Cognition, 50 (1994) 95-113

0010-0277 / 94 Elsevier Science B .V.

Concepts: a potboiler
Jerry Fodor*
Graduate Center, CUNY, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036, USA
Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University, Psychology Building, Busch Campus,
Piscataway, NJ 08855, USA

Abstract

An informal, but revisionist, discussion of the role that the concept of a concept
plays in recent theories of the cognitive mind. It is argued that the practically
universal assumption that concepts are (at least partially) individuated by their roles
in inferences is probably mistaken. A revival of conceptual atomism appears to be
the indicated alternative.

Introduction: the centrality of concepts

What’s ubiquitous goes unremarked; nobody listens to the music of the spheres
(or to me, for that matter). I think a certain account of concepts is ubiquitous in
recent discussions about minds; not just in philosophy but also in psychology,
linguistics, artificial intelligence, and the rest of the cognitive sciences; and not
just this week, but for the last fifty years or so. And I think this ubiquitous theory
is quite probably untrue. This paper aims at consciousness raising; I want to get
you to see that there is this ubiquitous theory and that, very likely, you yourself
are among its adherents. What to do about the theory’s not being true (if it’s
not) - what our cognitive science would be like if we were to throw the theory
overboard-is a long, hard question, and one that I’ll mostly leave for another
time.
The nature of concepts is the pivotal theoretical issue in cognitive science; it’s
the one that all the others turn on. Here’s why:
Cognitive science is fundamentally concerned with a certain mind-world

*Correspondence to: J. Fodor, Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University, Psychology
Building, Busch Campus, Piscataway, NJ 08855, USA.

SSDI 0010-0277(94)00618-U
relation: the goal is to understand how its mental processes can cause a creature
to behave in ways which, in normal circumstances, reliably comport with its
utilities. There is. at present, almost’ universal agreement that theories of this
relation must posit mental states some of whose properties are representational,
and some of whose properties are causul. The representational (or, as I’11 often
say, semantic) properties of a creature’s mental states are supposed to be sensitive
to. and hence to carry information about, the character of its environment.’ The
causal properties of a creature’s mental states are supposed to determine the
course of its mental processes, and, eventually, the character of its behavior.
Mental entities that exhibit both semantic and causal propertics are generically
called “mental representations”. and theories that propose to account for the
adaptivity of behavior by reference to the semantic and causal properties of
mental representations are called “representational theories of the mind”.
Enter concepts. Concepts are the least complex mental entities that exhibit
both representational and causal properties; all the others (including, particularly,
beliefs, desires and the rest of the “propositional attitudes”) are assumed to be
complexes whose constituents are concepts, and whose representational and
causal properties are determined, wholly or in part, by those of the concepts
they’re constructed from.
This account subsumes even the connectionist tradition which is, however,
often unclear, or confused, or both about whether and in what sense it is
committed to complex mental representations. There is a substantial literature on
this issue. provoked by Fodor and Pylyshyn (1988). See, for example, Smolensky
(1988) and Fodor and McLaughlin (1YYO). Suffice it for present purpose that
connectionists clearly assume that there are elementary mental representations
(typically labeled nodes), and that these have both semantic and causal prop-
erties. Roughly, the semantic propertics of a node in a network are specified by
the node’s label, and its causal properties are determined by the character of its
connectivity. So even connectionists think there are concepts as the present
discussion understands that notion.
On all hands, then. concepts serve both as the domains over which the most
elementary mental processes are defined, and as the most primitive bearers of
semantic properties. Hence their centrality in representational theories of mind.

‘The caveat is because it’s moot how one should understand the relation between main-lint
cognitive science and the Gibsonian tradition. For discussion, see Fodor and Pylyshyn (1981).
‘There is no general agreement, either in cognitive science or in philosophy, about how the
representational/semantic propertics of mental states arc to bc analyzed; they are. in general. simply
taken for granted by psychologists when empirical theories of cognitive processes are proposed. This
paper will not bc concerned. other than tangentially. with these issues in the metaphysical foundations
of semantics. For recent discussion. however. see Fodor (IYYO) and references cited therein.
 .I. Fodor I Cognition 50 (1994) 95-113 97

