Abstract
Advocates of sortal essentialism have argued that concepts like “thing” or “object” lack the unambiguous individuative criteria necessary to play the role of genuine sortals in reference. Instead, they function as “dummy sortals” which are placeholders or incomplete designations. In disqualifying apparent placeholder sortals, however, these philosophers have posed insuperable problems for accounts of childhood conceptual development. I argue that recent evidence in psychology demonstrates that children do possess simple or basic sortals of physical objects or things. I contend that these concepts provide the genuine individuative criteria necessary for reference. As a consequence, sortalism can be made compatible with the developmental facts of conceptual development.
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Notes
Rather than limit my discussion to a particular conception or theory of concepts, I will maintain, as far as possible, a neutral approach to their nature. As a consequence, I would argue that a necessary condition for concept possession is the capacity to have thoughts that employ that concept. This remains vague, of course, but very little turns on providing a more precise definition for our discussion.
See L.R. Baker (1997) for a more thorough discussion of the relation between physical constitution and identity.
Though early sortal designations can be overthrown in favour of more particular designations as familiarity with the object grows.
Bare particulars are not, however, simply a useful fiction within modern logic. The temptation towards bare particulars or something like them can be attribute to both Aristotle (Metaphysics Z, 1029a, pp. 10–25) and Locke, and more recently to Edwin Allaire (1963).
While there is a growing consensus that there are a great deal of cognitive structures and possibly concepts that are innate, there is very little evidence for the view that concepts of specific individuals are part of our basic complement. See Cowie (1999) for a sceptical discussion of Fodor’s version of radical nativism. I would argue, however, that innate concepts might play roles similar to those of sortals in object designation for other realms of discourse. Hence, we may have innately specific concepts of psychological or causal kinds, amongst others.
This is on the assumption that covering sortals fall under sortals that themselves subsume the same kinds of things that the covering sortal does.
This argument is reminiscent of Fodor’s so-called standard argument for nativism. Fodor (1981) argued that acquiring new concepts through rational learning mechanisms presupposes the ability to generate hypotheses that express the content of the concept being acquired. Without some basic or primitive concepts, no concepts could be acquired through learning. The sortal dependency argument echoes many of these concerns, though its primary concern is less with the mechanisms for concept acquisition, than the preconditions for concept possession.
My argument for this view is indebted to a similar position advocated by Lowe (1989b, pp. 13–14). One might argue that we can stop the regress if we suppose that the identity conditions for a sortal term can be given by another sortal with the same identity conditions. That is, if sortal A requires a covering sortal B for its identity conditions, why not suppose that B is the same as A? While I think this view is implausible, and introduces potentially insuperable problems for concept learning, addressing it here will take us beyond the scope of this paper.
For a more detailed discussion of the relation between these studies and Piaget’s conception of early childhood capacities, see Baillargeon (1999).
See, for example, Baillargeon and Graber (1987) for another example of early childhood object tracking.
See Xu et al. (1999).
See Kahneman et al (1992) for a version of this objection.
The experiments were not limited to the distinction between bunnies and trucks, but also included such things as cups, model cars and bottles.
I borrow the term “guiding conception” from Brian Loar (1991), who uses it in a different context, but to similar effect.
Eli Hirsch voices similar concerns (1982, p. 273).
Consider Lowe’s reading (1989, p. 12) of the following question: “What is that large brown thing over there in the room?” He claims that this is an example of reference without a sortal––the ‘it’ refers not to an object or thing but an uninterpreted variable. He writes, “while the question has determinate sense, this is only because it means something like: ‘there is something large and brown over there––what is it?’” I disagree. Surely, the ‘it’ in the question stands for the ‘something’ identified in the declarative. If he cannot pick out the ‘something,’ then the question has no determinate sense. As a consequence, Lowe’s argument appears to presuppose a sortal designation in its formulation. There is no question that this is a rough designation at best, but of course that is why a more definite description is being sought. I address concerns about the vagueness of sortal terms near the end of the paper.
Eli Hirsch makes something like this point when he suggests that the unifying assumptions we apply to unknown bodies enables reference without appeal to any sortal designations (1982, pp. 272–273). My claim is that the psychological experiments suggest that the unifying assumptions we apply to bodies do represent a species of sortal concept.
Hirsch tentatively defines “object” as “any continuous tract of matter” (1982, p. 41), a conception that is already more precise than standard concepts of objects which might include such dispersed entities as swarms of insects or flocks of birds.
Consider, for example, the learning environments of the Teletubbies or Sesame Street. The contrasts in the game “one of these things is not like the others” emphasize single property differences at the expense of possible real world complications.
In his terms, “the constraint which a succession must satisfy in order for it to correspond to a persisting object (in our language) is that there be (in our language) a sortal term F such that every object-stage in the succession comes under (is an instance of) F” (1982, p. 36).
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Sarnecki, J.E. Sortals for Dummies. Erkenn 69, 145–164 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-007-9094-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-007-9094-6