA alika the additions community the potato mandela community ontario general Tagge india brave my sternum with the root zone cousin port on taquile the refuse of generality copper to create the Frey girl because you know the record the periosteum model is regulated consider up to the holy regards really participating comfort I think I do too low-key a bit longer as shown here a diffuse affinity copper security concern a concept the lapis owned only concept organ is it the first naxi result the concept click on his own durable the conditioned response instrument which they considered cetera doing silly song know some little gem native irritably more a please a strong the Porsche ad receive all present on the refugee analytic Gibson the prefer a or for guard upon the conditions at which used the critically for when this you do communicate week provides a partial Monica or present conditions creating a potato for a community a congenial she's not a puppy so support post treatment resin place just won't cooperate to mediate more upon we analytic philosophers have signally failed our colleagues in cognitive science and we've done that by not sharing central essence about the nature of concepts concept use and conceptual content that have been entrusted to our care and feeding for more than a century I take it that analytic philosophy began with the birth of the new logic that Gottlob fleiger introduced in his seminal 1879 the Griff shrift the idea taken up in champion to begin with by Bertrand Russell was that the fundamental insights and tools that Frager made available there and developed and deployed through the 1890s could be applied throughout philosophy to advance our understanding of understanding and thought in general by advancing our understanding of concepts including the particular concepts with which the philosophical tradition had been concerned since its inception for franca brought about a revolution not just in logic but in semantics he made possible for the first time a mathematical characterization of meaning and conceptual content and so of the structure of sapience itself henceforth there was to be the business of the new movement of analytic philosophy to explore and amplify those ideas to exploit and apply them wherever they could do the most good those ideas are our cultural birthright heritage and responsibility but we analytic philosophers have not done right by them for we fail to communicate some of the most basic of those ideas have failed to explain their significance fail to make them available in forms usable by those working in allied disciplines who are also professionally concerned to understand the nature of thought minds and reason now contemporary cognitive science as a house with many mansions the provinces I mean particularly to be addressing our cognitive psychology developmental psychology animal psychology especially primatology and artificial intelligence cognitive psychology aims at reverse engineering the human mind figuring out how we do what we do what more basic abilities are recruited and deployed and how so as to result in the higher cognitive abilities we actually display developmental psychology investigates the sequence of stages by which those abilities emerge from the more primitive versions as individual humans mature animal psychology as I'm construing it is a sort of combination of cognitive psychology of non-human intelligences and a phylogenetic version of the ontogenetic human developmental psychology and by contrast to all those empirical inquiries into actual cognition artificial intelligence swings free of questions about how any actual organisms do what they do and asks instead what constellation of abilities of the sort we know how to implement in artifacts might in principle yield sapiens each of these disciplines is in its own way concerned with the broadly empirical question of how the trick of cognition is or might be done philosophers by contrast have been concerned with the normative question of what would count is doing it with what understanding particularly discursive conceptual understanding consists in rather than how creatures with a particular contingent Constitution history and armamentarium of basic abilities come to exhibit it I think Frager taught us three fundamental lessons about the structures of concepts and hints about all possible abilities that deserve to count as concept using abilities the conclusions we should draw from his discoveries is that concept use is intrinsically stratified it exhibits at least four basic layers with each capacity to deploy concepts in a more sophisticated sense of concept structurally presupposing the capacity to use concepts in all of the more primitive senses the three lessons that generate the structural hierarchy obliges to distinguish first between concepts that only label and concepts that describe second between ingredient and free-standing conceptual contents which make explicit the distinction between the content of concepts and the force of applying them and third concepts expressible already by simple predicates and concepts expressible in principle only by complex predicates AI researchers and cognitive developmental and animal psychologists need to take account of the different grades of conceptual content that are made visible by these distinctions both in order to be clear about the topic they're investigating after all if they're going to tell us how the trick is to be done they need to be clear about exactly which trick it is and because the empirical and in principle possibilities are constrained by the way the abilities to deploy concepts in all these various senses structurally presuppose the others that appear earlier in the sequence this is a point cognitive scientists have long appreciated on the side of basic syntactic complexity but the at least equally important and I would argue more conceptually fundamental hierarchy of semantic complexity has been largely ignored so first I want to talk about the transition from labeling to disk in the early modern philosophical tradition was built around a class of ikana sness and hence of concepts in part the result of what his scholastic predecessors had made of their central notion of Aristotelian forms the paradigmatic cognitive act for them is understood as classifying taking something particular as being of some general kind concepts are then identified with the general kinds this conception was enshrined in an order of logical explanation originating in Aristotle's prior analytics that was common to everyone thinking about concepts and consciousness in the period leading up to Kant at its base is a