ORIENTATION

Substances, as I have described them, are whatever one can learn from given only one or a few encounters, various skills or information that will apply on other encounters. Further, this possibility must be grounded in some kind of natural necessity. The function of a substance concept is to make possible this sort of learning and use of knowledge for a specific substance. For this, the cognizing organism must be able to recognize the specific substance under a variety of different conditions, as many as possible. It needs to do this, first, to grasp that the substance it is learning about over various encounters is one and the same so that knowledge of it can accumulate and, second, so that the accumulated knowledge can be applied. For substance concepts to be employed in the service of theoretical knowing – employed for knowing that rather than knowing how – the substance must be represented in thought in a univocal way, the same substance always represented as being the same. This makes possible a stable, unequivocal, and nonredundant inner representational system.

The ability to recognize what is objectively the same substance again as the same despite wide variations in the faces it shows to the senses is necessarily fallible. Although you surely have many ways of identifying each member of your immediate family – similarly for water and for cats – there will always be possible conditions under which you would misidentify them, mistaking them for someone or something else.

The theory I have presented of substance concepts and the thoughts governed by them is similar in a number of respects to Evans' theory of “information based thoughts” in The Varieties of Reference (1982). Evans' information based thoughts were thoughts containing information derived from perception or testimony, where the thinker also had “an adequate concept” of the information's source. Evans is not altogether clear, however, on what “information” is supposed to be. Initially (p. 122n), he refers us to J. J. Gibson (1968), but his subsequent discussion, which makes reference to informational states that “fail to fit” their own objects, “decaying” information (p. 128n), “garbled” information (p. 129), informational states that are “of nothing” (p. 128) and so forth, is glaringly inconsistent with Gibson's conception of information.

The clearest images Evans presents us are information contained, on the one hand, in a photograph, and on the other, it seems, in a percept (not, as Gibson would have had it, in energy impinging on sensory surfaces). But “[a]n informational state may be of nothing: this will be the case if there was no object which served as input to the information system when the information was produced” (p. 128). On the other hand, “two informational states embody the same information provided they result from the same informational event … even if they do not have the same content: the one may represent the same information as the other, but garbled in various ways” (pp. 128–9).

INTRODUCTION

I have tried to show that the ability to reidentify things that are objectively the same when we encounter them in perception is the most central cognitive ability that we possess. It is an extremely difficult task, deserving careful study by psychologists and neuroscientists as well philosophers. But in order to study how a task is performed one must begin, of course, with some understanding of what that task is. We have not yet asked in what the act of reidentifying consists.

The question is made more difficult by a tradition we have all been trained in, philosophers and psychologists alike, that takes the answer to be obvious. Answers to various other questions have then been constructed on this implicit foundation, so that challenges to it have become both hard to understand and anxiety producing. This traditional answer is that reidentifying an object or property in either perception or thought consists in being able to discriminate it, and that this ability is manifested in sameness of one's reaction to the object, or sameness of one's treatment of it, or sameness of the mental term or concept one applies to it. That is, reidentifying is repeating some kind of response. Call this “the repetition view of reidentifying.”

One familiar doctrine constructed on the repetition view is that when sameness in the referential content of two perceptions or thoughts fails to be transparent to the thinker, this is because the content is not thought of in the same way both times.

REAL KINDS

Substances are those things about which you can learn from one encounter something of what to expect on other encounters, where this is no accident but the result of a real connection. There is a reason why the same or similar properties characterize what is encountered. We can begin with examples of substances that are kinds. I will call these substances “real kinds,” contrasting this, as is traditional, with “nominal kinds.”

Most of the various definitions currently offered of “natural kinds” capture real kinds of one sort or another. Sometimes, however, the term “natural kind” is used to refer merely to a class determined by a “projectable” property, that is, one that might figure in natural laws. Then “is green” and “is at 32° Fahrenheit” denote “natural kinds,” predicates projectable over certain classes of subjects. What I am calling real kinds, on the other hand, must figure as subjects over which a variety of predicates are projectable. They are things that have properties, rather than merely being properties. That is why Aristotle called them “secondary substances,” putting them in the same broad ontological class as individuals, which he called “primary substances.” True, unlike the Aristotelian tradition, in modern times concepts of stuffs and real kinds have traditionally been treated as predicate concepts. That is, to call a thing “gold” or “mouse” has been taken to involve saying or thinking that it bears a certain description. One understands something as being gold or a mouse or a chair or a planet by representing it as having a certain set, or a certain appropriate sampling, of properties.