1. Ancient history: the classical background

The kind of concept-centered psychological theory I’ve just been sketching

should seem familiar, not only from current work in cognitive science, but also
from the philosophical tradition of classical British empiricism. I want to say a bit
about classical versions of the representational theory of mind because, though
their general architecture conforms quite closely to what I’ve just outlined, the
account of concepts that they offered differs, in striking ways, from the ones that
are now fashionable. Comparison illuminates both the classical and the current
kinds of representational theories, and reveals important respects in which their
story was closer to being right about the nature of concepts than ours. So,
anyhow, I am going to argue.
Here’s a stripped-down version of a classical representational theory of
concepts. Concepts are mental images. They get their causal powers from their
associative relations to one another, and they get their semantic properties from
their resemblance to things in the world. So, for example, the concept DOG
applies to dogs because dogs are what (tokens of) the concept looks like.
Thinking about dogs often makes one think about cats because dogs and cats
often turn up together in experience, and it’s the patterns in one’s experience, and
only these, that determine the associations among one’s ideas. Because associa-
tion is the only causal power that ideas have, and because association is
determined only by experience, any idea can, in principle, become associated to
any other, depending on which experiences one happens to have. Classical ideas
cannot, therefore, be defined by their relations to one another. Though DOG-
thoughts call up CAT-thoughts, LEASH-thoughts, BONE-thoughts, BARK-
thoughts and the like in most actual mental lives, there are possible mental lives
in which that very same concept reliably calls up, as it might be, PRIME
NUMBER-thoughts or TUESDAY AFTERNOON-thoughts or KETCHUP-
thoughts. It depends entirely on how often you’ve come across prime numbers of
dogs covered with ketchup on Tuesday afternoons.
SO much by way of a reminder of what classical theorists said about concepts. I
don’t want to claim much for the historical accuracy of my exegesis (though it
may be that Hume held a view within hailing distance of the one I’ve sketched;
for purposes of exposition, I’ll assume he did). But I do want to call your
attention to a certain point about the tactics of this kind of theory construction - a
point that’s essential but easy to overlook.
Generally speaking, if you know what an X is, then you also know what it is to
have an X. And ditto the other way around. No doubt, this applies to concepts.
If, for example, your theory is that concepts are pumpkins, then it has to be a part
of your theory that having a concept is having a pumpkin; and if your theory is
that having a concept is having a pumpkin, then it has to be a part of your theory
that pumpkins are what concepts are. I take it that this is just truistic.
 Sometimes it’s clear in which direction the explanation should go, and
sometimes it isn’t. So, for example, one’s theory about having a cat ought surely
to be parasitic on one’s theory about being a cat; first you say what a cat is, and
then you say that having a cat is just: having one of those. With jobs, pains, and
siblings, however, it goes the other way round. First you say what is to have a job,
or a pain, or a sibling, and then the story about what jobs, pains and siblings are
is a spin-off.
These examples are, I hope, untendentious. But decisions about the proper
order of explanation can be unobvious, important, and extremely difficult. To cite
a notorious case: ought one first to explain what the number three is and then
explain what it is for a set to have three members’? Or do you first explain what
sets are, and then explain what numbers are in terms of them? Or are the
properties of sets and of numbers both parasitic on those of something quite else
(like counting, for example). If I knew and I was rich, I would be rich and
famous.
Anyhow, classical representational theories uniformly took it for granted that
the explanation of concept possession should be parasitic on the explanation of
concept individuation. First you say what it is for something to be the concept
X - you give the “identity conditions” for the concept-and then the story about
concept possession follows without further fuss. Well, but how do you identify a
concept? Answer: you identify a concept by saying what it is the concept of. The
concept DOG, for example, is the concept of dogs; that’s to say. it’s the concept
that you use to think about dogs with. Correspondingly, having the concept DOG
is just having a concept to think about dogs with.
Similarly, mutatis mutandis, for concepts of other than canine content: the
concept X is the concept of Xs. Having the concept X is just having a concept to
think about Xs with. (More precisely, having the concept X is having a concept to
think about Xs “as such” with. The context “thinks about .” is intentional for
the “. . ” position. We’ll return to this presently.)
So much for the explanatory tactics of classical representational theories of
mind. Without exception, however, current theorizing about concepts reverses the
classical direction of analysis. The substance of current theories lies in what they
say about the conditions for having the concept A’. It’s the story about being the
concept X-the story about concept individuation - that they treat as parasitic: the
concept X is just whatever it is that a creature has when it has that concept. (See,
for example, Peacocke, 1992, which is illuminatingly explicit on this point.) This
subtle. and largely inarticulate, difference between contemporary representational
theories and their classical forebears has. so I’ll argue. the most profound
implications for our cognitive science. To a striking extent, it determines the kinds
of problems we work on and the kinds of theories that we offer as solutions to our
problems. I suspect that it was a wrong turn-on balance, a catastrophe - and that
we shall have to go back and do it all again.
 J. Fodor I Cognition 50 (1994) 95-113 99

First, however, just a little about why the classical representational view was
abandoned. There were, I think, three kinds of reasons: methodological,
metaphysical and epistemological. We’ll need to keep them in mind when we turn
to discussing current accounts of concepts.
Methodology: Suppose you’re a behaviorist of the kind who thinks there are
no concepts. In that case, you will feel no need for a theory about what concepts
are, classical or otherwise. Behaviorist views aren’t widely prevalent now, but
they used to be; one of the things that killed the classical theory of concepts was
simply that concepts are mental entities? and mentalism went out of fashion.
Metaphysics: A classical theory individuates concepts by specifying their
contents; the concept X is the concept of Xs. This seemed OK - it seemed not to
beg any principled questions- because classical theorists thought that they had
of-ness under control; they thought the image theory of mental representation
explained it. We now know that they were wrong to think this. Even if concepts
are mental images (which they aren’t) and even if the concept DOG looks like a
dog (which it doesn’t) still, it isn’t because it looks like a dog that it’s concept of
dogs. Of-ness (“content”, “intentionality”) does not reduce to resemblance, and
it is now widely, and rightly, viewed as problematic. It doesn’t follow either that
classical theorists were wrong to hold that the story about concept possession
should be parasitic on the story about concept identification, or that they were
wrong to hold that concepts should be individuated by their contents. But it’s true
that if you want to defend the classical order of analysis, you need an alternative
to the picture theory of meaning.
Epistemology: The third of the standard objections to the classical account of
concepts, though at least as influential as the others, is distinctly harder to state.
Roughly, it’s that classical theories aren’t adequately “ecological”. Used in this
connection, the term has Gibsonian ring; but I’m meaning it to pick out a much
broader critical tradition. (In fact, I suspect Dewey was the chief influence; see
the next footnote.) Here’s a rough formulation.
What cognitive science is trying to understand is something that happens in the
world; it’s the interplay of environmental contingencies and behavioral adapta-
tions. Viewing concepts primarily as the vehicles of thought puts the locus of this
mind/ world interaction (metaphorically and maybe literally) not in the world but
in the head. Having put it in there, classical theorists are at a loss as to how to get
it out again. So the ecological objection goes.
This kind of worry comes in many variants, the epistemological being, perhaps,
the most familiar. If concepts are internal mental representations, and thought is
conversant only with concepts, how does thought every contact the external world