doctrine of terms or concepts particularly in general the next layer erected on that base is a doctrine of judgments describing the kinds of class of Kotori relations that are possible among such terms for instance besides classifying Socrates as human humans can be classified as mortal finally in terms of those meta classifications grouping judgments in two kinds according to the sorts of terms they relate a doctrine of consequences or syllogisms as propounded classifying valid inferences in two kinds depending on which classes of class of Kotori judgments their premises and conclusions fall under it's the master idea of classification that gives this traditional order of explanation it's distinctive shape that idea defines its base the relation between its layers and the theoretical aspiration that animates the whole line of thought namely finding suitable ways of classifying terms and judgments classifiers and classifications so as to be able eventually to classify inferences as good or bad solely in virtue of the kinds of classifications they involve the fundamental meta conceptual role it plays in structuring philosophical thought about thought evidently makes understanding the concept of classifying itself a particularly urgent philosophical task besides asking is the tradition did what differ Jayde's various kinds of classifier classifying we can ask what they have in common what is it one must do in order thereby to count as classifying something as being of some kind in the most general sense one classifies something simply by responding to it differentially stimuli are grouped in two kinds by the response kinds they tend to elicit in this very general sense a chunk of iron classifies it's environments in two kinds by rusting in some of them and not others increasing or decreasing its temperature shattering or remaining intact of course as is evident from that example if classifying is just exercising a reliable differential responsive disposition it's a ubiquitous feature already of the inanimate world and for that very reason classifying in this generic sense is not an attractive candidate for identification with conceptual cognitive or conscious activity it just doesn't draw the right line between thinking and all sorts of thoughtless activities pant psychism is too high a price to pay for cognitive naturalism but that need not mean that taking differential responsiveness as the genus of which conceptual classification is a species is a bad idea I'm going to skip a bit now classification as the exercise of reliable differential responsive dispositions however they're acquired I've said is not itself yet a good candidate for conceptual classification particularly in the basic sense in which applying a concept to something is describing it why not suppose when were given a wand and told that the light on the handle would go on if and only if what the wand was pointed at had the property of being driving something what I never heard of before when men might then determine empirically that speakers are gravy but microphones are not door knobs are but window shades are not cats are and dogs are not and so on one would then be in a position reliably perhaps even infallibly to apply the label gravy is one also the position at that point to describe things as what what what is doing to qualify is applying the concept gravy to things intuitively I think the trouble is that one does not know what one has found out when one has found out that something is gravy doesn't know what one is taking it to be when one takes it to be gravy doesn't know what one is describing it as the label we want to say is uninformative what more is required Wilfrid Sellars gives this succinct and I believe correct answer he says it's only because the expressions in terms of which we describe objects locate these objects in a space of implications that they describe at all rather than merely label the end of the quote the reason why v is a mere label that it classifies without informing is that nothing follows from so classifying an object to vary the example if I discover that all the boxes in the Attic I'm charged with cleaning out have been labeled with red yellow or green stickers all I learned is that those labeled with the same color must share some property to learn what they mean is to learn for instance that the owner put a red label on the boxes to be discarded Green on those to be kept and yellow on those that needed further sorting and decision once I know what follows from a fixing one rather than another label I can understand them not as mere labels but as descriptions of the boxes to which they're applied description that is is classification with consequences either immediately practical and to be discarded examined kept or consequences for further classifications Michael dumb it has argued generally that to be understood is conceptually content full expressions must not have not only circumstances of appropriate application but also appropriate consequences of application that is when was looked not only upstream to the circumstances in which it's appropriate to apply the expression but also downstream to the consequences of doing so in order to grasp the content it expresses one-sided theories of meaning which sees on one aspect to the exclusion of the other are bound to be defective for they emit aspects of the use that are essential to the meaning of the expression for instance expressions can have the same circumstances of application and different consequences of application and when they do they'll have different descriptive content so one I will write a book about Hegel and two I foresee that I'll write a book about Hegel say different things about the world they describe it as being different ways the first describes my future activity and accomplishment the second my present aspiration yet the circumstances under which it's appropriate are warranted to assert them the situations to which I ought reliably to respond by endorsing them are the same or at least they can be made so by a light regimentation of a prediction expressing use of force see here to say that they have different descriptive content could also be put by saying they have different truth conditions that they have the same assert ability conditions just shows how assertive ility theories of meaning as one sided and done it sense go wrong but that same fact shows up in the different positions they occupy in what Sellars called the space of implications for from the first it follows that I will not immediately be struck by lightning that I will write some book and indeed that I'll write a book about Hegel none of those