I’ve been having another crack at my imaginative resistance paper, and this time I’m trying not to make the sections on Stephen Yablo’s views a bracketed to be included section. (For details of Yablo’s views, see sections 14 and 21 of Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda. I think what Yablo says is intriguing, but too short to be a full solution.

It’s a bit hard for me to get my head around Yablo’s solution, because officially I think it’s incoherent. He things imaginative resistance is closely linked to what he calls response-enabled concepts, or grokking concepts. These are introduced by examples, particularly by the example ‘oval’.

Here are meant to be some platitudes about OVAL. It is a shape concept – any two objects in any two worlds, indeed in any two parts of the old 2D matrix, that have the same shape are alike in whether they are ovals. But which shape concept it is is picked out by our reactions. They are the shapes that strike us as being egg-like, or a bit more geekily, like the shape of all ellipse whose length/width ratio is the golden ratio. (Hmmm…golden ratios…Hmmm.) In this way it’s meant to be distinguished on the one hand from, say, PRIME NUMBER, which is entirely independent of us, and from WATER, which would have picked out a different chemical substance had our reactions to various chemicals been different. Note that what ‘prime number’ picks out is determined by us, like all semantic facts are. So the move space into which OVAL is meant to fit is quite tiny. We matter to its extension, but not the way we matter to ‘prime number’ (or we don’t matter to PRIME NUMBER), and not the way we matter to ‘water’. Officially, I think there’s no move space here to move in, so I think positing such concepts is incoherent. Yablo’s terms for grokking concepts strike me as words that have associated egocentric descriptions that fix their reference without having egocentric reference fixing descriptions, and I find it hard to believe such words exist. But my official views are very intolerant, so I’ll pretend for now that I understand what Yablo is saying.

The important point for fiction about grokking concepts is that we matter, in a non-constitutive way, for their extension. Not we as we might have been, or we as we are in a story, but us. So an author can’t say, in the story squares looked egg-shaped to the people, so in the story squares are ovals, because we get to say what’s an oval, not some fictional character. Here’s how Yablo puts it:

Why should resistance and grokkingnes be connected in this way? It’s a feature of grokking concepts that their extension in a situation depends on how the situation does or would strike us. ‘Does or would strike us’ as we are: how we are represented as reacting, or invited to react, has nothing to do with it. Resistance is the natural consequence. If we insist on judging the extension ourselves, it stands to reason that any seeming intelligence coming from elsewhere is automatically suspect. This applies in particular to being ‘told’ about the extension by an as-if knowledgeable narrator.

As I said, I think this is all incredibly interesting (if incoherent) and not a million miles from my view. But I don’t think it works, at least as a complete solution.

My old Don Quixote story might look like a counterexample to Yablo’s position here. After all, the concept that seems to generate resistance there is TELEVISION, and that isn’t anything like his examples of grokking concepts. (The examples, apar from evaluative concepts, are all shape concepts.) On the other hand, if there are any grokking concepts, perhaps it is plausible that TELEVISION should be one of them. Let’s think of some platitudes about TELEVISION. (The following few lines are mostly me reciting from memory some of what Fodor says in Concepts, with televisual references replacing doorknobular ones.)

Three platitudes about TELEVISION stand out. One is that it’s very hard to define just what a television is. (Go on – try it and see how far you get.) Second is that there’s a striking correlation between people who have the concept TELEVISION and people who have been acquainted with a television. Not a correlation of 1 – some infants have acquaintance with televisions but not as such, and some people acquire TELEVISION by description – but still high. Third is that conversations about televisions are rarely at cross purposes, consisting of people literally talking different languages. TELEVISION is a shared concept.

Can we put these into a theory of the concept TELEVISION? Here’s a try. (Warning: Non-reductive analysis ahead.) Televisions are those things that strike us, people in general, as being sufficiently like the televisions we’ve seen, in a televisual kind of way. This isn’t part of the meaning of television – there’s no reference to us in the dictionary entry for ‘television’, and rightly so. But it sort of latches on to the right thing, in roughly the only way one could. The epistemic necessity of having a paradigm television to use as a basis for similarity judgments explains the striking correlation between televisual acquaintance and concept possession. The fact that the only way of picking out the extension uses something that is not constitutive of the concept, namely our reactions to televisions, explains why we can’t define the concept. And the use of people’s reactions in general rather than idiosyncratic reactions explains why its a common concept. This all seems remarkably clever to me, I do wish I had thought of it all first, and it doesn’t seem that far from what Yablo had in mind. So I’m fairly comfortable with the idea that (if any concept is grokking) TELEVISION is a grokking concept and my Quixote example is not a counterexample to Yablo’s little theory.

Still, I have three quibbles.

First, there’s a missing antecedent in a key sentence in his account, and I have no idea how to fill it in. What does he mean when he says ‘how the situation does or would strike us’? Does or would strike us if what? If we were there? But we don’t know where there is. There is a place where televisions look like knifes and forks. If all the non-grokking descriptions were accurate? Maybe, but I think there’s a worry now that most concepts will be grokking – Fodor intended his account of DOORKNOB to be quite general. Not universal, but quite general. If we take out all the grokking concepts, there may not be much left.

Second, despite that I’m still rather unsure that mental concepts, and content concepts, are grokking. LOVE might be, BELIEVING THAT THERE ARE SPACE ALIENS probably is not. But in the paper I argued that these concepts can generate resistance too. Maybe these are grokking as well (if anything is) so I don’t want to stress this.

Finally, I think this _slightly_ over-generalises. Here’s a sketch of a counter-example. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to fill it in. Imagine a time-travelling story told the following way. DQ and his buddy SP leave DQ’s apartment at midday Tuesday, leaving a well-arranged lounge suite and home theatre unit. They travel back to Monday, where DQ has some rather strange and unexpected adventures. He intended to correct something that happened yesterday, that had gone all wrong the first time around, and by the time they leave for Tuesday (via that old fashioned time travel route of drinking until they pass out and waking up in the future) he’s sure it’s all been sorted. When DQ and his buddy SP get back to his apartment midday Tuesday, it looks for all the world like there’s nothing there except a knife and fork. As I said, the details need some filling in, but I think you get the idea. Now that story doesn’t, I think, generate imaginative resistance. But a grokking concept, TELEVISION, is used in a way inconsistent with the underlying facts.

One might ask at this point whether Brian’s own theory also over-generates, predicting imaginative resistance at this point when none is to be found. The answer to that is that it doesn’t, though the epicycle to prevent that prediction may or may not have been added to the official story yet.