‘Terminological footnote: here and elsewhere in this paper, I follow the psychologist’s usage rather
than the philosopher’s; for philosophers, concepts are generally abstract entities, hence, of course, not
mental. The two ways of talking are compatible. The philosopher’s concepts can be viewed as the
types of which the psychologist’s concepts are tokens.
that the mental representations are supposed to represent? If there is a “veil of
ideas” between the mind and the world, how can the mind see the world through
the veil? Isn’t it, in fact, inevitable that the classical style of theorizing eventuates
either in solipsism (“we never do connect with the world, only with our idea of
it”) or in idealism (“it’s OK if we can never get outside of heads because the
world is in there with us”)?’ And, surely, solipsism and idealism are both
refutations of theories that entail them.
Notice that this ecological criticism of the classical story is different from the
behaviorist’s eschewal of intentionality as such. The present objection to “internal
representations” is not that they are representations, but that they are internal. In
fact. this sort of objection to the classical theory predates behaviorism by a lot.
Reid used it against Hume, for example. Notice too that this objection survives
the demise of the image theory of concepts; treating mental representation as,
say, discursive rather than iconic doesn’t help. What’s wanted isn’t either pictures
of the world or stories about the world; what’s wanted is what they call in Europe
being in the world. (I’m told this sounds even better in German.)
This is all, as 1 say, hard to formulate precisely; 1 think, in fact, that it is
extremely confused. But even if the “ecological” diagnosis of what’s wrong with
classical concepts is a bit obscure, it’s clear enough what cure was recommended,
and this brings us back to our main topic. If what we want is to get thought out of
the head and into the world, we need to reverse the classical direction of analysis,
precisely as discussed above; we need to take having a concept as the fundamental
notion and define concept individuation in terms of it. This is a true Copernican
revolution in the theory of mind, and we are still living among the debris.
Here, in the roughest outline, is the new theory about concept possession:
having a concept is having certuin epistemic capacities. To have the concept of‘X is
to be able to recognize Xs, and/or to be able to reason about Xs in certain kinds
of ways. (Compare the classical view discussed above: having the concept c?f‘X is
just being able to have thoughts about Xs). It is a paradigmatically pragmatist
idea that having a concept is being able to do certain things rather than being able
to think certain things. Accordingly, in the discussion that follows. I will contrast
classical theories of concepts with “pragmatic” ones. I’ll try to make it plausible
that all the recent and current accounts of concepts in cognitive science really arc
just variations on the pragmatist legacy.

‘“Experience to them is not only something extraneous which is occasionally superimposed upon
nature. hut it forms a veil or screen which shuts us off from nature, unless in some way it can hc
‘transcended’ (p. la)“. “Other [philosophers’ methods] begin with results of a reflection that has
already torn in two the subject-matter and the operations and states of experienctng. The prohlcm is
then to get together again what has hecn sundered _” (p. 9). Thus Dewey (19%). The remedy he
recommends is resolutely to refuse to recognize the distinction between experience and its object.
“[Expcriencc] recognizes in its primary integrity no division hetween act and material, subject and
object. but contains them both in an unanalyzed totality.”
 .I. Fodor I Cognition 50 (1994) %5-l 13 101

In particular, I propose to consider (briefly, you’ll be pleased to hear) what I

take to be five failed versions of pragmatism about concepts. Each evokes its
proprietary nemesis; there is, for each, a deep fact about concepts by which it is
undone. The resulting symmetry is gratifyingly Sophoclean. When we’ve finished
with this catalogue of tragic flaws, we’ll have exhausted all the versions of concept
pragmatism I’ve heard of, or can think of, and we’ll also have compiled a must-list
for whatever theory of concepts pragmatism is eventually replaced by.

2.1. Behavioristic pragmatism (and the problem of intentionality)

I remarked above that behaviorism can be a reason for ruling all mentalistic
notions out of psychology, concepts included. However, not all behaviorists were
eliminativists; some were reductionists instead. Thus Ryle, and Hull (and even
Skinner about half the time) are perfectly content to talk of concept possession,
so long as the “criteria” for having a concept can be expressed in the vocabulary
of behavior and/or in the vocabulary of dispositions to behave.
Do not ask what criteria are; there are some things we’re not meant to know.
Suffice it that criteria1 relations are supposed to be sort-of-semantical rather than
sort-of-empirical.
So, then, which behaviors are supposed to be criteria1 for concept possession?
Short answer: sorting behaviors. Au fond, according to this tradition, having the
concept X is being able to discriminate Xs from non-Xs; to sort things into the
ones that are X and the ones that aren’t. Though behaviorist in essence, this
identification of possessing a concept with being able to discriminate the things it
applies to survived well into the age of computer models (see, for example,
“procedural” semanticists like Woods, (1975); and lots of philosophers still think
there must be something to it (see, for example, Peacocke, 1992).
This approach gets concepts into the world with a vengeance: having a concept
is responding selectively, or being disposed to respond selectively, to the things in
the world that the concept applies to; and paradigmatic responses are overt
behaviors “under the control” of overt stimulations.
I don’t want to bore your with ancient recent history, and I do want to turn to
less primitive versions of pragmatism about concepts. So let me just briefly
remind you of what proved to be the decisive argument against the behavioristic
version: concepts can’t be just sorting capacities, for if they were, then coexten-
sive concepts-concepts that apply to the same things- would have to be
identical. And coextensive concepts aren’t, in general, identical. Even necessarily
coextensive concepts - like TRIANGULAR and TRILATERAL, for example -
may perfectly well be different concepts. To put this point another way, sorting is
something that happens under a description; it’s always relative to some or other
way of conceptualizing the things that are being sorted. Though their behaviors
102 .I. Fodor I Cognition 50 (1994) 95-113