is in the same sense a consequence of the second claim again we might train a parrot reliably to respond differentially to the visible presence of read things by squawking rock that's read it would not yet be describing things as read would not be applying the concept read to them because the noise it makes has no significance for it the parrot doesn't know that it follows from something's being read that it's colored that it cannot be wholly green and so on and ignorant as it is of those inferential consequences the parrot doesn't grasp the content the concept any more than we express a concept by gravy if all we have is the wand the lesson is that even observational concepts whose principle circumstances of appropriate application are non inferential a matter of reliable dispositions to respond differentially to non linguistic stimuli even observational concepts must have inferential consequences in order to make possible description as opposed to the sort of classification affected by non conceptual labels this rationalist idea that the inferential significance of a stater expression is essential to its conceptual content fulness is one of the central insights of frege's McGriff shrift his concept writing which I remind you is the founding document of modern logic and semantics and that principle is appealed to him in the appeal to by him in the opening paragraphs to define his topic he says quote there are two ways in which the contents of two judgments may differ it may or it may not be the case that all inferences that can be drawn from the first judgment when combined with certain other ones can always also be drawn from the second when combined with the same other judgments if it the part that's that I call that part of the content that's the same in both the conceptual content but if Allah cannot enter the quote here then is the first lesson that analytic philosophy ought to have taught cognitive science there's a fundamental meta conceptual distinction between classification in the sense of labeling and classification in the sense of describing and it consists in the inferential consequences of the classification its capacity to serve as a premise in inferences whether practical or theoretical to further conclusions I think there's probably no point in fighting over the minimal circumstances of application of the concepts concept and conceptual those who want to lower the bar sufficiently are welcome to consider purely class victori labels as a kind of concept perhaps so is not to be beastly to the beasts or to disqualify human infants bits of our brains or even some relatively complex computer programs entirely and in principle from engaging in conceptually articulated activities but if they decide to talk that way they must not then combine those circumstances of application with the consequences of application that are appropriate to genuinely descriptive concepts that is those that do come with inferential significances downstream from their application all right now I want to talk about the second distinction between ingredient and freestanding content how we can semantically separate content from force once our attention has been directed at the significance of applying a classifying concept downstream at the consequences of applying it rather than just upstream at the repeatable zit discriminates the grouping at Institute's so that mere classification is properly distinguished from descriptive classification the necessity of distinguishing different kinds of consequence becomes apparent discursive intentional phenomena and their associated concepts such as assertion inference judgment experience representation perception action endorsement and imagination typically involve what Sellars calls the notorious IDI ambiguity for under these headings we may be talking about the act of asserting inferring judging experiencing representing perceiving doing endorsing or imagining or we may be talking about the content that's asserted inferred judged experienced represented perceived done endorsed or imagined description is one of those ambiguous terms as is classification we ought to be aware of the distinction between the act of describing or classifying applying a concept on the one hand and the content of the description classification or concept how things are described classified or conceived on the other and the distinction is not merely of theoretical importance for those of us thinking systematically about concept use a distinctive level of conceptual sophistication is achieved by concept users that themselves distinguished between the contents of their concepts and their activity of applying them so for instance one thing one might want to know about a system being studied say a non-human animal a pre-linguistic human an artifact we're building is whether it distinguishes between the concept it applies and what it does by applying it for the inferential consequences of applying a classification doing that is describing and not merely labeling can be either semantic consequences which turn on the content of the concept being applied or pragmatic consequences which turn on the act one is performing and applying it suppose John issues an observation report the traffic light is red you may infer that the light is operating and illuminated and the traffic ought to stop in the direction it governs you may also infer that John has a visually unobstructed line-of-sight to the light that he notices what color it is and believes that it's red unlike the former inferences these last are not inferences from what John said from the content of his utterance from the concepts he's applied their inferences from his saying it from the pragmatic force or significance of his uttering it from the fact of his applying those concepts for what he said that the traffic light is red could be true even if John had not been in a position to notice it or form any beliefs about it nothing about John follows just from the color of the traffic light now it can be controversial whether a particular consequence follows from how something's described or from describing it that way that is whether that consequence is part of the descriptive content of an expression the concept applied we're stems rather from the force of using the expression from applying the concept a famous example is expressive as theories of evaluative terms such as good in their most extreme form this sort of theory claims that those terms have no descriptive content at all all their consequences stem from what what is doing in using them calling something good is commending endorsing or approving it in his lapidary article a