Abstract

Cognitive science has come down with a nasty cold, so Jerry Fodor has recently lamented, and the afflicting strain is something called concept pragmatism.1 Its chief symptom is the urge to identify the content of a concept with the inferences habitually drawn upon in its use (a ‘definition-in-use’), these serving also as its condition of possession, in knowing how to draw those inferences definitive of the concept.2 The affliction is quite fatal if Fodor is right, but the welfare of the patient is of only indirect concern. What I want instead to ask here is whether the diagnosis has anything to do with the pragmatism that he says, breathlessly, has “bred monsters” down the last century—in particular, with the..