Why Philosophy ain't Psychology . . . and Vice Versa

Some years back I was having drinks with an elderly neighbor, a retired accountant with a broad range of interests. He had played the violin in his youth and was an avid collector of art which he picked up in his travels. I happened to mention that I'd recently completed a book of philosophy and his ears perked up. He called to his wife and had her bring us a book he had received as a gift and handed it to me. I looked at the title, Brainstorms, and noticed the author was an M.D. Thumbing through it I quickly realized it was a popularized narrative about the maturing brain in adolescents. "This is about the brain," I said "neurological development and the psychology of young adults." He nodded and told me to keep it, saying that, since I was interested in philosophy I might find it interesting, too. He said he hadn't read it himself.

I accepted the gift and later gave him a copy of my then latest book and kept the one he gave me, though to this day I still haven't read it. Why not? Well, as I'd told my neighbor at the time, my interest was philosophy. Psychology and neuroscience are important fields and do command some attention from me, of course, but they're not the areas I work on myself. The sciences are important, obviously, but not everyone is a scientist. And philosophers or those who try to be have other issues on their minds. So what's the difference and can philosophers do work that science doesn't which we still need, or does the work scientists do exhaust the field of knowledge, real and potential? Recently I had an extended exchange with a retired psychologist and we ended up going back and forth on just this question, his view being a somewhat restrictive one vis a vis the value of philosophy and those who play around in that field.

After some discussion with him, in which he took me to task for suggesting that there was a metaphysical dimension to philosophy, it turned out that his conception of philosophy is rather narrow. Like any good scientist he made it quite clear that he had little respect for claims that cannot be observed and tested and that he thought such claims to knowledge, which lacked this potential, were nonsensical in the same way the logical positivists of the early twentieth century Vienna Circle school dismissed such claims. He fell back on that group's claim to philosophical fame, the so-called Verification Principle which asserts that only statements that can be tested against the world by observation or which can be shown to be tautological can have sense, that is meaning. The rest, which necessarily includes claims made in traditional metaphysics as well as religious, ethical and aesthetic claims, obviously are subjective and untestable, just expressions of opinions that sound like they're about something but, on examination, really aren't. Thus they fail the Verification test and must be deemed to fall into the category of nonsense as in non-sense.

He cited A.J. Ayer, the British philosopher who, as a young man, had gone to Vienna and studied for a time with the group that advocated the Verification Principle as the test of meaningfulness, the so-called logical positivists. Ayer wrote a little book, Language, Truth and Logic, after his time with the logical positivists which provided a brief and very clear exposition of the ideas promulgated by this group, including the introduction of "emotivism" to early twentieth century British philosophy, the claim that ethical statements have no cognitive content and are just expressions of the sentiments we possess about the things we observe. David Hume in the 18th century had made the claim that moral judgments were subjective, based on how we felt not what we observed, and so lacked knowledge status and Ayer, taking the logical positivists' view made the further point that such statements, failing the Verification Principle test, lacked cognitive status as well. They only looked as if they were substantive claims about things seen in the world when, in fact, they are just to say of some action things like "yuck" or "boo" or "bah". Emotivism in ethics never quite caught on, of course, because it failed a different test, that of how we use language in an ethical way but it had a sort of cachet at the time and shook up thinkers in the Anglo-American empiricist tradition.

My interlocutor, the retired psychologist, made it clear that Ayer was one of his heroes on the philosophical side of the ledger as was the early Wittgenstein who we meet in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein's first published work (and the only work of philosophy by him published in his lifetime). But my psychologist friend's philosophical real hero turned out to be Gilbert Ryle, the Oxford don (Wittgenstein worked at Cambridge) who wrote the justly famous work, The Concept of Mind in which he dissected by analysis the idea of mind and the mental which, he pointed out, we tend to think about in the wrong way. Because nominative terms in English tend to name things and to name a thing implies its existence as a thing, Ryle proposed that this usage leads us to make what he called a "category mistake." When we think about minds and what we mean when we talk about them, it turns out that the denotative process we invoke by naming something a "mind" leads us astray because when you look at the situation you see that there are no such things as minds, nothing in the head or near it or anywhere else that has the features of a thing in the world. Speaking about a person's mind suggests a picture of something inside the person, attached to his or her body, like a soul, a parallel entity of sorts.

