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and prototype theories (according to which it's empirical reliability that does). In effect,
the various theories of concepts we've reviewed are versions of IRS distinguished,
primarily, by what they say about the problem of individuating content.
Now, a quite standard reading of the history of cognitive science has the reliability-based
versions of IRS displacing the modality-based versions and in turn being displaced, very
recently, by theory theories.19 But that way of telling the story is, I think, mistaken.
Though theory theories do propose a view about what concepts are (or, anyhow, about
what concepts are like; or, anyhow, about what a lot of concepts are like), they don't, as
far as I can tell, offer a distinct approach to the content individuation problems.
Sometimes they borrow the modality story from definitional theories, sometimes they
borrow the reliability story from prototype theories, sometimes they share the holist's
despair of individuating concepts at all. So, for our purposes at least, it's unclear that
theory theories of concepts differ substantially from the kinds of theories
end p.112
of concepts that we've already reviewed. Hence the relatively cursory treatment they're
about to receive.
The basic idea is that concepts are like theoretical constructs in science as the latter are
often construed by post-Empiricist philosophers of science. The caveat is important. For
example, it's not unusual (see Carey 1991; Gopnik 1988) among theory theorists to
postulate  stage-like discontinuities in conceptual development, much as Piagetians do.
But, unlike Piaget, theory theorists construe the putative stage changes on the analogy
of perhaps even as special cases of the kinds of discontinuities that  paradigm shifts
are said to occasion in the history of science. The usual Kuhnian morals are often
explicitly drawn:
the concepts of the new and old theory and of the evidential description are
incommensurab[le]. (Gopnik 1988: 199)
Asking whether or not the six-month-old has a concept of object-permanence in the same
sense that the 18-month-old does is like asking whether or not the alchemist and the
chemist have the same concept of gold, or whether Newton had the same concept of
space as Einstein. These concepts are embedded in complex theories and there is no
simple way of comparing them. Moreover, particular concepts are inextricably
intertwined with other concepts in the theory. (Ibid.: 205)
It should be clear how much this account of conceptual ontogenesis relies on a Kuhnian
view of science. It isn't just that if Kuhn is wrong about theory change, then Gopnik is
wrong about the analogy between the history of science and conceptual development. It's
also that key notions like discontinuity and incommensurability aren't explicated within
the ontogenetic theory; the buck is simply passed to the philosophers.  It may not resolve
our puzzlement over the phenomena of qualitative conceptual change in childhood to
point out that there are exactly parallel paradoxes of incommensurability in science, but
at this stage we may see the substitution of a single puzzling phenomenon for two
separate puzzling phenomena as some sort of progress (Gopnik 1988: 209).
Correspondingly, however, if you find the idea that a scientific theory-change is a
paradigm shift less than fully perspicuous, you will also be uncertain what exactly it is
that the ontogenetic analogy asserts about stages of conceptual development. Your
response will then be a sense less of illumination than of déjà vu.
If Gopnik finds some solace in this situation, that's because, like Kuhn, she takes IRS not
to be in dispute.20 The putative  problem of incommensurability
end p.113
is that if the vocabulary of a science is implicitly defined by the theories it endorses, it's
hard to see how the theories can correct or contradict each other. This state of affairs
might be supposed to provide a precedent for psychologists to appeal to who hold that the
minds of young children are incommensurably different from the minds of adults.
Alternatively, it might be taken as a reductio of the supposition that the vocabulary of a
science is implicitly defined by its theories. It's hard to say which way one ought to take
it barring some respectable story about how scientific theories implicitly define their
vocabularies; specifically, an account that makes clear which of the inferences that such a
theory licenses are constitutive of the concepts it deploys. And there's no point in
cognitive scientists relying on the philosophy of science for an answer to this question;
the philosophy of science hasn't got one. It seems that we're back where we started.
In short, it may be that the right moral to draw from the putative analogy between
scientific paradigms and developmental stages is that the ontogenesis of concepts is
discontinuous, just like scientific theory-change. Or the right moral may be that, by
relativizing the individuation of concepts to the individuation of theories, IRS makes a
hash of both cognitive development and the history of science.
If there is any positive account of conceptual content that most theory theorists are
inclined towards, I suppose that it's holism.21 I don't, however, know of any attempt they
have made seriously to confront the objections that meaning holism is prone to. Two of
these are particularly relevant. The first is familiar and quite general (see Chapter 1 and
Fodor and Lepore 1992) and I won't go on about it here. Suffice it that if the
individuation of concepts is literally relativized to whole belief systems, then no two
people, and no two time slices of a given person, are ever subsumed by the same
intentional generalizations, and the prospects for robust theories in intentional
psychology are negligible.
end p.114
But I do want to say a word or so about the second objection, which is that holism about
content individuation doesn't square with key principles of the theory theory itself.
Consider, in particular, the idea that new concepts get introduced, in the course of theory
change, by a kind of implicit theoretical definition. In all the examples I've heard of, a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]