may look exactly the same, and though they may end up with the very same
things in their piles, the creature that is sorting triangles is in a different mental
state, and is behaving in a different way, from the creature that is sorting
trilaterals; and only the first is exercising the concept TRIANGLE. (For a clear
statement of this objection to behaviorism, see Dennett, 1978.)
Behaviorists had a bad case of mauvaisfois about this; they would dearly have
liked to deny the intentionality of sorting outright. In this respect, articles like
Kendler (19.52). according to which ‘what is learned, [is] a pseudoproblem in
psychology”, make fascinating retrospective reading. Suppose, however. that you
accept the point that sorting is always relative to a concept, but you wish,
nonetheless, to cleave to some kind of pragmatist reduction of concept individua-
tion to concept possession and of concept possession to having epistemic
capacities. The question then arises: what difference in their epistemic capacities
could distinguish the creature that is sorting triangles from the creature that is
sorting trilaterals? What could the difference between them be, if it isn’t in the
piles that they end up with?
The universally popular answer has been that the difference between sorting
under the concept TRIANGLE and sorting under the concept TRILATERAL lies
in what the sorter is disposed to infer from the sorting he performs. To think of
something as a triangle is to think of it as having angles; to think of something as a
trilateral is to think of it as having sides. The guy who is collecting triangles must
therefore accept that the things in his collection have angles (whether or not he has
noticed that they have sides); and the guy who is collecting trilaterals must accept
that the things in his collection have sides (even if he hasn’t notice that they have
angles).
The long and short is: having concepts is having a mixture of abilities to sort
and abilities to infer.’ Since inferring is presumably neither a behavior nor a be-
havioral capacity, this formulation is, of course. not one that a behavioristic prag-
matist can swallow. So much the worse for behaviorists, as usual. But notice that
pragmatists as such are still OK: even if having a concept isn’t just knowing how
to sort things, it still may be that having a concept is some kind of knowing
how, and that theories of concept possession are prior to theories of concept
individuation.
We are now getting very close to the current scene. All non-behaviorist

5The idea that concepts are (at least partially) constituted by inferential capacities receives what
seems to be independent support from the success of logicist treatments of the “logical” concepts
(AND. ALL, etc.). For many philosophers (though not for many psychologists) thinking of concepts
as inferential capacities is a natural way of extending the logicist program from the logical vocabulary
to TREE or TABLE. So, when these philosophers tell you what it’s like to analyze a concept, they
start with AND. (Here again, Peacocke, 1992, is paradigmatic.)
It should, however. strike you as not obvious that the analysis of AND is a plausible model for the
analysis of TREE or TABLE.
 .I. Fodor I CognitionSO(1994) Y-5-113 103

versions of pragmatism hold that concept possession is constituted, at least in

part, by inferential dispositions and capacities. They are thus all required to
decide which inferences constitute which concepts. Contemporary theories of
concepts, though without exception pragmatist, are distinguished by the ways that
they approach this question. Of non-behavioristic pragmatist theories of concepts
there are, by my reckoning, exactly four. Of which the first is as follows.

2.2. Anarchic pragmatism (and the realism problem)

Anarchic pragmatism is the doctrine that though concepts are constituted by

inferential dispositions and capacities, there is no fact of the matter about which
inferences constitute which concepts. California is, of course, the locus classicus
of anarchic pragmatism; but no doubt there are those even on the East Coast who
believe it in their hearts.
I’m not going to discuss the anarchist view. If there are no facts about which
inferences constitute which concepts, then there are no facts about which concepts
are which. And if there are no facts about which concepts are which, then there
are no facts about which beliefs and desires are which (for, by assumption, beliefs
and desires are complexes of which concepts are the constituents). And if there
are no facts about which beliefs and desires are which, there is no intentional
cognitive science, for cognitive science is just belief/desire explanation made
systematic. And if there is no cognitive science, we might as well stop worrying
about what concepts are and have a nice long soak in a nice hot tub.
I’m also not going to consider a doctrine that is closely related to anarchic
pragmatism: namely, that while nothing systematic can be said about concept
identity. it may be possible to provide a precise account of when, and to what
degree, two concepts are similar. Some such thought is often voiced informally in
the cognitive science literature, but there is, to my knowledge, not even a rough
account of how such a similarity relation over concepts might be defined. I
strongly suspect this is because a robust notion of similarity is possible only where
there is a correspondingly robust notion of identity. For a discussion, see Fodor
and Lepore (1992, Ch. 7).

2.3. Definitional pragmatism (and the analyticity problem)

Suppose the English word “bachelor” means the same as the English phrase
“unmarried male”. Synonymous terms presumably express the same concept (this
is a main connection between theories about concepts and theories about
language), so it follows that you couldn’t have the concept BACHELOR and fail
to have the concept UNMARRIED MALE. And from that, together with the
intentionality of sorting (see section 2.1), it follows that you couldn’t be collecting
bachelors so described unless you take yourself to be collecting unmarried males;
that is. unless you accept the inference that if something belongs in your bachelor
collection, then it is something that is male and unmarried.
Maybe this treatment generalizes; maybe, having the concept X just is being
able to sort Xs and being disposed to draw the inferences that define X-ness.
The idea that it’s defining inferences that count for concept possession is now
almost as unfashionable as behaviorism. Still. the departed deserves a word or
two of praise. The definition story offered a plausible (though partial) account of
the acquisition of concepts. If BACHELOR is the concept UNMARRIED
MALE, then it’s not hard to imagine how a creature that has the concept
UNMARRIED and has the concept MALE could put them together and thereby
achieve the concept BACHELOR. (Of course the theory that complex concepts
arc acquired by constructing them from their elements presupposes the availabili-
ty of the elements. About the acquisition of these, definitional pragmatism tended
to be hazy.) This process of assembling concepts can be -indeed, was-studied in
the laboratory; see Bruner. Goodnow. & Austin (1956) and the large cxperimcn-
tal literature that it inspired. Other significant virtues of the definition story will
suggest themselves when we discuss concepts as prototypes in section 2.4.
But alas. despite its advantages, the definition theory doesn’t work. Concepts
can’t be definitions because most concepts don’t /zuve definitions. At a minimum,
to define a concept is to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for something
to be in its extension (i.c., for being among the things that concept applies to).
And. if the definition is to bc informative, the vocabulary in which it is couched
must not include either the concept itself or any of its synonyms. As it turns out,
for most concepts. this condition simply can’t be met: more precisely. it can’t be
met unless the definition employs synonyms and near-synonyms of the concept to
be defined. Maybe being male and unmarried is necessary and sufficient for being
a bachelor; but try actually filling in the blanks in “x’ is a dog iff x is a .”
without using the words like “dog” or “canine” or the like on the right-hand
side.
There is. to bc sure, a way to do it; if you could make a list of all and only the
dogs (Rover. Lassie, Spot etc.), then being on the list would be necessary and
sufficient for being in the extension of DOG. That thcrc is this option is,
however, no comfort for the theory that concepts are definitions. Rather, what it
shows is that being a necessary and sufficient condition for the application of a
concept is not a sufficient condition for being a definition of the concept.
This point gcncralizes beyond the cast of lists. Being u creuture with u
backbone is necessary and sufficient for heirzg u creuture with u heurt (so they tell
me). But it isn’t the case that “creature with a backbone” defines “crcaturc with a
heart” or vice versa. Quite generally, it seems that Y doesn’t define X unless Y
applies to all and only the possible Xs (as well, of course. as all and only the
 J. Fodor I Cognition 50 (I 994) 9_5- 11.3 105