But on analysis it is seen that this sort of thing cannot exist because it fails the test of observability. What we can see are people acting in certain ways, ways we count as revealing their thinking and if they think then they obviously have minds. But it is not the minds as such that we see but the behavior. And thus a "category mistake" happens. We get the idea in our heads of parallel entities, of minds as well as bodies, so-called dualism in metaphysical terms, i.e., we come to think, as Descartes thought, that the world consists of at least two substances, bodies and minds, leading him to recognize a metaphysical problem, namely how can two such very different "things" make contact with one another? If bodies are physical and make contact through physical means, how can minds, which are non-physical have any effects on the physical world of bodies? Setting aside Descartes' own solution, the issue became important in subsequent western philosophy, causing no end of metaphysical debate, and leading in the twentieth century to the rejection by logical positivists of these questions entirely. Not only was someone like Descartes wrong in his solution but the whole question is misconceived because there just is no cognitive content to be found in claims about minds as such, as metaphysically present along side bodies.

My interlocutor, it turned out, looks to Ryle as the definitive resolver of the conundrum which our language, with its denotative bias, kicks up whenever we want to talk about thoughts and thinking in ourselves or others, whenever we want to speak of minds as such. Don't make the "category mistake" Ryle explicated for us of supposing that because the word "mind" is a naming word, that it is naming something that is discoverable in the world as an object of some sort. The term "mind" must be purged of this erroneous picture when we use it. As a psychologist, my interlocutor said, as scientists, we must focus on what can be tested and that means observed and the job of philosophy, he assured me, is a limited one. It's to clean up the conceptual confusions that beset us and make it a little easier for scientists to get the real work of knowledge gathering done.

He does acknowledge the contributions of Wittgenstein though, finding much to admire in the man's early work, the Tractatus in which Wittgenstein famously sketched out what he then took to be the limits of language, specifying that there were some things we could do with language that involved showing and only that and into this domain he consigned ethical, aesthetic and religious claims. Unlike the logical positivists, who were his contemporaries and who found inspiration in his Tractatus, Wittgenstein did not dismiss the language used in these three areas as plain old nonsense, on the order, say of jumbled sentences or nonsensical poetic usages ("'twas brillig in the slithy toves"). He thought it nonsense of a special sort, important nonsense, meaningful nonsense, though this proved a difficult line to draw and even the later Wittgenstein backed away from it in his subsequent writings (e.g., Philosophical Investigations, On Certainty), devising instead a very different way of approaching language and its modes of expression. But my psychologist correspondent seemed stuck to me in the ground of the logical positivists and the early Wittgenstein, holding out, as it were, for a view of philosophy that is much more constraining than is warranted.

He told me that philosophers have no business speculating about minds, that that is the business of scientists and, in particular, psychologists, who actually studied how people acted and talked in the real world and devised theories to explain what they found or looked for data in actual people to test their theories. Philosophers don't do that kind of stuff and, since they don't, they are out of their depth, he assured me, when delving into questions about how people think, how minds do what they do (gather knowledge, develop and hold onto beliefs, make and assess arguments). This is all grist for the scientist, the psychologist in particular, but beyond the scope of philosophy.

Our particular bone of contention turned out to be that of Chomsky's theory of language. As we went back and forth about all these issues the question arose as to whether or not a Chomskyian theory, which asserts that language arises in human beings as part of a maturation process, much like puberty leads to sexually capable adults or babies progress from crawling to walking, makes any sense. If Chomsky is right then there is, as he puts it, a universal grammar that somehow manifests in the maturing human brain and, as it does, language ability appears. In support of his claim he points out that humans learn language, which consists of learning to express very complex locutions they have never been exposed to before much too rapidly and without sufficient input to allow for an explanation that rests on learning alone. There must, per Chomsky, be an innate language in the brain already which would also explain why statements within different human languages with vastly different grammatical structures, can be translated into one another so easily. There is, says Chomsky, an underlying or deeper grammar which is the same for all language speakers even if it manifests differently in different cultures through different languages. And the deep or universal grammar in question, says Chomsky, must have occurred as a brain mutation in a single human ancestor and then proved advantageous to those of his or descendants who had it, making them better competitors than others of their species and so becoming dominant across the human genome.

