Hi all,
me and my
colleagues Henry Railo and Jussi Haukioja have an experimental paper on
semantic externalism and psychological essentialism, now forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology. The paper
presents data that supports Kripke-Putnam style externalism about natural kind
term reference.
The paper
can be found in whole here, but I
describe it in some detail also in what follows.
According
to a view in psychology of concepts called psychological
essentialism, people believe that natural category members share some
hidden, unobservable, empirically discoverable deep structure or essence, whose
possession is necessary and sufficient for category membership. However, the
psychological essentialists themselves don’t take their view to take a stand on
what determines the extensions of natural kind terms.
We present
two semantic adaptations of psychological essentialism, namely strict and hybrid externalistic essentialism. The strict view is motivated
mainly by Kripke and Putnam, and it holds that speakers believe not only that
natural category members share some hidden deep structure, but also that this
hidden essence determines what belongs in the extension of the category term,
even if the deep structure is unknown. The hybrid view, in turn, is motivated
by some experimental studies suggesting that natural kind terms may be
ambiguous between two senses, an externalistic and an epistemic (e.g. Braisby
et al. 1996). In the externalistic sense the term applies to whatever shares
the external essence in fact shared by the category members, but in the
epistemic sense the term applies to whatever satisfies the identificatory
criteria associated with the term. For instance, if all cats turned out to be
robots while we believed them to be mammals, the term ‘cat’ would have referred
to the robots in its externalistic, but not in its epistemic sense.
In the face
of the proposed accounts, we examine Braisby’s et al. (1996) experiments which
claim to undermine externalism. We argue that they fail because of both
theoretical and experimental problems. We then go on to present two experiments
of our own.We used
scenarios that were presented to the participants in two stages. In the first
stage the participants read descriptions of a natural kind, referred to by term
t, and of some novel samples that
either satisfied or not the identificatory information associated with t. Fictitious natural kinds were used.
Here is an example:
A yellowish, bitter-smelling, fragile mineral
called zircaum occurs widely in Mid-Siberian soil. Scientists generally believe
that zircaum is the compound ACB.
In
Northern Norway, a deposit of a substance just like zircaum is found – it is
yellowish, bitter-smelling, fragile, etc. When scientists examine its deep
structure, they find out that it is ACB, just like zircaum is believed to be.
The scientists conclude that there is zircaum in Northern Norway.
We then
presented the participant data about the original samples that were (by
externalistic standards) to undermine the earlier judgement concerning the
Norwegian sample:
A few weeks after the discovery in
Northern Norway, scientists examine the Mid-Siberian substance more closely.
Using methods and instruments more exact than previously available, they find
out that they were wrong about the deep structure of the substance: the
substance is KML instead of ACB. However, the substance found in Northern
Norway was indeed ACB, just as the scientists thought it was.
After
having read this passage, the participant was asked whether she considered the
earlier judgement concerning the Norwegian sample (a) justified and (b)
strictly speaking correct. Internalism predicts that the earlier judgement be
considered strictly correct, as the sample fitted all of the identificatory
criteria associated with the term at that time, whereas externalism entails
that she consider the judgement false, as the Norwegian sample did not possess
the real, external category essence. (I am here omitting some details and
variations that we used in the scenarios.)
The results
were that the majority of answers (69 %) were externalistic, and the minority
(28 %) internalistic. Though the results undermine internalism, which cannot
account for the externalistic answers, the results do not vindicate
externalism. Instead, the results lend some support to the hybrid view, since
it seems that the speakers used the category terms ambiguously between an
externalistic and epistemic sense. However, we couldn’t rule out that the
response pattern was due to the participants’ guessing or answering randomly,
as they had no choice but to answer either internalistically or
externalistically; a guessing strategy would have produced the same response
pattern as the one predicted by the hybrid view.
Because of
this problem, another experiment was conducted, where the participants were
given the chance to pick one out of four alternatives with respect to the
correctness of the earlier judgement. These were (i) that the judgement was
correct, (ii) that it was not correct, (iii) that it was correct in one sense
and wrong in another, and finally (iv) there was the option of answering
‘cannot say’. Predictions for internalism and externalism are the same as before,
but this time the hybrid view entails that the participants answer by choosing
the explicitly ambiguous option (‘on the one hand…’). The ‘cannot
say’-alternative is introduced to minimise the proportion of guesses or random
answers.
The results
were the following: 48 % of the answers were externalistic, 22 % internalistic,
17 % ambiguous, and 12 % ‘cannot say’. That is, there were over two times more
externalistic answers than any other type of answers, just like in the first
experiment. Though there were again a substantial proportion of
non-externalistic answers, we conclude that the results lend most support to
externalism, as this time the answering options contradict each others.
Moreover, since the hybrid hypothesis did not receive much direct support, it
is possible that the internalistic answers in the first experiment did not
after all manifest ambiguity, but rather were due to some intervening
variables.
We conclude
that the results suggest that natural kind terms have externalistic
essentialist cores that make them refer in virtue of the unknown deep structure
of the actual samples.
The paper
can be found in whole here.
Reference:
Braisby, N., Franks. B.,
Hampton, J. (1996). Essentialism, word use, and concepts. Cognition, 59, 247
– 274.
![](http://<a href="http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/phil-peer-banner.gif">Download phil-peer-banner.gif (5.9K)</a>){kind=link}
Recent Comments