Christopher Peacocke

There are issues in the theory of concepts about which A Study of Concepts could have said more. There are also some issues about which it would have done well to say something different. The commentators in this symposium have successfully identified a series of issues of one or other of these two kinds, and I am very grateful for their thought and detailed attention. I have learned from reflection on their comments, and I take this opportunity to try to carry the discussion forward by addressing a range issues underdeveloped in A Study of Concepts. Georges Rey raises global questions about the project of SoC. Answerability, Quinean challenges and the relations between my approach and covariation or ‘locking’ theories are amongst the problems he raises. The comments of David Papineau are at an intermediate level of generality. He poses questions about the subject-matter of a theory of concepts, and rejects my critique of teleological theories of content. He is also dissatisfied with my account of the relations between actual thought and the normative properties of concepts. I will consider that issue at some length. Jane Heal considers my elaboration of the approach for a specific concept, that of belief. I will take the topics in that order.

This note aims to clarify which arguments do, and which arguments do not, tell against Conceptualism, the thesis that the representational content of experience is exclusively conceptual. Contrary to Sean Kelly's position, conceptualism has no difficulty accommodating the phenomena of color constancy and of situation‐dependence. Acknowledgment of nonconceptual content is also consistent with holding that experiences have nonrepresentational subjective features. the crucial arguments against conceptualism stem from animal perception, and from a distinction, elaborated in the final section of the paper, between content which is objective and content which is also conceived of by its subject as objective.

The Realm of Reason develops a new, general theory of what it is for a thinker to be entitled to form a given belief. The theory locates entitlement in the nexus of relations between truth, content, and understanding. Peacocke formulates three principles of rationalism that articulate this conception. The principles imply that all entitlement has a component that is justificationally independent of experience. The resulting position is thus a form of rationalism, generalized to all kinds of content. To show how these principles are realized in specific domains, Peacocke applies the theory in detail to several classical problems of philosophy, including the nature of perceptual entitlement, induction, and the status of moral thought. These discussions involve an elaboration of the structure of entitlement in ways that have applications in many other areas of philosophy. He also relates the theory to classical and recent rationalist thought, and to current issues in the theory of meaning, reference and explanation. In the course of these discussions, he proposes a general theory of the a priori. The focus of the work lies in the intersection of epistemology, metaphysics, and the theory of meaning, and will be of interest both to students and researchers in these areas, and to anyone concerned with the idea of rationality

Judgement, perception, and other mental states and events have a minimal objectivity in this sense: making the judgement or being in the mental state does not in general thereby make the judgement correct or make the perception veridical. I offer an explanation of this minimal objectivity by developing a form of constitutive transcendental argument. The argument appeals to the proper individuation of the content of judgements and perceptions. In the case of the conceptual content of judgements, concepts are individuated by their fundamental reference rules. Properly developed, this resource can be used against various forms of idealism, and to defend a conception of transcendental arguments that presupposes neither verificationism nor transcendental idealism. The article contrasts its approach with other recent transcendental treatments. It also addresses the relation between its argument and Principles of Significance. I close with a discussion of the right way of handling the extreme generality necessarily involved in transcendental reasoning

where F is a contradiction (I use his numbering). Tim says about these equivalences: (1) “modulo the implicit recognition of this equivalence, the epistemology of metaphysically modal thinking is a special case of the epistemology of counterfactual thinking. Whoever has what it takes to understand the counterfactual conditional and the elementary logical auxiliaries ~ and F has what it takes to understand possibility and necessity operators.” (158) (2) The idea that we evaluate metaphysically modal claims “by some quite different means [from those we use to evaluate counterfactuals – CP] is highly fanciful, since it indicates a bizarre lack of cognitive economy and has no plausible explanation of where the alternative cognitive resources might come from” (162) (3) “the capacity to handle metaphysical modality is an “accidental” byproduct of the cognitive mechanisms that provide our capacity to handle counterfactual conditionals” (162). The biconditional corresponding to a proposed definition of a concept C may be necessary and a priori. But that leaves open these questions: (1) Does the definition contribute to an explanation of why what are in fact truths containing C are true? (The Explanation Question) (2) Does the definition contribute to an explanation of our knowledge of certain contents containing C? (Epistemic Question) (3) Does the definition contribute to an explanation of our understanding or grasp of contents containing C? (Understanding Question) I argue that applied to (17) and (18), considered as definitions, the answers to these three..

The topic of Being Known is what I call the Integration Challenge, which is the challenge of providing, for any given domain, a simultaneously acceptable metaphysics and epistemology for that domain. In virtually every domain of thought, it is a substantive task to reconcile our metaphysics and our epistemology of that domain. In some cases, we have an intuitively acceptable metaphysics, but cannot find a plausible epistemology which would allow us knowledge of truths for which that is the right metaphysics. In others, the reverse situation obtains. In yet others, we have an intuitive metaphysics and an intuitive epistemology, but cannot see how they are to be reconciled.