I objected that this view has too many holes (it can't really be tested and what aspects of it can be don't actually pan out -- See How Language Began by the linguist Daniel Everett). More, there is another explanation that explains the occurrence of language just as well. It's the one that is basically consistent with Wittgenstein's later work in which he revised his view of language and how it works, taking a pragmatic turn (as others have put it)in the spirit of C. S. Peirce (who is cited by Everett) and William James (Pragmatism and the Theory of Truth). For the later Wittgenstein language is basically behavior of a certain sort, i.e., rule following behavior which humans learn to follow by emulation of their fellows and immersion in particular groups. Language, on this view, rests on the foundation of signaling, a communication capacity which is shared by humans with a vast array of other creatures and which becomes increasingly sophisticated as you move up the evolutionary ladder. On this view, language is just the next step in the development of our signaling capabilities. It kicks in when creatures like us develop brain capacity of sufficient scope and complexity to enable us to take in and retain and arrange information in complex enough ways to allow signaling to serve a new function, depiction.

My correspondent objected to all this though, arguing that philosophers cannot say anything of substance about brains and thinking because that is the province of neurologists and psychologists. At best, he assured me, philosophers can do some clarificatory work with concepts. But they shouldn't try to get ahead of themselves or stray into the domain of the professionals in matters like this. I demurred, pointing out that conceptual analysis, while certainly important and the focus of philosophical thought, is about more than definitional clarification, that even Ryle, in analyzing the concept of mind, had to be doing something more than that. And this got us into a wrangle about the word "concept," itself. I argued that conceptual analysis led one to think about the concept of "concept" and that, in doing so, it becomes clear that there is no such thing, that like the word "mind," what is being denoted is an abstraction and that the denotative form of the term misleads us into looking for an entity, if not in the world, then in some parallel domain that is like the world in being populated with things, with its own sort of entities.

"You are making a category mistake," my correspondent said. You are imagining what is not there, a realm of mind when we all know that all "mind" means are certain sorts of behaviors in certain sorts of creatures. "But if we are analyzing concepts," I replied, "what are we doing?" And I offered my own answer, that concepts are not things as such but points or loci on a kind of mental map, a map consisting of all the complex connections of past and current images we have taken in and organized into more than the raw sensory inputs they begin with. We have, I said, taken our inputs and made them into a world, one that has temporal and spatial extension. For creatures without language, I suggested, there can be no world as such, even if to us they exist in the world we know with us. What they can do is receive sensory inputs and respond in the moment to these but that without language how could they organize those inputs to provide them with a picture of things beyond their immediate observation or recognize a past or imagine a future. Language, I suggested, is the key to these things, and that it takes brains of a certain capacity to enable language to work. And language depends on the ability to develop and maintain a complex array of thought images and this has the form, metaphorically speaking, of a mapping, a web of connections and this reflects an alternative model to Chomsky's vis a vis the development and acquisition and operation of language.

Here my new friend and I really parted company for his response was quick and clear. That he said is the realm of science. You philosophers have no business speculating about how minds work. Leave it to the psychologists and linguists like Chomsky. Wittgenstein, my interlocutor assured me, knew nothing about the latest scientific results about how minds and language work. He was insightful as far as he went but he and those who would fall back on his views are out of their depth here. Let philosophers stick to cleaning up messy concepts and leave the real work of theorizing about how minds and language work to those who are actually engaged in studying these things in a scientific way.

This brought us back to the question of concepts, of course, and my view that concepts are not things, not entities at all, but points on that metaphorical map in our heads which we develop as our brains develop, in contact with the world. Concepts, my correspondent assured me, are not explainable through some metaphysical hocus pocus about brain maps such as I was describing but can be seen as linguistic phenomena or, as he put it "linguistic entities." When I challenged his use of "entity" in this fashion as being contrary to Ryle's rule about avoiding category mistakes, he responded that "entity" can be used in this way and, of course, he is right. Computer programmers do use "entity" to designate objects of this or that programmed algorithm which they encode into computers. But that, I responded, is a specialized use, derivative of our ordinary one, rather than stand-alone in nature. In that sense it's like a metaphor, too. But my interlocutor drew a line here because, he asserted, dictionaries do show "entity" used in the way he wants to use it. He even offered an example from one of the standard dictionaries, Merriam-Webster as follows:

something that has separate and distinct existence and objective or conceptual reality.

Of course this particular definition conjoins the two conditions for the use he wants to assert, making the "definition" cited conditional on there being both separate and distinct existence AND objective or conceptual reality for something to be deemed an entity. But we can't claim that there is such "separate and distinct existence" for concepts except insofar as we posit such existence in a non-physical way. But that is just to stipulate, is it not? The use he wants to make of "entity" does not even appear to be supported by the definition he cites. Yet a dictionary might be found offering a definition that would work in the way he wants it to work, couldn't it? Dictionaries are just compilations of how we use our words and how we use them is subject to change and mutual agreement.

So we could say, with my interlocutor, that concepts are entities but then the same problem Ryle noted still obtains. To speak of concepts as things is like speaking of minds as souls.

As to his view of the Verification Principle, his argument is that it is valid as a a norm in the practice of science and who can argue with that? But the problem is not with that application of the principle but with the fact that the principle was not originally conceived that way or taken to be so limited. The original point of the logical positivists' principle of meaning was to identify a criterion of meaning that would enable speakers to separate the informational wheat from the chaff that surrounds it and thus disqualify certain kinds of talk from the arena of meaning. And, of course, the Principle did not do that precisely because, as was eventually recognized, it is, itself, in that class of statements it would disqualify as meaningful.

The Verification Principle, which required that any statement be either verifiable in fact (or in theory) through observation or that it be tautologous (true in virtue of the meaning of the term itself), failed its own test since it could not be shown to be true itself in either of these ways and so it was gradually abandoned by its own proponents. As a rule, however, for admissibility to the realm of scientific inquiry, it still makes sense and I wasn't disputing that. What it does not do is what it was originally conceived to do, to delineate between what can be said with sense and what must be treated as nonsense. Despite what the logical positivists thought (and what Wittgenstein once seemed to say), that meaningful language is only that language which can be applied to what is checkable by us through observation and testing in the world or by the unpacking meanings of terms, much that is important to how we get on in the world is left out and even Wittgenstein noticed it both in his early work and his later (though he did not think it quite the problem initially that he came to think it was as he matured). We forfeit ethics and aesthetics and even the realm of religion and what that seems to bring to human life if the idea of meaningfulness is thought to be exhausted by what is checkable by observation and tautology alone.

If the Verification Principle had worked as advertised, everything we do or think or care about that is not part of scientific or factual inquiry or baked into the meanings of our terms would have to be jettisoned as meaningless. But human life is not exhausted by what we can test in the world or calculate, even if that is the standard which science must apply if it is to be science. After many efforts to reformulate the Verification Principle even those of a positivistic bent, like Quine, felt obliged to move past it. But as a norm of science it is a useful tool given that the point of science is making things work in the world.

But what then of philosophy vs. psychology? If the latter is a science because it attends to what can be seen and tested in the world and the former is not because it doesn't, what's the difference between the two and why did my one-time neighbor suppose they were the same? Well aside from the fact that "philosophy" and "psychology" have common elements in how they're spelled, with "p's" and "h's" and "y's" in the mix, and a common etymology in that both derive from ancient Greek terms, and, of course, they have similar word length, both are inquiries into the intangible, into the realm of the mental. But what makes the inquiry of psychology science then while the inquiry of philosophy is not? And does it matter?

If Philosophy is not science and thus offers us no new information about the world, what good is it? What technologies or corrections to how we proceed in the world can philosophy offer us and if it cannot offer anything like this, why bother with it?

So we got into the question of philosophy's nature and role, of course, and my new friend assured me that philosophy was okay if it kept out of science's business and that metaphysical speculations failed to do that. I agreed with that. While philosophy was once coextensive with the sciences, that ceased to be the case as soon as inquirers about how the world works began to adopt methods of systematic observation and collection of data. Philosophy has no direct interest in these practices. Instead, it concerns itself with our thinking about things, that is with our concepts.

But is conceptual analysis, as my friend says, just a matter of getting the meanings of terms right, of doing the work of dictionaries albeit by probing a little deeper? Is conceptual analysis exhausted by what came in Anglo-American philosophy to be called "ordinary language philosophy" as practiced by Ryle and suggested by the later Wittgenstein and in contrast to the work of earlier analytical thinkers like Frege, Russell and Moore and, of course, the young Wittgenstein? I suggested that conceptual analysis was a larger task than that, that it involved getting a bead on language itself, on language in general, on how it works and, of course, why it works and what its working makes possible for its speakers.