script abysm Peter Geach asks what the rules governing this move are he offers the archaic English term makaras meaning to characterize someone is happy should we say that in apparently describing someone is happy we're not really describing anyone but rather performing the distinctive speech act of Maca rising but why not then discern a distinctive speech act for any apparently descriptive term what are the rules of this game what's wanted Geach saw is a criterion for distinguishing semantics from pragmatic consequences those that stem from the content of a concept being applied from those that stem from what we're doing in applying that concept using an expression to perform a speech act geech finds one in Frager who in turn was develop developing a point made already by kant the logical tradition content heritage was built around the class of victory theory of consciousness that I began by considering and judgment was accordingly understood as classification or predication paradigmatically of something particular as something general but we've now put ourselves in a position to ask is this view intended as a model of how judge about contents are constructed or of what one is doing in judging can't saw as Frager would see after him that the phenomenon of compound judgments shows it cannot play both roles as it was traditionally intended to do for considered the hypothetical or conditional judgment 3 if raiga is correct then conceptual content depends on inferential consequences in asserting the sentence making this judgment endorsing its content have i predicated correctness Ephrata have i classified him as correct have i described him as correct have i applied the concept of correctness if so then predicating or classifying or describing is not yet judging for in asserting the conditional I have not judged that Freya is correct I've at most built up a judge about content the antecedent of the conditional by predication for embedding a declarative descriptive sentence as an unassertive component in a compound asserted sentence strips off the pragmatic force that it's freestanding unembarrassed intent to the content of the compound sentence to which alone the pragmatic force of the speech act is attached and that means that embedding simpler sentences as components of compound sentences paradigmatically embedding them as the antecedents of conditionals is the way to discriminate the consequences that derive from the content of a sentence from consequences that derive from the act of asserting or endorsing it we can tell that happy for instance does Express descriptive content and is not simply an indicator that some utterance has the pragmatic force or significance of Macker icing because we can say things like for if she is happy then John should be glad for in asserting that one does not macros anyone no one's been called happy so the consequence that John should be glad must be due to the descriptive content of the antecedent not to its force similarly eh argues that the fact we can say things like five if being trustworthy is good then you have reason to be trustworthy shows that good does have descriptive content notice that the same test appropriately discriminates the different descriptive contents of the claims six labeling is not describing and seven I believe that labeling is not describing for the two do not behave the same way as antecedents of conditionals the stuttering inference 8if labeling is not describing then labeling is not describing is as solid and inference as one could ask for even if it's not very interesting the corresponding conditional nine if I believe that labeling is not describing then labeling is not describing requires at least a good deal more faith in me to endorse and in the same way the embedding test ishes sentences 1 & 2 before in each case it tells us properly the different descriptive contents are involved I called Gita's a script abysm s a lapidary he refutes the entire expressive us meta ethical tradition down to his day in a six page article he makes his argument and then gets out what all this means is that any user of descriptive concepts who can also found form compound sentences paradigmatically conditionals is in a position to distinguish what pertains to the semantic content of those descriptive concepts from what pertains to the act or pragmatic force of describing by applying those concepts this capacity is a new hire more sophisticated level of concept use and it can be achieved only by looking at compound sentences in which other descriptive sentences can occur as unassertive components for instance it's only in such a context that one can distinguish denial a kind of speech act or attitude from negation a kind of content one who asserts sentence six has both denied that labeling is describing and negated a description but one who asserts conditionals such as eight and nine has negated descriptions but hasn't denied anything the modern philosophical tradition of to Frager took it for granted that there was a special attitude one could adopt towards a descriptive conceptual content a kind of minimal force one could invest it with that must be possible independently of and antecedently to being able to endorse that content in a judgment this is the attitude of merely entertaining the description the picture for instance intake how was that first one entertained descriptive thoughts judge about contents and then by in principle subsequent act of will accepted it or rejected it franca rejects that picture the principal and for him in principle fundamental pragmatic attitude and hence speech act is judging or endorsing the capacity merely to entertain a proposition a judge will content a description is a late coming capacity and one that's parasitic on the capacity to endorse such contents in judgment in fact for Freya the capacity to entertain without endorsement the proposition that pay is just the capacity to endorse conditionals in which that proposition occurs as antecedent or consequent for doing that is to explore its descriptive content its inferential circumstances and consequences what follows what it follows from and what follows from it what would make it true and what would be true if it were true but without endorsing it this is a new kind of distanced attitude towards ones concepts in their contents and it's one that becomes possible only in virtue of the capacity to form compound sentences of the kind of which conditionals are a paradigm it's a new level of cognitive achievement not new in the sense of a new kind of empirical knowledge though conditionals can indeed codify new empirical discoveries but rather a new