Ed writes,
Your counter-arguments are very useful but I find some of them puzzling. One argument that repeatedly occurs is that a concept cannot contain the object that it is a concept of. Our concept of Venus (if we have one) cannot contain Venus, for example.
My difficulty is that I agree with this argument, indeed it’s a cornerstone of the thesis in the book. See e.g.
The standard theory is a development of Mill’s theory, and is attended by the same difficulties. It explains properness by a semantic connection between proper name and bearer whereby the name can only signify that thing, but this leads to all the well-known difficulties mentioned in the last chapter, for example (i) how a large planetary body like Jupiter could be a part of a meaning or a thought, (ii) how identity statements involving different names for the same thing, such as “Hesperus is Phosphorus” can sometimes be informative, and (iii) how negative existential statements, which apparently deny a meaning for the name, are possible at all.
My emphasis. So where are we disagreeing I wonder? Is it that I claim a singular term has a meaning or sense? But in other posts of yours, you seem to agree that singular terms have a sense.
Or is it that you think that the sense of a singular term is ‘general’?
BV: Yes, that is what I claim. A singular term such as a name has a sense, but its sense is general. But I note that you switched from 'concept' to 'sense.' They are closely related. We may have to examine whether they are equivalent.
If so, you need to define what ‘general’ means. I define it as repeatable. A repeatable concept is one that we can without contradiction suppose to be instantiated by more than one individual, perhaps by individuals in different possible worlds. A singular concept by contrast is one where we cannot suppose repeatability without contradicting ourselves. For example, I cannot rationally entertain the thought that there could have been someone else who was Boris Johnson in 2021. That is because ‘someone else’ in this context means ‘someone other than Boris Johnson’, but ‘who was Boris Johnson’ means ‘someone who was no other than Boris Johnson’.
Thus to suppose that there could have been someone else who was Boris Johnson in 2021 is to suppose that there could have been someone who was both (1) other than Boris Johnson and (2) not other than Boris Johnson.
BV: I accept your definitions of 'general concept' and 'singular concept' pending some caveats to come. We agree that there are general concepts. We also agree that there are general terms and that there are singular terms. Presumably we also agree that a term is not the same as the concept the term expresses. The English word 'tree' and the German word 'Baum' are both token-distinct and type-distinct. But they express the same concept. Therefore, a word and the concept it expresses are not the same. And the same goes for sense: a word is not the same as its sense.
We disagree about whether there are singular concepts. You say that there are and I say that there aren't.
I think the onus is on you to establish that there cannot be unrepeatable concepts in the sense defined above.
BV: Why is the onus probandi on me rather than on you? Why is there a presumption in favor of your position that I must defeat, rather than the other way around? But let's not worry about where the burden of proof lies. We are not in a court room. You want an argument from me to the conclusion that there are no singular/individual/unrepeatable concepts. The demand is legitimate regardless of burden-of-proof considerations.
We agree that a first-level singular concept C, if instantiated, is instantiated by exactly one individual in the actual world and by the very same individual in every merely possible world in which C is instantiated. This is essentially your definition of 'singular concept.' I don't disagree with it but I say more.
I say that every concept is a mental grasping by the person who deploys the concept of the thing or things that instantiate (fall under, bear) the concept. A concept of an individual, then, would have to be a mental grasping of what makes that individual be the very individual it is and not some other actual or possible individual. So if there is the irreducibly singular concept Socrateity, then my deployment of that concept would allow we to grasp the haecceity (thisness) of Socrates which is precisely his and 'incommunicable' (as a schoolman might say) to any other individual actual or possible. But this is what minds of our type cannot grasp. Every concept we deploy is a general concept, and it doesn't matter how specific the concept is. Specificity no matter how far protracted never gets the length of singularity.
All of our concepts are mental representations of the repeatable features of things. It follows that all of our concepts are general. The individual, however, is essentially unrepeatable. For that very reason there cannot be a concept of the individual qua individual.
Consider Max Black's world in which there are exactly two iron spheres, alike in all monadic and relational respects, and nothing else. If there were an individual concept of the one sphere, then it would also be an individual concept of the other. But then it would not be an individual or singular concept: it would be general. It would be general because it would have two instances. The only way there could be two individual concepts is if each had as a constituent an iron sphere — which is absurd. Therefore, there cannot be any individual concepts.
