From Linguistic Contextualism to Situated Cognition: the Case of Ad Hoc Concepts

Abstract

Our utterances are typically if not always “situated,” in the sense that they are true or false relative to unarticulated parameters of the extra-linguistic context. The problem is to explain how these parameters are determined, given that nothing in the uttered sentences indicates them. It is tempting to claim that they must be determined at the level of thought or intention. However, as many philosophers have observed, thoughts themselves are no less situated than utterances. Unarticulated parameters need not be mentally represented. In this paper, I try to make precise the notion of representation at stake here. In one sense of ‘representation’, something is represented if it is inferentially relevant. In another, less demanding sense, something is represented if it is relevant to the construction of a context-sensitive, ad hoc concept. Ad hoc concepts act as “proxies” for cognitively more demanding representations. They “imitate” the latter's epistemic and pragmatic roles while being inferentially less sophisticated. Thus, there are two senses in which a thought can be said to be situated: (1) its truth-value is relative to a non-represented contextual parameter, (2) its truth-value is not itself relative, but it involves a context-sensitive, ad hoc concept.

Keywords:

• Contextualism
• Situated Cognition
• Relativism
• Ad Hoc Concepts
• Unarticulated Constituents

Acknowledgements

Various ancestors of this paper have been presented at the conference “Memory and Embodied Cognition” (Macquarie University, Sydney, November 2004), the 5th Prague Interpretation Colloquium (Czech Academy of Sciences, April 2005) and the conference “La ciencia como proceso cultural” (UNAM, Mexico City, June 2005). I thank Angeles Eraña, Axel Barcelo, Eros Corazza, John Sutton and a referee for comments and/or encouragement.

Notes

Notes

[1] See also Borg (2004), which is also in the spirit of semantic minimalism.

[2] Recanati (2004) contains a very useful presentation of the relevant issues.

[3] See Evans (1985, ch. 12) for an influential defence of the Fregean view based on apparently non-negotiable features of assertion. Full-blown relativists, such as John MacFarlane, have opposed Evans's argument and put forward a non-standard account of assertion.

[4] I shall use italics when thoughts rather than linguistic representations are in question.

[5] Arguably, Perry's examples are not on a par. Perhaps the ducking example does not involve any representation; a fortiori, it does not involve any self-representation. The case is different with the milk shake example, which involves some form of practical reasoning.

[6] “The eyes that see and the torso or legs that move are parts of the same more or less integrated body” (Perry, 1992, p. 219). See also Corazza (2004, especially ch. 2) who contends, in a Wittgensteinian spirit, that our thoughts are anchored to non-represented contexts determined by “language-games” and “forms of life.”

[7] Interestingly, Barsalou (2005) calls ad hoc representations “conceptualizations,” and defines a concept as a productive ability to generate many different situated conceptualizations.

[8] Harmony is relative to thought-content. Consider a subject who utters ‘It's raining’ on the basis of her visual experience of the weather in Paris. She takes the train to Marseille and, a few hours later, acts on the basis of her initial thought by opening her umbrella there. The subject exhibits disharmony with respect to the ad hoc thought It's raining-here (since seeing the weather in Paris does not tell us anything about the meteorological condition in Marseille), but she exhibits harmony with respect to a mere feature-placing thought (which is indeed the only coherent thought-content she is grasping).

[9] Here is a more controversial case. Suppose Wittgenstein is right and there are purely expressive uses of ‘I’. For instance, an utterance of ‘I’m tired’ expresses the subject's tiredness, and is not associated with an identifying self-conception. The subject forms a neutral or impersonal thought like There is tiredness. In other words, the subject is a cognitively unarticulated constituent of the thought. Arguably, though, the subject is still a linguistically articulated constituent of the utterance.

[10] The term ‘minimal representation’ is itself used by Clark in a consonant sense.