kind of semantic self-consciousness conditionals make possible a new sort of hypothetical thought descriptive concepts bring empirical properties into view embedding those concepts and conditionals brings the contents of those concepts into view in the same sense creatures that can do that are functioning at a higher cognitive and conceptual level than those who can only apply descriptive concepts just as those who can apply descriptive concepts are functioning at a higher cognitive and conceptual level than those who can only classify things by reliable responsive discrimination that is labeling and that fact sets a question for the different branches of cognitive science I mentioned in my introduction can chimps or african grey parrots or other non-human animals not just use concepts to describe things but also semantically discriminate the contents of those concepts from the force of applying them by using them not just in describing but in conditionals in which their contents are merely entertained and explored and at what age and along with what other capacities to human children learn to do so what's required for a computer to demonstrate this level of cognitive functioning conditionals are special because they make inferences explicit that is they put those inferences in to endorse Apple Judge Abel assertable which is to say propositional form and it's their role in inferences we saw that distinguishes descriptive concepts from your classifying labels but conditionals are an instance of a more general phenomenon for we can think of them more abstractly as operators which apply to sentences to yield further sentences as such they bring into view a new notion of conceptual content a new principle of assimilation hence classification of such conceptual contents for we begin with the idea of sameness of content that derives from sameness of pragmatic force attitude or speech act but the frege's each argument shows that we can also individuate conceptual content contents more finely not just in terms of their role in freestanding utterances but also accordingly as substituting one for another as arguments of operators paradigmatically the conditional does or does not yield compound sentences with the same freestanding pragmatic significance or force dumb it calls these notions freestanding an ingredient content respectively so we might think of the sentence 10 it's nice here and 11 it's nice where I am as expressing the same attitude performing the same speech act as having the same pragmatic force or significance after all they not only have the same circumstances of application but the same consequences of application and hence role as antecedents of conditionals but we can see that they have different ingredient contents by seeing that they behave differently as arguments when we apply it different operator to them 12 it's always nice here and 13 it's always nice where I am have very different circumstances and consequences of application different pragmatic significances and those do behave differently as antecedents of conditionals but this difference in content this sense of different content in which they patently do have different contents is one that shows up only in the context of compounding operators which apply to sentences and yield further sentences the capacity to deploy such operators to form new conceptual descriptive contents from old ones accordingly ushers in a new level of cognitive and conceptual functioning creatures that cannot merely label but describe our rational at least in the minimal sense that they're able to treat one classification as providing a reason for or against another if they can use conditionals they can distinguish inferences that depend on the content of the concept they're applying from those that depend on what they're doing in classifying something is falling under that concept but the capacity to use conditionals gives them more than just that ability for conditionals let them say what's a reason for what say that an inference is a good one and for anyone who can do that the capacity not just to deny that a classification is appropriate but to use a negation operator to form new classifications brings with it to capacity to say that two classifications classifiers concepts are incompatible that one provides a reason to withhold the other creatures that can use this sort of sentential compounding operator are not just rational but logical creatures and they're capable of a distinctive kind of conceptual self-consciousness for they can describe the rational relations that make their classifications into descriptions in the first place and hence they can be conscious or aware of them in the same sense in which descriptive concepts allow them to be aware of empirical features of their world now I want to turn to the last distinction between simple and complex predicates and the concepts that correspond to them for there is still a higher level of structural complexity of concepts and concept use now I've claimed that frege's should be credited with appreciating both of the points I've made so far so far first the descriptive conceptual classification beyond mere discriminative labeling depends on the inferential significance of the concepts and second that semantically distinguishing the inferential significance of the contents of concepts from that of the force of applying them depends on forming sentential compounds paradigmatically conditionals in which other sentences appear as components in each of those insights Freya had predecessors live Nets in his new essay on the human understanding had already argued the first point against Locke and Kant we've seen appreciated how attention to compound sentences including his hypotheticals requires substantially amending the traditional classification of conceptual consciousness the final distinction I'll discuss that between simple and complex predicates and the corresponding kinds of concepts they express his frege's alone no one before him an embarrassingly few even if his admirers after him grasp this idea frege's most famous achievement is transforming traditional logic by giving us a systematic way to express and control the inferential roles of quantification Lee complex sentences frankic could as the whole logical tradition from Aristotle down to his time fixated as it was on syllogisms could not handle iterated quantifiers so he could explain for instance why 14 if someone is loved by everyone then everyone loves someone is true it's a conditional it codifies a correct inference but 15 if everyone loves someone then someone is loved by everyone is not what's less appreciated I think