Location, intuitions, and low-level common factors

Many concepts come with presuppositions, direct or indirect, implicit or explicit, about the level of the referent. Some concepts come with intuitions that make a high level location the natural choice, e.g. intuitions about transparency and the essential role of appearances. Pain would be the obvious example; what makes something a pain is that it hurts, no matter what the low level story is. We shall have more to say about such concepts – the strongest candidates for response-dependence of subject matter – in Ch. 6.

Other concepts come with intuitions pointing to several locations at once, making the location question hard to settle (especially failing a clear empirical verdict, e.g. the discovery of the existence of, or total lack of, an appropriate low level reference candidate). As suggested, colour concepts presumably belong in this category, which is what makes the location dispute in that area so intractable. Yet other concepts may come with no location-relevant intuitions at all.

But for many concepts, it is natural to expect low-level reference – or, more accurately, the expectation is the more innocent one of unproblematic reference to a property in the world: a property that could be described as subject-independent, substantial, and probably low-level if we thought about the matter in those technical terms. Such concepts would presumably includewater,cat, and presumably alsored

and other colour concepts, despite the competing intuitions pointing to a high level location. In fact, this may well be the default position for most concepts, as Pettit suggests.

If such a concept turns out to be correlated with a substantial, well-behaved low level property, this property can be thought of as the referent of the concept. But in other cases, such as colour concepts, no such property is to be found. Though we might have expected low-level reference – or at least unproblematic reference to objective properties – it turns out that the low-level correlates of colour concepts are very complex disjunctions of low level properties – arguably too disjunctive to serve

as referents.24 If reference requires a common factor on the level on which the referent is located, colour concepts fail of low-level reference. On some views of concept formation and reference, this discovery would force a conclusion that the concepts were flawed, and should either be discarded altogether or replaced with new concepts suited for high-level reference. But the ethocentric story allows a less revisionary conclusion. When faced with the discovery of low-level reference failure for colour concepts, we may follow Johnston’s lead and seek their referents among higher level properties, e.g. response-dispositions or the deflationary properties correlated with criterially governed concepts.

For many concepts, this picture seems plausible. Many concepts can be in good standing regardless what the situation turns out to be like on lower levels, even if they come with presuppositions in favour of low level reference if a suitable referent can be found. For many concepts, the natural response to low level reference failure is not an error theory, but a location on a higher level. The ethocentric story accommodates this possibility, neutral as it is on the location question. The core part of the account of the concept, the story about the salient similarity and the discounting practice, can remain in place, while all that needs to be adjusted is the presupposition of low level reference (plus, of course, any intuitions that might motivate it). This allows a less revisionary account than many alternatives (including Johnston’s view that concepts are defined by the core intuitions about the subject matter in question).

Intuitions about location are a diffuse lot in any case. They tend to vary a lot across people and times, and are highly susceptible to philosophical manipulation. So it is an advantage of the account of concept evolution that it allows a concept to survive the discovery that some of the intuitions connected with it cannot be accommodated.25

24_{Though see Jackson (1998), p. 105-112, for an argument to the contrary.}

25_{Some externalists would judge intuitions about location altogether irrelevant to the question}

about the reference of the concepts. To them, my remarks above about intuitions and reference will be of limited interest. However, even for externalists, the ethocentric story should be attractive. The dispositions to notice salient similarities and discount circumstances that yield deviant verdicts – blind

This puts us in a position to give a more complete answer to the question how a concept can exist and be in good standing before the nature of its referent, or even its level, is known: The ethocentric story is neutral on the amount of regularity found on lower levels, and would work for both high and low level concepts. It also allows the location question to remain open for a given concept until any relevant facts about underlying properties are in. Thus, it explains how it is possible for us to refer to a property even if we don’t yet know its exact nature, or even on which level it is to be found. This is a significant advantage of the story.

For similar reasons, an ethocentric story of concept evolution offers an account of how concepts could come to equivocate between levels in the way described in Ch. 2 – and indeed, how this could be the default position for ethocentric concepts. The ethocentric story allows underlying factors to influence the C-conditions in such a way that C-conditions will be the conditions in which characteristic features on different levels are correlated. Because of this correlation in C-conditions, there will often be no need to distinguish the features clearly, and nothing will force a ‘decision’ (implicit or explicit) about what level is most important for the concept. (Indeed, such a choice could be risky, since an unequivocal choice of a low level location would open a possibility of reference failure, and cut off the fallback option of higher level location.) So level equivocations are natural on the ethocentric story.26 Many concepts arguably contain level equivocations; we have looked at a few (colour concepts and concepts of mental states) in Ch. 2. The ability to account for this phenomenon is another advantage of an ethocentric story of concept evolution.