Substance Concepts: BBS Call for Commentators

Below is the abstract of a forthcoming BBS target article on: INDIVIDUAL, STUFF, AND KIND CONCEPTS: A COMMON STRUCTURE by Ruth Garrett Millikan This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please send EMAIL to: bbs(a)cogsci.soton.ac.uk or write to: Behavioral and Brain Sciences Department of Psychology University of Southampton Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/ http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/ ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/ ftp://ftp.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/bbs/ gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals If you are not a BBS Associate, please send your CV and the name of a BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator. An electronic draft of the full text is available for inspection with a WWW browser, anonymous ftp or gopher according to the instructions that follow after the abstract. ____________________________________________________________________ A COMMON STRUCTURE FOR CONCEPTS OF INDIVIDUALS, STUFFS, AND REAL KINDS: MORE MAMA, MORE MILK AND MORE MOUSE Ruth Garrett Millikan Philosophy Department University of Connecticut Storrs CT 06250 millikan(a)umich.edu KEYWORDS: categorization, concepts, externalism, natural kinds, names, basic-level categories, child language, theory of meaning, Putnam. ABSTRACT: Concepts are highly theoretical entities. One cannot study them empirically without committing oneself to substantial preliminary assumptions. Among the competing theories of concepts and categorization developed by psychologists in the last thirty years, the implicit theoretical assumption of "descriptionism" has never been seriously challenged. I present a nondescriptionist theory of our most basic concepts, "substances," which include (1) stuffs (gold, milk), (2) real kinds (cat, chair) and (3) individuals (Mama, Bill Clinton, The Empire State Building). On the basis of something important that all three have in common, our earliest and most basic concepts of them are identical in structure. The membership of the category "cat," like that of "Mama," is a natural unit in nature, to which the concept cat does something like pointing, and continues to point despite large changes in the properties the thinker represents the unit as having. For example, large changes can occur in the way a child identifies cats and the things it is willing to call "cat" without affecting the extension of its word "cat." The difficulty is to cash in the metaphor of "pointing" in this context. Having substance concepts need not depend on knowing words, but language interacts with substance concepts, completely transforming the conceptual repertoire. I will discuss how public language plays a crucial role in both the acquisition of substance concepts and their completed structure. -------------------------------------------------------------- To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the World Wide Web or by anonymous ftp or gopher from the US or UK BBS Archive. Ftp instructions follow below. Please do not prepare a commentary on this draft. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the article. The URLs you can use to get to the BBS Archive: http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/ http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.millikan.html ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/bbs.millikan ftp://ftp.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/bbs/Archive/bbs.millikan gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals To retrieve a file by ftp from an Internet site, type either: ftp ftp.princeton.edu or ftp 128.112.128.1 When you are asked for your login, type: anonymous Enter password as queried (your password is your actual userid: yourlogin(a)yourhost.whatever.whatever - be sure to include the "@") cd /pub/harnad/BBS To show the available files, type: ls Next, retrieve the file you want with (for example): get bbs.millikan When you have the file(s) you want, type: quit