is that in order to specify the inferences involving arbitrarily nested quantifiers here's someone every franca needed to introduce a new kind of predicate and hence discern a structurally new kind of concept our first grip on the notion of a predicate is as a component of sentences in artificial languages we combine for instance a two-place predicate P with two individual constants a and B to form the sentence P a be logically minded philosophers of language used this model to think about the corresponding sentences of natural language understanding 16 content mired Rousseau as formed by applying the two-place predicate admired to the singular terms Kant and Rousseau the kind of inferences that are made explicit by quantified conditionals inferences that essentially depend on the contents and the predicates involved though require us to distinguish a one place predicate related to but to state from this to place one one that's exhibited by 17 Rousseau admired Rousseau and 18 Kant admired Conte but not by 1619 someone admired himself follows from 17 and 18 but not from 16 the property of being a self admirer differs from that of being an admirer and from that of being admired even though it entails both but notice there's no part of the sentences 17 and 18 that they share with each other that they do not also share with 16 looking just at the substantial expressions out of which the sentences are built does not reveal the respect of similarity that distinguishes self admiration from admiration in general and that's a respect of similarity that's crucial to understanding why the conditional twenty if someone admired himself then someone admires someone expresses a good inference well 21 if someone admires someone then someone admires himself does not for what sentence is 17 and 18 shared that distinguishes them from 16 is not a component or a part of them but a pattern more specifically it's a pattern of cross identification of the singular terms that to place predicate applies to the repeatable expression kind that is a part of those sentences admires is a simple predicate it occurs as a component in sentences built up by concatenated it appropriately with a pair of singular terms X admires X is a complex predicate and a number of different complex predicates are associated with any multi place simple predicate so the three place simple predicate used to form the sentence 22 john enjoys music recorded by mark and books recommended by bob generates not only a three place complex predicate of the form are X Y Z but also to plex come to place complex predicates of the form are X X Y R XY Y and R X Y X as well as the one place complex predicates are xx acts the complex predicates can be thought of as patterns that can be exhibited by sentences formed using the simple predicate or as equivalence classes of such sentences so the complex self-admiration predicate can be thought of either as the pattern rather than the part that's common to all the sentences Rousseau admired Rousseau content mired Conte Caesar admired Caesar Brutus admired brutus napoleon admired napoleon and so on or just as that set of sentences any member of such an equivalence class of sentences sharing a complex predicate can be turned into any other by a sequence of substitutions of all occurrences of one singular term by occurrences of another substitution is a kind of decomposition of sentences including importantly compound ones formed using sentential operators such as conditionals after sentences have been built up using simple components singular terms simple predicates sentential operators they can be assembled into equivalence classes that is patterns can be discerned among them by regarding some of the elements is systematically replaceable by others this is the same procedure of noting invariance under substitution that we saw applies when the notion of free standing applies to the notion of free standing content to give rise to the notion of ingredient content when the operators apply only two whole sentences Frigga called what's invariant under substitution of some sentential components for others a function a function can be applied to some arguments to yield a value but it's not part of the value at yields so for instance one can apply the function capital of to Sweden to yield the value Stockholm but neither Sweden nor capital of is part of Stockholm Frigga tied himself in some metaphysical knots trying to find a clear way of contrasting functions with things objects but two points emerge clearly from his discussion first discerning the substitutional relations among different sentences sharing some simple predicate is crucial for characterizing a wide range of inferential patterns and second those inferential patterns articulate the contents of a whole new class of concepts now sentential compounding had already provided the means to build new simple concepts out of old ones the boolean connectives conjunction disjunction negation and the conditional definable in terms of them permit the combination of simple predicate sin all the ways representable by Venn diagrams corresponding to intersection Union complementation and inclusion of sets concept extensions represented by regions and so the expression of new concepts formed from the old ones by those operations but there's a crucial class of new analytically complex concepts formable from the old ones that are not general by such compounding procedures one cannot for instance form the concept of a C such that for every a there is a B that stands to that C in the relation R that's a complex one place predicates that logicians would represent as having the form the set of all X's such that C X and for all Y there is a Z such that are X Z as Fraga says such a concept cannot as boolean ones can be formed simply by putting together pieces of the boundaries of the concepts a B and C the correlations of elements of those sets the concepts like these those expressed by complex predicates depend on and so the inferences they're involved in cannot be represented by Venn diagrams and Freya showed further that it's just concepts like this that even the simplest mathematics works with the concept of a natural number is the concept of a set every element of which has a successor that is for every number there's another related to it as a successor the decisive advance that frege's new quantificational logic made over traditional logic is a semantic expressive advance his logical notation can as the traditional logic could not form complex predicates and sell both express a vitally important kind of concept and logically codify the inferences that articulate it's