actual Xs). It is, then, the modal notion- possibility- that’s at the heart of the
idea that concepts are definitions. Correspondingly, what killed the definition
theory of concepts, first in philosophy and then in cognitive psychology, is that
nobody was able to explicate the relevant sense of “possible”.
It seems clear enough that even if Rover, Lassie and Spot are all the dogs that
there actually are, it is possible, compatible with the concept of DOG, that there
should be others; that’s why you can’t define DOG by just listing the dogs. But is
it, in the same sense, possible, compatible with the concept DOG that some of
these non-actual dogs are ten feet long? How about twenty feet long? How about
twenty miles long? How about a light-year long? To be sure, it’s not biologically
possible that there should be a dog as big as a light-year; but presumably biology
rules out a lot of options that the concept DOG, as such, allows. Probably biology
rules out zebra-striped dogs; surely it rules out dogs that are striped red, white
and blue. But I suppose that red, white and blue striped dogs are conceptually
possible; somebody who thought that there might be such dogs wouldn’t thereby
show himself not to have the concept DOG- would he?
So, again, are light-year-long dogs possible, compatible with the concept
DOG? Suppose somebody thought that maybe there could be a dachshund a
light-year long. Would that show that he has failed to master the concept DOG?
Or the concept LIGHT-YEAR? Or both?
To put the point in the standard philosophical jargon: even if light-year-long
dogs aren’t really possible, “shorter than a light-year” is part of the definition of
DOG only if “some dogs are longer than a light-year” is analytically impossible;
mere biological or physical (or even metaphysical) impossibility won’t do. Well, is
it analytically impossible that there should be such dogs? If you doubt that this
kind of question has an answer, or that it matters a lot for any serious purpose
what the answer is, you are thereby doubting that the notion of definition has an
important role to play in the theory of concept possession. So much for
definitions.

2.4. Stereotypes and prototypes (and the problem of compositionulity)

Because it was pragmatist, the definition story treated having a concept as

having a bundle of inferential capacities, and was faced with the usual problem
about which inferences belong to which bundles. The notion of an analytic
inference was supposed to bear the burden of answering this question, and the
project foundered because nobody knows what makes an inference analytic, and
nobody has any idea how to find out. “Well”, an exasperated pragmatist might
nonetheless reply, “even if I don’t know what makes an inference analytic, I do
know what makes an inference statistically reliable. So why couldn’t the theory of
concept possession be statistical rather than definitional? Why couldn’t I exploit
the notion of a reliable inference to do what definitional pragmatism tried and
failed to do with the notion of an analytic inference‘?”
We arrive. at last, at modern times. For lots of kinds of Xs. people are in
striking agreement about what properties an arbitrarily chosen X is likely to have.
(An arbitrarily chosen bird is likely to be able to fly: an arbitrarily chosen
conservative is likely to be a Republican; an arbitrarily chosen dog is likely to be
less than a light-year long.) Moreover, for lots of kinds of Xs, people are in
striking agreement about which Xs are prototypic of the kind (diamonds for
jewels; red for colors; not dachshunds for dogs). And. sure enough, the Xs that
are judged to be prototypical are generally ones that have lots of the properties
that an arbitrary X is judged likely to have; and the Xs that are judged to have
lots of the properties that an arbitrary X is likely to have are generally the ones
that arc judged to be prototypical.
Notice. in passing. that stereotypes share one of the most agreeable features of
definitions: they make the learning of (complex) concepts intelligible. If the
concept of an X is the concept of something that is reliably Y and Z, then you can
learn the concept X if you have the concepts Y and Z together with enough
statistics to recognize reliability when you see it. It would be OK, for this
purpose, if the available statistical procedures were analogically (rather than
explicitly) represented in the learner. Qua learning models, “neural networks”
arc analog computers of statistical dependencies, so it’s hardly surprising that
prototype theories of concepts are popular among conncctionists. (See, for
example, McClelland & Rummelhart, 1986.)
So, then, why shouldn’t having the concept of an X be having the ability to sort
by X-tress, together with a disposition to infer from something’s being X to its
having the typical properties of Xs’? I think, in fact. that this is probably the view
of concepts that the prototypical cognitive scientist holds these days.
To see why it doesn’t work, let’s return one last time to the defunct idea that
concepts are definitions. It was a virtue of that idea that it provides for the
cornpo.~itiot~alit~ of concepts. and hence for the productivity and systematicity of
thought. This. we’re about to see, is no small matter.
In the first instance, productivity and systematicity are best illustrated by
refcrencc to features (not of minds but) of natural languages. To say that
languages are productive is to say that there is no upper bound to the number of
well-formed formulas that they contain. To say that they are systematic is to say
that if a language can express the proposition that P, then it will be able to express
a variety of other propositions that arc. in one way or another, semantically
related to P. (So, if a language can say that P and that -Q, it will also be able to
say that Q and that -P; if it can say that John loves Mary, it will be able to say
that Mary loves John and so forth.) As far as anybody knows, productivity
and systematicity are universal features of human languages.
Productivity and systematicity arc also universal features of human thought
 J. Fodor I Cognition SU (1994) 9_5- 113 107

