Cathal O'Madagain

It appears to be the case that some of our concepts have their content fixed by the minds of others. For example, we might have thoughts involving the concept quark, without knowing quite what quarks are. In such a case, we are likely to accept the authority of a physicist to tell us what exactly we are thinking about. This phenomenon, known as ‘social externalism’ about concepts, is puzzling both in terms of _how_ such concepts are supposed to work, but also in terms of _why_ we should have concepts whose content is fixed by the minds of others. In this chapter it is argued that if we think about social externalism in terms of extended mind reasoning we find a better account of how deferential concepts work, and why we have them, than has hitherto been available.

Pointing and the joint attention between agents that it establishes, play a foundational role in human communication and cooperation. How this capacity emerges in development and evolution is therefore a central question for our understanding of distinctively human communication. Here we face two mysteries. The first is where does pointing come from? There are many candidates in early infancy that could be precursors of pointing – including reaching, touching, and copying others. The second is how does pointing support infants’ understanding of others’ communicative intentions, which seems, paradoxically, to develop after pointing has emerged. Here I argue that some automatic aspects of human behaviour – namely touch exploration in infants, and adults’ automatic tendency to look at what they touch – lead to early pointing behaviour without requiring either infant or adult to think about the others’ intentions. Once this behaviour begins, it sets up a ‘joint attention triangle’ between agents that provides a natural platform for our understanding of the minds of others to develop, both in early development and our evolution.

Epistemic injustice is the phenomenon whereby we commit an injustice against someone in their capacity as a knower. If we ignore someone's knowledge due to their membership in a particular group against which we are prejudiced, a kind of harm arises that is uniquely epistemic. The building blocks of knowledge and belief, of course, are concepts---and so conceptual injustice, if there were such a thing, might be a more serious problem again. Is there such a thing as conceptual injustice? Injustice at the conceptual level has been discussed before, but only with the assumption of "subjectivism" about concepts---that there is no right or wrong way to use a concept---and hence such that its consequences are restricted to problems of misinterpretation or an impoverished ability to express ourselves. However, recent accounts of concepts have shown that some conceptual schemes can be measurably better than others, and this carries the implication that the conceptual schemes recommended by those more knowledgeable than ourselves should be deferred to. Once we recognize that concepts can be objectively better or worse, the nature of the kind of epistemic injustice that can arise at the conceptual level is revealed to be very different. It becomes clear that we will often have a duty to defer to another's conceptual scheme, not merely for the sake of understanding what they are saying, but in our own subsequent thinking on the subject.

In this article, we describe a hitherto undocumented fallacy-in the sense of a mistake in reasoning-constituted by a negativity bias in the way that people attribute motives to others. We call this the "worst-motive fallacy," and we conducted two experiments to investigate it. In Experiment 1, participants expected protagonists in a variety of fictional vignettes to pursue courses of action that satisfy the protagonists' worst motive, and furthermore, participants significantly expected the protagonist to pursue a worse course of action than they would prefer themselves. Experiment 2 was a preregistered attempted replication of Experiment 1, including a bigger range of vignettes; the first effect was not replicated for the new vignettes tested but was for the original set. Also, we once again found that participants expected protagonists to be more likely than they were themselves to pursue courses of action that they considered morally bad. We discuss the worst-motive fallacy's relation to other well-known biases as well as its possible evolutionary origins and its ethical consequences.

Demonstratives (words like ‘this’ and ‘that’) and indexicals (words like ‘I’, ‘here’, and ‘now’) seem intuitively to form a semantic family. Together they form the basic set of directly referring ‘context sensitive’ terms whose reference changes as the environment or identity of the speaker changes. Something that we might expect of a semantics for indexicals is therefore that it would be closely related to a semantics of demonstratives, although recent approaches have generally treated them separately. A promising new theory of indexicals is the ‘token-contextual’ account, which accounts for a wide range of uses of indexicals without encountering the problems faced by competing models. So far this theory has not been considered for demonstratives, however, but only for the indexicals ‘I’, ‘here’ and ‘now’. In this paper I show that the token-contextual account can be elegantly extended to cover demonstratives. Doing so restores unity to our understanding of a natural semantic family, and allows us to identify a single rule governing the most basic context-sensitive terms.