ONE SPECIAL KIND OF CONCEPT

One use of the word “concept” equates a concept with whatever it is one has to learn in order to use a certain word correctly. So we can talk of the concept or and the concept of and the concepts hurrah, the, because, necessarily, ouch, good, true, two, exists, is – and so forth. We can talk that way, but then we should remember Wittgenstein's warning: “Think of the tools in a toolbox: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a glue pot, nails and screws – The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects” (1953, Section 11). Given this broad usage of “concept,” there will be little or nothing in common about any two of these various concepts. We mustn't expect a theory of how the tape measure works to double as a theory of how the glue works.

In this book, I propose a thesis about the nature of one and only one kind of concept, namely, concepts of what (with a respectful nod to Aristotle) I call “substances.” Paradigmatic substances, in my sense, are individuals (Mama, The Empire State Building), stuffs (gold, milk), and natural kinds (mouse, geode). The core of the theory is not, however, about grasp of the use of words for substances (although I will get to that). Rather, the core belongs to the general theory of cognition, in exactly the same way that theories of perception do. Substance concepts are primarily things we use to think with rather than to talk with.

SAMES, DIFFERENTS, SAME, AND DIFFERENT

For certain purposes sameness can be treated as a relation. So treated it is of special interest because, although there is only one kind of real sameness relation, hence only one kind of sameness in the real world, and only one kind of sameness on the level of intermediaries (intermediaries are, after all, supposed to be real in their own realm) there are two separate relations corresponding to sameness on the level of intentional content. A visaging might involve (1) two or more presentations of what is the same content in fact or (2) two or more presented contents visaged as being the same. Call the first of these a “visaging of sames,” the second a “visaging of sameness.” Either can occur without the other – as I will slowly try to make clear – or they can occur together. Compare other internal relations. One might visage a tone, say, middle C, and also visage a different tone, say, A above C, but not visage one being a fifth higher than the other though of course it is. Or one might visage that one color was brighter than another without visaging either of these as a definite brightness or even as very definite hues. Imagine, for example, that the lighting is poor and peculiar, so one can't really tell “what the colors are.” The passive picture theory of perception (Section 8.2), however, with its projection of properties of the visaged onto the intermediaries of the visaging, requires that visaged sameness should correspond to real sameness in intermediaries, that is, that sameness should be represented by sameness.

There is, indeed, a form of informational semantics that has this verificationist implication. The original definition of information given in Dretske's Knowledge and the Flow of Information (1981, hereafter KFI), when employed as a base for a theory of intentional representation or “content,” has this implication. I will argue that, in fact, most of what an animal needs to know about its environment is not available as natural information of this kind. It is true, I believe, that there is one fundamental kind of perception that depends on this kind of natural information, but more sophisticated forms of inner representation do not. It is unclear, however, exactly what “natural information” is supposed to mean, certainly in Fodor, and even in Dretske's writing. In many places, Dretske seems to employ a softer notion than the one he originally defines. I will propose a softer view of natural information that is, I believe, at least hinted at by Dretske, and show that it does not have verificationist consequences. According to this soft informational semantics, a creature can perfectly well have a representation of Xs without being able to discriminate Xs from Ys.

I believe there is some ambivalence in Dretske's writing about natural information, especially noticeable when comparing KFI to Explaining Behavior (1991, hereafter EB), but if we ignore some of Dretske's examples, the explicit statement of the theory in KFI is univocal.

EARLY WORDS FOR SUBSTANCES

The bulk of a child's earliest words are concrete nouns, including names of individuals, names of concrete kinds, and some names for stuffs (“milk,” “juice”). These are acquired in a rush by the dozens between about one and one half and two years old: “this vocabulary spurt is often called the naming explosion to reflect the large preponderance of nouns that are learned” (Markman 1991, p. 81). Adjectives come later and more slowly, and abstract nouns later still. This suggests that the ability to distinguish concrete individuals in thought and the ability to distinguish concrete kinds and stuffs may have something in common, and that concepts of properties and of other abstract objects may not be required for these tasks. There is much independent evidence that children come to appreciate separable dimensions, such as color, shape, and size, only after a considerable period in which “holistic similarities” dominate their attention (see Keil 1989, for discussion). Thus, concepts of properties again appear as less fundamental than those expressed with simple concrete nouns.

We can interpret this data as suggesting that concepts of substances are the easiest for a child to obtain, and more surprising, that the ontological distinction among individuals, real kinds, and stuffs does not produce a difference in ease of early learning. I have proposed that, despite their obvious ontological differences, individuals, real kinds, and stuffs have something important in common that bears directly on what it is to have concepts of them.