(and, for all I know, of the thoughts of many infra-human creatures). There is no
upper bound to the number of thoughts that a person can think. (I am assuming
the usual distinctions between cognitive “competence” and cognitive “perform-
ance”). And also, if a mind can entertain the thought that P and any negative
thoughts, it can also entertain the thought that -P; if it can entertain the thought
that Mary loves John, it can entertain the thought that John loves Mary . and so
on.
It is extremely plausible that the productivity and the systematicity of language
and thought are both to be explained by appeal to the systematicity and
productivity of mental representations, and that mental representations are
systematic and productive because they are compositional. The idea is that mental
representations are constructed by the application of a finite number of com-
binatorial principles to a finite basis of (relatively or absolutely) primitive
concepts. (So, the very same process that gets you from the concept MISSILE to
the concept ANTIMISSILE, also gets you from the concept ANTIMISSILE to
the concept ANTIANTIMISSLE, and so on ad infinitum.) Productivity follows
because the application of these constructive principles can iterate without bound.
Systematicity follows because the concepts and principles you need to construct
the thoughts that P and -Q are the very same ones that you need to construct the
thoughts that Q and -P; and the concepts and principles you need to construct
the thought that John loves Mary are the very same ones that you need to
construct the thought that Mary loves John.
This sort of treatment of compositionality is familiar, and I will assume that it
is essentially correct. I want to emphasize that it places a heavy constraint on both
theories of concept possession and theories of concept individuation. If you accept
compositionality, then you are required to say that whatever the concept DOG is
that occurs in the thought that Rover is a dog, that very Same concept DOG also
occurs in the thought that Rover is a brown dog; and, whateT+er the concept
BROWN is that occurs in the thought that Rover is brown, the very same concept
BROWN also occurs in the thought that Rover is a brown dog. It’s on these
assumptions that compositionality explains how being able to think that Rover is
brown and that Rover is a dog is linked to being able to think that Rover is a
brown dog. Compositionality requires, in effect, that constituent concepts must be
insensitive to their host; a constituent concept contributes the same content to all
the complex representations it occurs in.
And compositionality further requires that the content of a complex repre-
sentation is exhausted by the contributions that its constituents make. Whatever
the content of the concept of BROWN DOG may be, it must be completely
determined by the content of the constituent concepts BROWN and DOG,
together with the combinatorial apparatus that sticks these constituents together;
if this were not the case, your grasp of the concepts BROWN and DOG wouldn’t
explain your grasp of the concept BROWN DOG.
 In short, when complex concepts are compositional. the whole must nof be
more than the sum of its parts, otherwise compositionality won’t explain
productivity and systematicity. And if compositionality doesn’t, nothing will. If
this account of compositionality strikes you as a bit austere, it may be some
comfort that the systematicity and productivity of thought is compatible with
compositionality failing in any finite number of cases. It allows, for example, that
finitely many thoughts (hence a forfiori, finitely many linguistic expressions) are
idiomatic or metaphoric, so long as there are infinitely many that are neither.
We can now see why, though concepts might have turned out to be definitions,
they couldn’t possibly turn out to be stereotypes or prototypes. Concepts do
contribute their defining properties to the complexes of which they are con-
stituents, and the defining properties of complex concepts are exhaustively
determined by the defining properties that the constituents contribute. Since
bachelors are, by definition, unmarried men, tall bachelors are, by the same
definition, tall unmarried men; and very tall bachelors are very tall unmarried
men, and very tall bachelors from Hoboken are very tall unmarried men from
Hoboken and so on. Correspondingly, there is nothing more to the definition
of “very tall bachelor from Hoboken” than very tall unmarried man from
Hohoken; that is, there is nothing more to the definition of the phrase than what
the detinitions of its constituents contribute.
So, then, if concepts were definitions. we could see how thought could be
compositional, and hence productive and systematic. Concepts aren’t definitions.
of course. It’s just that. from the present perspective, it’s rather a pity that they’re
not.
For stereotypes, alas. don’t work the way that definitions do. Stereotypes
aren’t compositional. Thus, ‘*ADJECTIVE X” can be a perfectly good concept
even if there is no adjective X stereotype. And even if there are stereotypic
adjective Xs, they don’t have to be stereotypic adjectives or stereotypic Xs. I
doubt. for example, that there is a stereotype of very tall men from Hoboken;
but. even if there were, there is no reason to suppose that it would be either a
stereotype for tall men, or a stereotype for men from Hoboken, or a stereotype
for men. On the contrary: often enough, the adjective in “ADJECTIVE X” is
there precisely to mark a way that adjective Xs depart from stereotypic XS.
Fitzgerald made this point about stereotypes to Hemingway when he said. “The
rich are different from the rest of us.” Hemingway replied by making the
corresponding point about definitions: “Yes”, he said, “they have more money”.
In fact, this observation about the uncompositionality of stereotypes general-
izes in a way that seems to me badly to undermine the whole pragmatist program
of identifying concept possession with inferential dispositions. I’ve claimed that
knowing what is typical of adjective and what is typical of X doesn’t, in the
general case, tell you what is typical of adjective Xs. The reason it doesn’t is
perfectly clear; though some of your beliefs about adjective Xs are compositional-
 J. Fodor I Cognition 50 (lYY4) Y-5-l 13 109

