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Notes
1. Machery does not assert an identity between the philosophical and ordinary uses of concepts, but rather the conceptual capacities drawn on across these uses. My claim is that Machery fails to distinguish adequately these different uses. Now, insofar as capacities are individuated by the kinds of things they are capacities for, these distinctive ways of using concepts arguably correspond to different conceptual capacities, i.e. different ways of deploying concepts available to both capacities, though perhaps some belong exclusively to one or the other capacity.
2. The characterization of the method of cases I’m here propounding does not appear in Machery’s discussion of ‘the reflection defense’ (155–158) nor does it appear in his discussion of ‘the mischaracterization defense’ (177–180).
3. I am in no way claiming that philosophers necessarily ‘theorize’ about linguistic practice.
4. It is not a problem for the standard use of cases as I understand it that ‘typically people do not form beliefs about necessary and sufficient membership conditions’ (234). After all, if people naturally formed such beliefs, and were the beliefs reliably true, there’d be no need for philosophical reflection. Machery also mentions that ‘most philosophers analyzing the method of cases have missed … the fact that typicality gradients are an important manifestation of concepts’ (234). While prototypes theorists in the 1970s may have coined the term ‘typicality’, it’s far from clear that philosophers have completely missed the phenomena it corresponds to, and Machery does not elaborate on how he understands the nature of the omission nor why exactly it should be thought problematic.
5. See Chapter 3. I discuss these features below.
6. For example, propaganda arguably exploits the associative and affective elements of human understanding in ways that do indeed undermine our rational capacities. See e.g. Stanley (Citation2015).
7. My point here is distinct from ‘the fallibility defense’ (171–175) Machery considers.
8. There’s an affinity, on which there isn’t room to elaborate, between what I’m suggesting and the notion of ‘conceptual competence’ Machery considers in the first chapter, and with ‘the expertise defense’ (158–169).
9. See also Brogaard (Citation2016).
10. Feminist philosophers of epistemology and science as well philosophers of race, gender, and other socially and politically significant categories have been challenging this trend for some time.