INTRODUCTION

In Chapter 7, I offered an answer to the question: How do we know when we are thinking of a substance, and thinking of it unequivocally and nonredundantly? But I did not answer the question, equally urgent: What, on an externalist account, could possibly constitute that one knows what substance one is thinking about? In this chapter, I will try to answer that question.

I will agree with Evans that grasping the identity of the object of one's thought requires having a concept of that object. I have already agreed with him, throughout this book, that a (substance) concept is, in part, an ability to reidentify its object. But abilities, I have said, can be better or worse (Section 4.3). Especially, one can know how to do a thing only under very restricted conditions or under a great variety of conditions. Knowing what one is judging about is thus a matter of degree. One can come to know better what one is judging about.

WHAT DETERMINES THE EXTENSIONS OF NEW SUBSTANCE CONCEPTS?

In the first section of this chapter, I will use the results of the last chapter to explain more exactly how the extension of a substance concept is fixed. I will be concerned, especially, with how the extensions of new substance concepts, acquired directly on first meeting with their referents, are fixed. The rest of the chapter will be devoted to fitting the theory of substance concepts defended here into the more general theory of intentional representation developed in Millikan (1984, 1993a).

Evans concluded, about the man with the memory of the ball he was unable to identify, that the man did not have the capacity to think of that ball at all, but only to think of a ball (Section 13.4). But, I have argued, the question whether he could think of that individual ball doesn't turn on whether he was actually able to reidentify it. It doesn't turn on whether his situation was right for reidentifying it. It depends, rather, on whether his thought was produced by his cognitive systems in such a way as to have, as its first assigned function, that it be coidentified, specifically, with thoughts of that particular ball. And to that question the answer would seem to be yes.

As Evans describes the case, when the man was looking at the ball he understood it to be an individual ball, indeed, one that happened to be steel and shiny.

INTRODUCTION: IMAGES OF IDENTITY

In Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar, Strawson (1974) offers “a picture or model” of what happens when a man learns that two things formerly thought to be separate are in fact one and the same. “We are to picture a [knowledge] map, as it were” on which all those individuals the man knows of are represented by dots, and the predicates the man knows to apply to each are written in lines emanating from these dots or, if the predicate is relational, lines joining two dots.

On Strawson's picture, the identity of a particular is represented in the mind by the identity of another particular. So long as you haven't made any mistakes, everything you know about your mother is attached to the same particular mental representation of your mother, to the same token.

Steven Pinker (1994b) chides the educated layman for imagining Darwin's theory to go something like Figure 1 (the vertical lines are “begats”).

Pinker says, “evolution did not make a ladder; it made a bush” (p. 343), and he gives us the diagrams shown in Figures 2 and 3 instead, showing how it went, in increasing detail, down to us. “Paleontologists like to say that to a first approximation, all species are extinct (ninetynine percent is the usual estimate). The organisms we see around us are distant cousins, not great grandparents; they are a few scattered twig-tips of an enormous tree whose branches and trunk are no longer with us” (pp. 343–4). The historical life bush consists mainly in dead ends.

Moreover, when we look more closely at the life bush, examining in detail the various lineages that form the littlest twigs (the species), we see the same pattern over again. The vast majority of individual animals and plants forming these various lineages didn't make it. The twigs are largely made of fuzz – of myriad little lives that broke off before reproduction. An indication of a species' mortality rate is how many more offspring than one per parent are conceived on average. Consider, then, spiders, fish, and rabbits. And recall that Octavius was a common Roman name. To a first approximation, all individual animals die before reproducing.

Species went extinct, typically, because of changing environments, including the comings and goings of other living species.

This book has three major theses: (1) that a number of historically prominent skeptical arguments make no obvious mistake and therefore cannot be easily dismissed; (2) that the analysis of skeptical arguments is philosophically useful and important and should therefore have a central place in the methodology of philosophy, particularly in the methodology of epistemology; and (3) that taking skeptical arguments seriously requires us to adopt an externalist, reliabilist epistemology. More specifically, it motivates a position that I call “agent reliabilism,” which is an externalist version of virtue epistemology.

If these theses are correct, then many philosophers have misunderstood the nature of skeptical arguments and their role in philosophical inquiry. For example, many philosophers think that skepticism poses no philosophically interesting problem. According to this view, skeptical arguments rest on some obvious mistake, such as a quest for absolute certainty or a demand for immutable foundations, and can therefore easily be dismissed. Others think that skepticism rests on a substantive philosophical mistake, but that skeptical arguments teach no epistemological lessons. For example, many philosophers think that skepticism is rooted in a bad ontology. On this view skeptical arguments assume an ontological dualism between knowing mind and material object of knowledge and can therefore be rejected by rejecting the offending dualism. Others have thought that skepticism is rooted in representationalism, and still others that it is rooted in realism. Finally, some philosophers have appreciated that skepticism is indeed an epistemological problem, but have tried to solve it by remaining within a traditional, internalist epistemology.