ly inherited from your beliefs about adjectives, and some are compositionally
inherited from your beliefs about Xs, some are beliefs that you have acquired
about adjective Xs us such, and these aren’t compositional at all.
The same applies, of course, to the inferences that your beliefs about adjective
Xs dispose you to draw. Some of the inferences you are prepared to make about
green apples follow just from their being green and from their being apples. That
is to say: they derive entirely from the constituency and structure of your GREEN
APPLE concept. But others depend on information (or misinformation) that you
have picked up about green apples as such: that green apples go well in apple pie;
that they are likely to taste sour; that there are kinds of green apples that you’d
best not eat uncooked, and so forth. Patently, these inferences are not definitional
and not compositional; they are not ones that GREEN APPLE inherits from its
constituents. They belong to what you know about green applies, not to what you
know about the corresponding words or concepts. You learned that “green apple”
means green and apple when you learned English at your mother’s knee. But
probably you learned that green apples mean apple pies from the likes of Julia
Child.
The moral is this: the content of complex concepts has to be compositionally
determined, so whatever about concepts is not compositionally determined is
therefore not their content. But, as we’ve just been seeing, the inferential role of
a concept is not, in general, determined by its structure together with the
inferential roles of its constituents. That is, the inferential roles of concepts are
not, in general, compositional; only defining inferences are.
This puts your paradigmatic cognitive scientist in something of a pickle. On the
one hand, he has (rightly, I think) rejected the idea that concepts are definitions.
On the other hand, he cleaves (wrongly, I think) to the idea that having concepts
is having certain inferential dispositions. But, on the third hand (as it were), only
defining inferences are compositional so if there are no definitions, then having
concepts can’t be having inferential capacities.
I think that is very close to being a proof that the pragmatist notion of what it
is to have a concept must be false. This line of argument was first set out in Fodor
and Lepore (1992). Philosophical reaction has been mostly that if the price of the
pragmatist account of concepts is reviving the notion that there are analytic/
definitional inferences, then there must indeed be analytic/definitional inferences.
My own view is that cognitive science is right about concepts not being
definitions, and that it’s the analysis of having concepts in terms of drawing
inferences that is mistaken. Either way, it seems clear that the current situation is
unstable. Something’s gotta give.
I return briefly to my enumeration of the varieties of pragmatist theories of
concept possession. It should now seem unsurprising that none of them work. In
light of the issues about compositionality that we’ve just discussed, it appears
there are principled reasons why none of them could.
2.5. The “theory theory” of concepts (and the problem of holism)

Pragmatists think that having a concept is having certain epistemic capacities;

centrally it’s having the capacity to draw certain inferences. We’ve had trouble
figuring out which inferences constitute which concepts; well, maybe that’s
because we haven’t been taken the epistemic bit sufficiently seriously.
Concepts are typically parts of beliefs; but they are also, in a different sense of
“part”, typically parts of theories. This is clearly true of sophisticated concepts
like ELECTRON, but perhaps it’s always true. Even every-day concepts like
HAND or TREE or TOOTHBRUSH figure in complex, largely inarticulate
knowledge structures. To know about hands is to know, inter alia, about arms and
fingers; to know about toothbrushes is, inter afia, to know about teeth and the
brushing of them. Perhaps, then, concepts are just abstractions from such formal
and informal knowledge structures. On this view, to have the concept ELEC-
TRON is to know what physics has to say about electrons; and to have the
concept TOOTHBRUSH is to know what dental folklore has to say about teeth.
Here are some passages in which the developmental cognitive psychologist
Susan Carey (1985) discusses the approach to concepts that she favors: “.
[young] children represent only a few theory-like cognitive structures, in which
their notions of causality are embedded and in terms of which their deep
ontological commitments are explicated. Cognitive development consists. in part,
in the emergence of new theories out of these older ones, with the concomitant
reconstructing of the ontologically important concepts and emergence of new
explanatory notions” (p. 14); “. . successive theories differ in three related ways:
in the domain of phenomena accounted for. the nature of explanations deemed
acceptable, and even in the individual concepts at the center of each system ..
Change of one kind cannot be understood without reference to the changes of the
other kinds” (pp. 4-5). The last two sentences are quoted from Carey’s
discussion of theory shifts in the history of science; her proposal is. in effect, that
these are paradigms for conceptual changes in ontogeny.
Cognitive science is where philosophy goes when it dies. The version of
pragmatism according to which concepts are abstractions from knowledge
structures corresponds exactly to the version of positivism according to which
terms like “electron” are defined implicitly by reference to the theories they occur
in. Both fail, and for the same reasons.
Suppose you have a theory about electrons (viz. that they are X) and I have a
different theory about electrons (viz. that they are Y). And suppose. in both
cases. that our use of the term “electron” is implicitly defined by the theories we
espouse. Well. the “theory theory” says that you have an essentially different
concept of electrons from mine if (and only if?) you have an essentially different
theory of electrons from mine. The problem of how to individuate concepts thus
reduces to the problem of how to individuatc theories. according to this view.
 J. Fodor I Cognition 50 (lY94) 95-113 111