descriptive content so complex concepts can be thought it was formed by a four stage process first put together simple predicate since singular terms to form a set of sentences then apply sentential operators to form compound sentences then substitute variables for some of the singular terms to form complex predicates and finally apply quantifiers to bind some of those variables to form new complex predicates if one likes this process can now be repeated with the complex predicates just formed playing the role that simple predicate syringe at the first stage yielding new sentences they can then be conjoined and the individual constitute constants substituted for to yield further one place complex predicates we can use these procedures to build to the sky repeating these stages of concept construction as often as we like and remarkably frege's rules tell us how to compute the inferential roles of the concepts formed at each stage on the basis solely of the inferential roles of the raw materials and the operations applied at this stage this is the heaven of complex concept formation that he opened up for us well I'm now in a position to conclude the result of all these considerations which I remind you have been in place since the dawn of analytic philosophy well over a century ago is a four stage semantic hierarchy of ever more demanding senses of concept and concept use at the bottom our concepts reliably differentially applied possibly learned labels or classifications crudely behaviorist psychological theories such as Skinner's attempted to do all their explanatory work with responsive discriminations of this sort at the next level concepts as descriptions emerge when merely classifying concepts come to stand in inferential evidential or just a big Ettore relations to one another when the propriety of one sort of classification has the practical significance of making others appropriate or inappropriate in the sense of serving as reasons for or against them at the second level conceptual content first takes a distinctively propositional form applications of this sort of concept are accordingly appropriately expressed using declarative sentences for the propositional content such sentences Express just R whatever can play the role of premise and conclusion in inferences and it's precisely being able to play those roles that distinguishes applications of descriptive concepts from applications of merely classificatory wants building on the capacity to use inferentially articulated descriptive concepts to make propositional e content full judgments or claims the capacity to form sentential compounds paradigmatically conditionals which make endorsements of material inferences relating descriptive concept applications proposition lis explicit and again negations which make endorsements of material incompatibilities relating descriptive concept applications propositional e explicit bring with it the capacity to deploy a further more sophisticated kind of conceptual content ingredient as opposed to freestanding content conceptual content of this sort is to be understood in terms of the contribution it makes to the content of compound judgments in which it occurs and only thereby indirectly to the force or pragmatic significance of endorsing that content so ingredient content is what can be negated or conditional eyes the distinctive sort of definiteness and determinate nough stats characteristic of this sort of conceptual content becomes vivid when it's contrasted with contents that can be used as labels that cannot appear in such sentential compounds such as that expressed for instance by pictures my young son once complained about a park sign consisting of a silhouette of what looked like a Scottish Terrier surrounded by a red circle with a slash through it familiar with the force of prohibition associated with signs of this general form he wanted to know does this mean no Scotties allowed or no dogs allowed or no animals allowed or no pets allowed indeed with pictures one has no way of indicating the degree of generality intended a creature that can understand a claim like if the red light is on then there's a biscuit in the drawer without disagreeing when the light is not on and no biscuit is present or immediately looking for the biscuit regardless of how it is with the light has learned to distinguish between the content of descriptive concepts and the force of applying them and as a result can entertain and explore those concepts and their connections with each other without necessarily applying them in the sense of endorsing their applicability to anything present the capacity in this way to free oneself from the bonds of the here-and-now is a distinctive kind of conceptual achievement so the first step was from merely discriminant discriminating classification to rational classification rational because inferentially articulated according to which classifications provide reasons for which others the second step is to synthetic logical concept formation in which concepts are formed by logical compounding operators paradigmatically conditionals and negation the final step is to analytical concept formation in which the sentential compound is formed at the third stage are decomposed by noting invariance under substitution systematically assimilating sentences into various equivalence classes accordingly as they can be regarded as substitutional variants of one another is a distinctive kind of analysis of those compound sentences as involving the application of concepts that were not components out of which they were originally constructed concepts formed by this sort of analysis are substantially and in principle more expressively powerful than those available at earlier stages in the hierarchy of conceptual complexity and as I've said they are for instance indispensable and even the simplest mathematics now I want to insist this hierarchy is not a psychological one it's a logical and semantic one concepts at the higher levels of complexity presuppose those at the lower levels not because creatures of a certain kind cannot in practice as a matter of fact deploy the more complex kinds unless they can deploy the simpler ones but because in principle it's structurally impossible to do so nothing could count as grasping or deploying the kinds of concept that populate the upper reaches of the hierarchy without also grasping or deploying those drawn from its lower levels the dependencies involved are not empirical but meta conceptual and normative the freegan considerations that enforce the distinctions between and the sequential arrangement of concept kinds do not arise from studying how concept