This book is largely the result of snide remarks from my colleagues at Fordham University. I arrived there very interested in skeptical problems, and people like Vincent Colapietro and Merold Westphal would wonder, out loud, why. One time, after I had presented a paper to the department on Humean skepticism, Chris Gowans bluntly asked me why anyone should find this sort of thing interesting. On another occasion, I was asked why I had my heart set on raising the dead – Hume had already been refuted, so why bother doing it again? Remarks like this were only half serious, but they were frequent enough to set me thinking about why I was so interested in skeptical arguments. It certainly was not because I thought that skepticism might be true. In fact, in this sense I was far less skeptical than most of my colleagues. Rather, I came to realize that my interest in skepticism was methodological. Along with a great many other epistemologists, I was interested in skeptical arguments because I thought that they could teach substantive lessons about the nature of knowledge and evidence. It was part of my methodology, in fact, to assume that skepticism is false, and that skeptical arguments must go wrong somewhere. The trick was to say where, and to learn the philosophical lesson contained therein.

In this last chapter I want to sketch how the methodology of strong particularism can be extended to moral and religious epistemology. I do this by way of three illustrations. In Part I of the chapter, I look at work by Plantinga and Alston in religious epistemology, and I show how these authors effectively engage in an indirect application of the methodology. Both authors argue that objections to the rationality of religious belief trade on assumptions that, if true, would lead to skepticism in the empirical realm as well. As a result, the objections against religious belief are determined to be unsound. Also as a result, positive suggestions for the epistemology of religious belief emerge. We will see how Plantinga defends the general idea that beliefs about God might be noninferentially justified, and how Alston develops this line of thought in a theory of religious perception. The general structure of Alston's discussion is as follows: Objections to religious perception trade on an inadequate understanding of perception in general; such objections, if sound, would make even empirical perception impossible. Once an adequate theory of empirical perception is in place, however, the possibility of perceiving God becomes a live option in religious epistemology.

In Part II of the chapter, I want to do for moral perception what Alston does for religious perception. Drawing on the results of Chapters 2 through 8, I argue that traditional objections to moral perception misunderstand the nature of perception in general.

In the first four chapters I have been claiming that skeptical arguments play an important role in philosophical inquiry. Such arguments act as heuristic devices for driving positive epistemology in particular, as opposed to ontology or philosophy of mind. I mean this thesis to be both prescriptive and descriptive. On the one hand, I am claiming that skeptical arguments ought to play this methodological role. On the other, the claim is that such arguments do in fact play it. Nothing supports the descriptive thesis more than the literature on the skeptical argument from an infinite regress of reasons. That argument is beautifully simple, but it has inspired debate over the nature of knowledge and evidence for over two millennia.

THE REGRESS ARGUMENT AND STRONG PARTICULARISM

The problem arises because it seems that one must have good reasons for whatever one claims to know. But not any reason is a good reason; one must have reasons for thinking that one's reasons are true. Accordingly, it seems that knowledge requires (per impossibile) an infinite regress of reasons. An early version of the argument is attributed to the ancient skeptic, Pyrrho. The passage quoted next is taken from Sextus Empiricus's discussion of Agrippa's five skeptical modes leading to the suspension of judgment. Agrippa, in turn, was systemizing the skeptical teachings of Pyrrho.

At present, Western philosophy is divided among various schools. For reasons that are partly philosophical and partly historical, philosophy as it is practiced in the Anglo-American or “analytic” tradition often looks very different from what goes on in traditional continental philosophy, the tradition of American pragmatism, or the so-called post-modern school. But across these various factions one discovers a point on which there is odd agreement. A great many philosophers, including representatives from each of the schools mentioned, have defended essentially the same diagnosis of skepticism about the world. Namely, they claim that skepticism is not an epistemological problem at all, but is rather the necessary consequence of a misguided modern ontology. Once that ontology is given up, these philosophers agree, the problem of skepticism cannot even get off the ground.

Richard Rorty calls this characterization of the relationship between skepticism and the modern ontology “the usual story,” citing Etienne Gilson and J. H. Randall as two of the story's prominent proponents. Here are some characteristic statements of the position, beginning with two from a founding father of Anglo-American philosophy, George Berkeley: