Category Archive

I’ve been reading Jerry Fodor’s paper ‘There Are No Recognitional Concepts; Not Even RED’. There’s an argument in it that goes something like this. Concepts are compositional, in the sense that a concept such as RED APPLE is composed out of RED and APPLE. Recognition-conditions for concepts are not compositional. The ability to pick out a red apple does not require being able to pick out red things and apples. More importantly being able to pick them out successfully does not imply that one can pick out red apples. So, recognition-conditions are not possession-conditions and so there are no concepts such that their possession-conditions just are some recognition-conditions. Q.E.D. I have to say I find it quite convincing on a first reading.

I was, however, moved to wonder about the following. Fodor makes a point of saying that not all complex concepts are intersective in the set theoretic sense. That sense is that in not all cases does {x : x is a FG} = {x : x is a F} ∩ {x : x is a G}. This seems fair enough in a case like RED HAIR or, more clearly, BIG ANT. (Some big ants just aren’t big.) My first thought is that if all complex concepts were intersective the view Fodor argues against would look a lot more attractive. Apparently the claim that FG is compositional iff it’s intersective is not unpopular in the field and I think I should take some time to find out why.

I also had some possibly related worries about the distinction between simple and complex concepts. If BIG ANT is not intersective, what evidence is there that it’s made up of ANT and BIG at all? Other than the fact that it’s lexically complex and has a morphological sort of relationship? (In a way I find it hard to put precisely!) I then got to thinking that some lexically complex and non-intersective concepts are probably not compositional, such as PUB CRAWL. I think there might well be a way to make this a principled distinction but I don’t see it clearly at the moment.