Machery and Seppälä express concisely the basis upon which theories of concepts might be thought of as being empirically assessable:
“Psychological theories of concepts are supported to the extent that the properties they attribute to concepts explain why we tend to categorize, reason inductively or deductively, etc., the way we do. If concepts have many properties in common, as the received view would have it, then we would expect our categorization judgments to have many properties in common, and similarly for our episodes of inductive and deductive reasoning, the analogies we make, etc.”
Yet, to suppose that our categorization and reasoning will tell us something of what concepts are, as opposed to the deployment of concepts within our particular psychology, is to presuppose that the nature of concepts is to somehow incorporate these cognitive practices. On the contrary, any theory of concepts will be empirically indefeasible absent a priori charitable assumptions. Further, even the Principle of Charity includes two important variables: the concept expressed by means of a linguistic expression and judgements concerning the extension of one’s concepts. Thus, charity to another mind can come in the form of attributing true judgements at the expense of shared concepts, or by attributing shared concepts at the expense of true judgements. This gives two dimensions of freedom to the interpretation of another’s expressions and, of course, the more we loosen the principle of charity, the easier it is to ignore the results of empirical data as a threat to an a priori theory of concepts. All we need is a good motivation to do so.
Machery, E. and Seppälä, S, ‘Against Hybrid Theories of Concepts’ (2008) forthcoming, available online at http://www.pitt.edu/~machery/papers as at 3 November 2008
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