Abstract
In this chapter, I argue that a holistic account of mental content is inescapable and, in fact, not as problematic as critics (especially Fodor and Lepore, Holism: a shopper’s guide. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford/Cambridge, 1992) argue. First, I introduce (the complexities of) the distinction between the wide and narrow kinds of mental content and then briefly discuss the relation between various philosophical notions of mental content and Relevance Theory’s (RT) linguistic semantics. Next, I argue that all philosophical notions of shared content, namely causal-externalist wide content, social-externalist wide content and non-truth-theoretic narrow content, are problematic and that holism is the only plausible thesis about mental content. I endorse Bilgrami’s (holistic) thesis about the unity and locality of content. I discuss how Bigrami’s philosophy fits in with the wholly inferential model of utterance interpretation I argued for in Chap. 3. Finally, I discuss how, in the light of Bilgrami’s thesis and the Representational Hypothesis, we can and should distinguish between a domain of concepts and a domain of associations between semiotic labels and concepts.
The quotation from Noûs, 32, Akeel Bilgrami, Why holism is harmless and necessary, 105–126, Copyright © 1998 Wiley, is reprinted here with permission of John Wiley and Sons Inc.
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Notes
- 1.
The network effect and radical individualism are conceptually distinct but closely related aspects of holism.
- 2.
Actually, the assumption that ‘meanings’ are not possessed by each individual shows that they are not collectively shared. I discuss this point further in Sect. 4.3.3.
- 3.
This terminology is borrowed from Bilgrami (1992).
- 4.
In fact, Putnam’s narrow-wide distinction was designed as a thesis about the content of linguistic expressions and was only subsequently employed in theories of concepts as such (as argued by Brown 2011).
- 5.
These examples are taken from Recanati (1993: 66).
- 6.
Perry’s argument cannot be maintained. If I entertain the same narrow content ‘His pants are on fire’ but apprehend different thoughts about (a) Mark, who’s my friend, and (b) Tom, who I hold a grudge against, I may rush to help Mark but laugh at Tom. In this example, it is Perry’s wide content, thus, that explains my differing actions.
- 7.
Whereas schemas are context-independent, they do not seem to be independent of the mind-external environment since schemas are, presumably, acquired in experience (see Sect. 3.1). In this context, it is interesting to consider Bach’s (1996) comment that one challenge for the proponents of narrow content is to ‘specify narrow contents informatively, rather than by abstraction from wide contents’.
- 8.
This holds on the assumption of the analytic-synthetic distinction.
- 9.
- 10.
Conceptual role semantics is concerned with the content of concepts (i.e. sub-propositional entities), whereas inferential role semantics is concerned with the role a proposition plays in a set of inference patterns (Pagin 2006).
- 11.
Furthermore, there exist puzzles where one and the same term has to correspond to two distinct Fodorian concepts, i.e. concepts with the same content but distinct syntaxes. An example is provided by the so-called Paderewski puzzle. Paderewski was a famous Polish pianist as well as Prime Minister. Thus, we can easily imagine a situation where a person who mistakenly believes that Paderewski the pianist and Paderewski the politician were two different people has a further belief that they have met Paderewski the politician, but not Paderewski the pianist in person. Fodor’s solution to this puzzle is to argue that this person has two syntactically distinct concepts which share the same content.
- 12.
In the unlikely event that it were possible to investigate people’s mental contents, conceptual primitive by conceptual primitive, and if we found a single conceptual structure recurrent across individuals in association with a given semiotic label (see my discussion of RT’s process of ‘concept narrowing’ in Sect. 3.1), we could not extrapolate from such an observation to the existence of collectively shared linguistic semantics. Relatedly, we could not extrapolate from such finding to the existence of the cognitive process of deterministic decoding of such content.
- 13.
That is, the ‘problem’ arises if one – like Fodor and Lepore – doesn’t acknowledge the role of pragmatic constraints.
- 14.
- 15.
However, conceptual spaces theory makes use of dynamically construed prototypes for some categories.
- 16.
This interpretation seems to be right especially in the light of Bilgrami’s (1992: 12) argument that the locality thesis ‘dissolves the very idea of content composed of context-invariant concepts’. He (ibid.) argues that the locality thesis offers ‘a way out of the dogmas of a certain way of thinking which leave us on the one hand with a false distinction [wide-narrow] and, on the other, with an artificially tidy picture of the mind’.
- 17.
See Pollock (2013) for a relevant discussion and defence of holism.
- 18.
Evans’s LCCM approach (2006, 2009) is an interesting illustration of adherence to this classical, but hugely problematic (as discussed in Chap. 3) notion of a linguistic sign. This theory is of interest to us because it stresses the importance of a meaning potential whilst insisting on the moderate lumping paradigm. On the one hand, Evans reserves the term ‘meaning’ to what can be characterised as ad hoc concepts, stressing that ‘meaning’ is a context-dependent phenomenon. However, he also argues (e.g. 2009: 153) that both ‘stable units of semantic structure’ – i.e. lexical concepts, which partly constitute the ‘bipolar symbolic units’ that populate the linguistic system – and a ‘dynamically evolving non-linguistic knowledge’ (a.k.a. meaning potential) are required for ‘meaning’ construction. Whereas I agree with Evans (e.g. 2009: 84) that words do not have meaning and think that Evans’s work is a fruitful contribution to the study of how different parts of the meaning potential are activated in utterance interpretation, the objections I raised against the Saussurean approaches in Chap. 3 apply here equally strongly. Evans acknowledges that context helps select between different lexical concepts associated with a polysemous word and argues that such contextually selected lexical concept is needed to give access to specific – i.e. consistent with the context – regions of the meaning potential representation. In other words, for Evans there’s no accessing of the meaning potential without the gatekeeper in the form of a lexical concept. But we have seen that on a multiple-trace theory of memory activation of specific regions of the meaning potential can be achieved without positing lexical concepts (or any other kind of summary representations). Specific regions of the meaning potential representation (i.e. specific memory traces associated with a given morpho-phonetic label) will be activated in response to the context sensitive probe (mental representation of an acoustic event that activates an aggregate of exemplars labelled with a morpho-phonetic label and mental representation of context which activates relevant traces within that aggregate). Furthermore, even though for Evans ‘meaning’ is an utterance phenomenon, it is seen as a property of an utterance (e.g. 2009: 73) – hence, my earlier likening of it to ad hoc concepts. I leave the explanation of why this is a problem until Chap. 6, where I discuss why a clear distinction needs to be made between the content of a communicated thought – an ad hoc concept – on the one hand, and meaning – qua relation – on the other (I have made a similar promise earlier in relation to Urquiza’s stance on Relevance Theoretic approach to ‘meaning’).
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Sztencel, M. (2018). Revisiting Holism. In: Semantics, Pragmatics and Meaning Revisited. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 17. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69116-9_4
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