François Recanati
Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Collège de France
Année 2023-2024
Colloque - Indexical Dynamics : Cognitive Dynamics as Mental Vehicle Identity: A Parity Argument from Polysemy
Colloque organisé par François Recanati, Professeur du Collège de France, chaire Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Intervenant(s)
Michael Murez, Université de Nantes
According to Fregean theories, thinking the same thought requires thinking not only about the same referent, but also thinking about it in the same way, under the same concept. Fregean theories face 'Schiffer's Puzzle' (Schiffer, 2005; Buchanan, 2016), i.e., some thoughts have what Schiffer calls "the relativity feature": "[their] entertainment requires different people, or the same person at different times, to think of [the same referent] in different ways" (Schiffer, 2005: 138). Paradigmatic examples are provided by 'cognitive dynamics' (Kaplan, 1989): A thinker thinks of some day as "today", a day passes, and the same thinker, keeping track of time, now thinks of the same day as "yesterday". The thinker is disposed to reason diachronically according to a pattern known as 'trading on coreference' (Campbell, 1988), which is often taken to indicate redeployment of the same concept. Yet it is tempting to say that the concepts expressed by "today" and "yesterday" are different, since they play different cognitive roles. According to Schiffer (2005: 149), "[i]t's clear the Fregean theory can't accommodate the relativity feature", because contra (e.g.,) Frege (1956 [1918]) and Evans (1981), there is no plausible account of what the concept which remains the same cross-contextually, and is expressed by different indexicals, is supposed to be.
Against Schiffer and others, I defend a broadly Fregean position, which allows for diachronic identity between concepts, despite changes in (many aspects of) cognitive role and means of linguistic expression. I argue that such a position is independently motivated if, unlike traditional Fregeans, we identify concepts not with elements of content, but with 'robust' mental vehicles (Reference omitted for review). Concepts so construed are not individuated by the thinker's conception of their referent (the properties and relations they represent it as instantiating). My basic strategy for responding to Schiffer's puzzle is Fodorian in spirit (Fodor, 1990: 167): changes in a thinker's global inferential/behavioral dispositions across contexts trace back to aspects of their broader psychological state, which are not individuative of their concepts. They correspond to conceptional rather than conceptual change.