Practices of concept-revision among scientists seem to indicate that concepts can be improved. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union revised the concept "Planet" so that it excluded Pluto, and insisting that the result was an improvement. But what could it mean for one concept or conceptual scheme to be better than another? Here we draw on the theory of epistemic utility to address this question. We show how the plausibility and informativeness of beliefs, two features that contribute to their utility, have direct correlates in our concepts. These are how inclusive a concept is, or how many objects in an environment it applies to, and how homogeneous it is, or how similar the objects that fall under the concept are. We provide ways to measure these values, and argue that in combination they can provide us with a single principle of concept utility. The resulting principle can be used to decide how best to categorize an environment, and can rationalize practices of concept revision.

Growing evidence indicates that our higher rational capacities depend on social interaction—that only through engaging with others do we acquire the ability to evaluate beliefs as true or false, or to reflect on and evaluate the reasons that support our beliefs. Up to now, however, we have had little understanding of how this works. Here we argue that a uniquely human socio-linguistic phenomenon which we call ‘joint attention to mental content’ plays a key role. JAM is the ability to focus together in conversation on the content of our mental states, such as beliefs and reasons. In such conversations it can be made clear that our attitudes to beliefs or reasons may conflict—that what I think is true, you might think is false, or that what I think is a good reason for believing something, you might think is a bad reason. We argue that through JAM, children discover that mental contents can be evaluated under various attitudes, and that this discovery transforms their mind-reading and reasoning abilities.

A substantial literature supports the attribution of intentional states such as beliefs and desires to groups. But within this literature, there is no substantial account of group concepts. Since on many views, one cannot have an intentional state without having concepts, such a gap undermines the cogency of accounts of group intentionality. In this paper I aim to provide an account of group concepts. First I argue that to fix the semantics of the sentences groups use to make their decisions or express their beliefs, we need to appeal to a conventional semantics like that of Lewis. I then argue that the same reasons we have for taking group intentional states to be irreducible to the intentional states of their members apply also to the terms fixed by a conventional semantics. It follows that the meanings of terms in the sentences expressing a group's intentional states are also fixed by facts about the group, not its members. And recognizing this, I argue, amounts to attributing concepts to groups. Finally, I discuss a real-life example of a group concept—the meaning of ‘meter’ as fixed by the International Bureau of Weights and Measurements—and I discuss the upshot of these considerations for the question of social externalism about concepts

To avoid difficulties facing intention-based accounts of indexicals, Cohen () recently defends a conventionalist account that focuses on the context of tokening. On this view, a token of ‘here’ or ‘now’ refers to the place or time at which it tokens. However, although promising, such an account faces a serious problem: in many speech acts, multiple apparent tokens are produced. If I call Alaska from Paris and say ‘I'm here now’, an apparent token of my utterance will be produced in both Paris and Alaska. The token-contextual account seems to imply that in such cases I will refer to both places and contradict myself. Here I argue that to resolve this and similar puzzles we must realize that not all apparent semantic tokens really are semantic tokens, and that to decide which ones count we must appeal to speaker intentions. However, because this appeal is made at the level of the metaphysics of semantic tokens rather than to determine their meaning, it does not raise the problems associated with intentionalism that the conventionalist hopes to avoid. The metaphysics of semantic tokens uncovered is surprisingly complex, showing that shapes and sounds can transition in and out of being utterances.

Semantic deference is the apparent phenomenon whereby some of our concepts have their content fixed by the minds of others. The phenomenon is puzzling both in terms of how such concepts are supposed to work, but also in terms of why we should have concepts whose content is fixed by others. Here I argue that if we rethink semantic deference in terms of extended mind reasoning we find answers to both of these questions: the minds of others can be understood to play a role in storing the semantic knowledge underpinning our concepts without undermining their functionality, and this ‘outsourcing’ of semantic knowledge greatly expands our overall knowledge-bearing capacity, both at the level of the individual and the community. I conclude that deference in fact affords stronger grounds for a social expansion of knowledge than standard extended mind reasoning permits.

Davidson and Husserl both arrived independently at a startling conclusion: that we need to interact with others in order to acquire the concept of objectivity, or to realize that the world we are in exists independently of us. Here I discuss both of their arguments, and argue that there are problems with each. However, I then I argue that each thinker provided us with one key insight that can be combined to provide a more compelling argument for the claim. Finally I discuss some recent work in developmental psychology that may lend support to the view that emerges.