But, of course, nobody knows how to individuate theories. Roughly speaking,

theories are bundles of inferences, just as concepts are according to the
pragmatist treatment. The problem about which inferences constitute which
concepts has therefore an exact analagon in the problem which inferences
constitute which theories. Unsurprisingly, these problems are equally intractable.
Indeed, according to the pragmatist view, they are interdefined. Theories are
essentially different if they exploit essentially different concepts; concepts are
essentially different if they are exploited by essentially different theories. It’s hard
to believe it matters much which of these shells you keep the pea under.
One thing does seem clear: if your way out of the shell game is to say that a
concept is constituted by the whole of the theory it belongs to, you will pay the
price of extravagant paradox. For example: it turns out that you and I can’t
disagree about dogs, or electrons, or toothbrushes since we have no common
conceptual apparatus in which to couch the disagreement. You utter “Some dogs
have tails.” “No dogs have tails” I reply. We seem to be contradicting one
another, but in fact we’re not. Since tailessness is part of my theory of dogs, it is
also part of my concept DOG according to the present, holist account of concept
individuation. Since you and I have different concepts of dogs, we mean different
things when we say “dog”. So the disagreement between us is, as comfortable
muddleheads like to put it, “just semantic”. You might have thought that our
disagreement was about the facts and that you could refute what I said by
producing a dog with a tail. But it wasn’t and you can’t, so don’t bother trying;
you have you idea of dogs and I have mine. (What, one wonders, makes them
both ideas of dogs?) First the pragmatist theory of concepts, then the theory
theory of concepts, then holism, then relativism. So it goes. Or so, at least, it’s
often gone.
I want to emphasize two caveats. The first is that I’m not accusing Carey of
concept holism, still less of the slide from concept holism to relativism. Carey
thinks that only the “central” principles of a theory individuate its concepts. The
trouble is that she has no account of centrality, and the question “which of the
inferences a theory licenses are central?” sounds suspiciously similar to the
question “which of the inferences that a concept licenses are constitutive?” Carey
cites with approval Kuhn’s famous distinction between theory changes that
amount to paradigm shifts and those that don’t (Kuhn, 1962). If you have caught
onto how this game is played, you won’t be surprised to hear that nobody knows
how to individuate paradigms either. Where is this buck going to stop?
My second caveat is that holism about the acquisition of beliefs and about the
confirmation of theories might well both be true even if holism about the
individuation of concepts is, as I believe, hopeless. There is no contradiction
between Quine’s famous dictum that it’s only as a totality that our beliefs “face
the tribunal of experience”, and Hume’s refusal to construe the content of one’s
concepts as being determined by the character of one’s theoretical commitments.
There is. to be sure, a deep, deep problem about how to get a theory of
confirmation and belief fixation if you are an atom& about concepts. But there is
also a deep, deep problem about how to get a theory of confirmation and belief
fixation if you are MOBan atomist about concepts. So far as I know, there’s no
reason to suppose that the first of these problems is worse than the second.
So much for caveats. It’s worth noticing that the holistic account of concepts at
which we’ve now dead-ended is diametrically opposite to the classical view that
we started with. We saw that, for the likes of Hume, any concept could become
associated to any other. This was a way of saying that the identity of a concept is
independent of the theories one holds about the things that fall under it; it’s
independent, to put it contemporary terms, of the concept’s inferentinl role. In
classical accounts. concepts are individuated by what they are concepts of, and
not by what theories they belong to. Hume was thus a radical atomist just where
contemporary cognitive scientists are tempted to be radically holist. In this
respect, 1 think that Hume was closer to the truth than we are.
Here’s how the discussion has gone so far: modern representational theories of
mind arc devoted to the pragmatist idea that having concepts is having epistemic
capacities. But not just sorting capacities since sorting is itself relativized to
concepts. Maybe, then, inferential capacities as well? So bc it, but which
inferential capacities? Well, at a minimum. inferential capacities that respect the
compositionality of mental representations. Defining inferences are candidates
since they do respect the compositionality of mental representations. Or, rather.
they would if there were any definitions, but there aren’t any definitions to speak
of. Statistical inferences aren’t candidates because they aren’t compositional. It
follows that concepts can’t be stereotypes. The “theory theory” merely begs the
problem it is meant to solve since the individuation of theories presupposes the
individuation of the concepts they contain. Holism would be a godsend and the
perfect way out except that it’s preposterous on the face of it. What’s left, then,
for a pragmatist to turn to?
I suspect. in fact, that there is nothing left for a pragmatist to turn to and that
our cognitive science is in deep trouble. Not that there aren’t mental representa-
tions, or that mental representations aren’t made of concepts. The problem is,
rather, that Hume was right: concepts aren’t individuated by the roles that they
play in inferences, or, indeed, by their roles in any other mental processes. If. by
stipulation, semantics is about what constitutes concepts and psychology is about
the nature of mental processes, then the view I’m recommending is that semuntics
isn’t part of psychology.
If semantics isn’t part of psychology. you don’t need to have a sophisticated
theory of mental processes in order to get it right about what concepts are. Hume.
for example, did get it right about what concepts are, even though his theory of
mental processes was associationistic and hence hopelessly primitive. Concepts
are the constituents of thoughts; as such. they’re the most elementary mental
 J. Fodor I Cognition 50 (1994) Y-5-113 113

objects that have both causal and representational properties. Since, however,
concepts are individuated by their representational and not by their casual
properties, all that has to specified in order to identify a concept is what it is the
concept of. The whole story about the individuation of the concept DOG is that
it’s the concept that represents dogs, as previously remarked.
But if “What individuates concepts?” is easy, that’s because its the wrong
question, according to the present view. The right questions are: “How do mental
representations represent?” and “How are we to reconcile atomism about the
individuation of concepts with the holism of such key cognitive processes as
inductive inference and the fixation of belief?” Pretty much all we know about the
first question is that here Hume was, for once, wrong; mental representation
doesn’t reduce to mental imaging. What we know about the second question is, as
far as I can tell, pretty nearly nothing at all. The project of constructing a
representational theory of the mind is among the most interesting that empirical
science has ever proposed. But I’m afraid we’ve gone about it all wrong.
At the very end of Portnoy’s Complaint, the client’s two hundred pages of
tortured, non-directive self-analysis comes to an end. In the last sentence of the
book, the psychiatrist finally speaks: “So [said the doctor]. Now vee may perhaps
to begin. Yes?”

References

Bruner, J., Goodnow, J.. & Austin, G. (1956). A Study of Thinking. New York: Wiley.
Carey, S. (1985). Conceprual Change in Childhood. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dennett, D. (1978). Skinner Skinned. In Brainstorms. Cambridge. MA: MIT Press.
Dewey, J. (1958). Experience and Nature. New York: Dover Publications.
Fodor, J. (1990). A Theory of Content and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor. J., & Lepore, E. (1991). Why meaning (probably) isn’t conceptual role. Mind and Language,
6, 328-343.
Fodor, J.. & Lepore, E. (1992). Holism: A Shopper’s Guide. Oxford: Blackwell.
Fodor. J.. & McLaughlin, B. (1990). Connectionism and the problem of systematicity: why
Smolensky’s solution doesn’t work. Cognition, 35, 183-204.
Fodor, J.. & Pylyshyn, Z. (1981). How direct is visual perception? Some reflection on Gibson’s
“ecological approach”. Cognition, 9, 139-196.
Fodor, J., & Pylyshyn, Z. (1988). Correctionism and cognitive architecture. Cognition, 2X, 3-71.
Kendler, H. (1952). “What is learned ?” A theoretical blind alley. Psychological Review, 59, 269-277.
Kuhn, T. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McClelland, J., & Rummelhart, D. (1986). A distributed model of human learning and memory. In J.
McClelland & D. Rummelhart (Eds.), Parallel Distributed Processing (Vol. 2). Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Peacocke. C. (1992). A Study of Concepts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Smolensky, P. (1988). On the proper treatment of connectionism. Behavioral and Bruin Sciences, 11,
l-23.
Woods, W. (1975). What’s in a link? In D. Bobrow & A. Collins (Eds.), Representation and
Understanding. New York: Academic Press.