The open location question

Pettit’s ethocentric story explains how it is possible for a learner, say a young child, to acquire a concept without knowing the exact nature of its referent. The same sort of story can now be told of entire communities: a concept may come into use and be in good standing even if no member of the community knows the exact nature, or even the level, of its referent.

On the ethocentric story of concept evolution, only two things are needed for a basic concept to form: A similarity made salient by response patterns, and sufficient inter- and intrapersonal constancy in judgements based on the responses for a stable set of C-conditions to form and to provide a seems/is distinction. Accordingly, all a subject needs in order to acquire a concept is the disposition that makes the similarity

pattern salient to the subject, and the second order disposition that allows her to participate in the discounting practice in the right way.

None of these features prejudge the question of underlying features. The constancy in responses in C-conditions could be due to a lower-level common factor, as in the case of natural kind concepts (e.g. water, assuming for a moment that this is a basic concept). Or it could be due to a smallish disjunction of such features (as with jade). Or it could be due to a more complex set of features, as in the case of colours (in this case, the physical common factor is something as specific as a disposition to reflect light with certain distributions of wavelengths on three different bands of wavelengths that the three types of receptors in the human eye are receptive to). Or, finally, the constancy could be due to pure coincidence, with no interesting story, however complex, to be told about low level features.23(But still, the story allows underlying features to influence the extensions of the concepts; more on this in the next section.)

This means that it can be left open whether the high level similarity is correlated with a low level similarity, and whether such a low-level similarity would deserve the status as the referent of the concept. This allows a concept to be established in the ethocentric way before it is known on which level an appropriate referent is to be found, or what its exact nature is. These questions can be left for later empirical investigation, and the practice around the concept can do just fine without an answer.

This story is very similar to the one told in section 1.1 about how response- dependent concepts can refer to response-independent properties. The reasoning in

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Cases of the latter type are presumably rare, however, as is suggested by Pettit’s example of ‘ping’ and ‘pong’ (1991, p. 615). These ‘concepts’ mean absolutely nothing. Yet there is a lot of regularity in the classifications people make when asked which things are ping and which ones are pong. For example, ice cream is almost invariably placed in the ping category, whereas soup is classified as pong. The explanation of these regularities is presumably similarities in the sound of the words or something of that sort, but it makes for a regularity explained in terms of underlying features all the same (though the relevant underlying features are a long way from being the kinds of properties that are appropriate as referents; this sets ‘ping’ and ‘pong’ apart from the colour case, where locating the reference of the concepts with the complex low-level candidate would not be a completely crazy move, and the case of water, where location with the low level common factor is a natural choice).

that section actually makes a lot more sense if based on the community version of the ethocentric story rather than the individual version. Strictly speaking, the conclusion in case of individuals will only be the fairly uninteresting one that a concept can be learned through ostension with the help of response-dispositions even though it is the concept of e.g. a natural kind, or perhaps a concept whose meaning is given by a definition in terms of other concepts. This much is fairly uncontroversial; whatever pedagogical methods work in language learning and teaching should be ok. When teaching a child the concept of water, pointing out samples in everyday contexts works a lot better than explanations about oxygen and hydrogen molecules. Likewise, when teaching mathematics, it may be preferable to let students acquire the conceptfunctionby examples and by doing exercises, rather than presenting them with inaccessible definitions. And when teaching the conceptcat, exemplars will do just fine for ordinary purposes, and the story about DNA or whatever is essential to being a cat will be relevant mainly to biologists and philosophers. Relatedly, individuals can presumably master e.g. scientific concepts parasitically, as long as there are people in their linguistic community that know the full story about the concepts and the properties they refer to. This opens the possibility that the ‘ordinary people’ may acquire their (limited) mastery of the concepts in something like the ethocentric way, even though the experts acquire their more advanced mastery in a different way. But this possibility in itself says little about the relation between the concept and its referent.

The more interesting claim would be the community version of the same thought: that even entire communities may acquire concepts in the ethocentric way, even if (some of) those concepts subsequently turn out to refer to properties best described in another way than by the similarity pattern (e.g. by its chemical composition (‘water’), DNA (‘cat’), or definitions in terms of other concepts (‘function’)). This possibility is explained by the ethocentric story of concept evolution.

2.3 Accessing independently existing properties by concepts made of ‘for us’