users actually work but from investigation of what concept use fundamentally is they concern not how the trick is done the trick of concept use but what could in principle count is doing it and that's a normative not empirical issue and that's why it's philosophers who first came across the semantic hierarchical met a conceptual structure of concept kinds the cognitive scientists need to know about it for it's part of the job of the disciplines the cognitive science comprises to examine each from its own distinctive point of view all four grades of conceptual activity the use of more complex and sophisticated kinds of concepts no less than that of the simpler and less articulated sorts the move from merely classification Yuen Li descriptive concepts for instance marks a giant step forward in the phylogenetic development of sapiens but I don't think we yet now what non-human creatures are capable of taking that step human children clearly do cross that boundary but when by what means at what age or stage of development can non-human primates learn to use conditionals has anyone ever tried to teach them the only reason to focus on that capacity out of all the many linguistic constructions one might investigate empirically in this regard is an appreciation of the distinctive kind of semantic self-consciousness about rational relations among classifications which marks the move from classification to rational description that conditionals make possible computer scientists have to be sure expended some significant effort in thinking about varieties of possible implementation of sentential compounding for instance in exploring what connectionist your parallel distributed processing systems can do but they've not in the same way appreciated the significance of the question of whether to what extent and how such vehicle is representational architectures can capture the full range of concepts expressed by complex predicates after all those systems lack of syntactically compositional explicit symbolic representations prohibits the standard way of expressing those concepts for that way presides proceeds precisely by substitutional decomposition of just such explicit symbolic representations these are merely examples of potentially important questions raised by the hierarchy of conceptual complexity the cognitive scientists have by and large not been moved so much as to ask why not well I think it's pretty clear that the answer is ignorant specifically it's ignorant of the considerations put forward already by Freya that draw the bright semantic meta conceptual lines between different grades of concepts and arrange them in a strict presuppositional semantic hierarchy any adequately trained cognitive scientist even those working in disciplines far removed from computational linguistics can be presumed to have at least passing familiarity with the similarly four-membered Chomsky hierarchy that lines up kinds of grammar automaton and syntactic complexities of languages and grab in an array from the most basic finite state automata computing regular languages specifiable by the simplest sort of grammatical rules to most sophisticated to stack pushdown automata computing recursively enumerable languages specifiable by unrestricted grammatical rules but the at least equally significant semantic distinctions i've been retailing have not similarly become a part of the common wisdom and theoretical toolbox of cognitive science even though they've been available for at least a half century longer the cost of that ignorant in questions not asked theoretical constraints not appreciated promising avenues of empirical research not pursued is great failure to appreciate the distinctions and relations among fundamentally different kinds of concepts has led I think to a standing tendency systematically to overestimate the extent to which one has constructed in AI or discerned in development whether by human children our non-human primates or reverse engineered in psychology what we users of the fanciest sort of concepts do and that underlying ignorance is culpable but it's not the cognitive scientists who are culpable for their ignorance the ideas in question are those that originally launched the whole enterprise of analytic philosophy I think it's fair to say that as we philosophers have explored those ideas we've gotten clearer about them in many respects for one reason or another though we haven't shared the insights we've achieved we're culpable for having kept this treasure trove to ourselves and it's high time we were more generous in sharing these ideas jovem exceed Kowalski officios a really equity completely pocketed a citrusy tree like please come on DiMaggio C V bombs here P do a figure because in certain if I saw that three seconds come on a few Sofia nearly ready for one okay uh let's just creative without press representative como swagger a monkey I chose Community College community via a camellia of the personality no way friggin a silly be completing Hadas thanks for the hotel Kokichi man was more pretty much in your way or a premier syllogistic jean-philippe click on save to Kim she self supremo this indicator shows that we don't know no concept ID clearly shows no question about conception promoted to support Kamui photo ID even conflict on your label in the conception portfolio sample model the forgiving et cetera concept it typically one is a projected onto solid released actual XSLT little faith on the company concept the concept allure LaForce exerts a Donna P Cassandra the circumcision fellowship now see the destruction of the dejected photography merit was in 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pocket but the real in yogic postures and they're not going to you want to cooperate assume in neurons because the culture has an outside from one side you jump or remove condom regalia president is just community not color like a donkey suppose a potato a tili-tili condoms not disappeared she say she cackled porn and sadistic Chantal o tality no way directly consequence a greater focus on current political issues committee responsibly the opposition cognitive over Raimondi the protesters young affirmative support may module should the participation malik al Ghul we should assume upon Republican seconds of a risotto he sweat formally the question with ever mock up ray you

Channel: German Lourenço Mejia

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Keywords: Robert Brandom, Jacques Bouveresse, Analytic Philosophy (Field Of Study), Cognitive Science (Field Of Study)

Id: 0EgS6jeP59M

Length: 65min 50sec (3950 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 28 2014