And here we slid into Chomsky's ideas on the subject, considering his claims as to the origin, nature and purpose of language. My interlocutor took exception here to my attempt to challenge Chomsky when I noted that it made no sense to posit a heritable brain algorithm as the one and only basis for language's occurrence in human beings. This, he said, is where you go wrong, for philosophy which is just conceptual analysis can never move beyond the "linguistic entities" which, he assured me, concepts are. If philosophy is about analyzing what we call concepts, then to try to say anything about the world as such via philosophy cannot make any headway because language is in the world, not just in our heads, and so it must be left to the sciences. To do anything else is to bang one's head against the walls of metaphysical speculation.

What then, I asked, is there left for philosophy if we are just, on your view, to be glorified lexicographers? And is that what philosophers have always been in actuality when they were doing anything worthwhile (the rest of their time being spent fooling themselves and their audiences by spinning metaphysical fantasies)? My new friend had some very clear ideas about this, he said, ideas that went back to the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, to the young Ayer and to Gilbert Ryle who held that philosophy had to confine itself to concepts and leave everything else in the world alone. Leave it to the scientists.

Yet if I'm right, there are no such things as concepts because they do not exist except in the abstract and abstractions are intangible. Part of the world only in the minds of those who think them. This doesn't mean we can't do conceptual analysis, of course, but only that we must see this activity differently, as being about exploring the range of our thoughts rather than this one or that one in particular. Concepts, on this view, aren't lifted out of their milieu and placed in a petrie dish or under a microscope to be probed and prodded and their reactions observed by members of the scientific community. They are just how we do some things, in this case, how we structure our world. To do an analysis of a concept is to tease out the pathways and follow where they lead.

My interlocutor demurred, saying that this was vague and pointless talk, unverifiable according to the Verifiability Principle again, and that here philosophy (or at least one philosopher) must be headed off the rails and plunging into a metaphysical abyss. Leave the mental realm to those best equipped to study it he urged me, leave it to the psychologists.

But what do psychologists really do in matters of the mental that differs from philosophers, and vice versa? Well for one thing philosophers look at a bigger canvas in a sense since they want to look beyond this or that mind or group of minds. They look to mind as such as in what is it, why it isn't something else (say just certain brains), etc. Psychologists look at human minds through the behaviors exhibited by human beings and, while philosophers cannot look away from that, theirs is a different target. Though philosophy must take into account the best reports and analyses and theories psychologists can put together in doing what they do, philosophers do something very different. We aren't busy documenting responses to particular prompts in sample or general populations as psychologists do. We don't conduct experiments. What we do is consider and examine the thought processes we humans go through to arrive at conclusions, to reach understandings, to justify to ourselves and to others the lines of reasoning we follow and find convincing.

Philosophers look at human thinking but from a different angle and for a different purpose than psychologists. Philosophers look at "warrants," at the ways in which our ideas support and lead to other ideas, the ways in which we justify to ourselves our beliefs and the conclusions they bring us to. We look at thinking, as it were, from the inside, and not from without by studying what some population of subjects does. Philosophers look inward but it is an innerness that is shared by all who are capable of asking and trying to answer the same questions.

Philosophy is about clarification but it is not a matter of unpacking definitions, however implicit in their usages and thus in need of further explication. It's about following the bread crumbs which our thoughts leave behind along the paths that take us to the places where those thoughts get meaning. Philosophy is about building and refining a picture of how things are with us and with others like us, based on how they seem to us to be. it's the worm in the apple, gnawing its way out, just as science is like the bird on the outside pecking at what's going on within.

Philosophy is not psychology. I could not agree more. But it is not thereby discredited. It's just looking at things from a different place with a different end in mind, clearing away the detritus that may sometimes crowd our field of vision in order to get a little better picture of what we think. It's not just about making better dictionaries.

Update on June 27, 2021 by Stuart W. Mirsky

As an addendum to this essay I want to add some additional information. I shared this essay with my interlocutor in the exchange referenced here, the exchange which led to this particular piece, and was surprised to learn that he took exception both to my posting about our conversations (even though I hadn't used his name) and to my representations of his position in the above. He believes I have gotten his views wrong and, though we have some disagreement on that, I owe it to him to make clear to any readers here that he disavows the claims I imputed to him. He asked me to post the following disclaimer which he wrote:

My characterizations of my friend's views were not approved by him and are not based directly on what he said during our conversations. He feels that my characterizations are serious misrepresentations of what he said and believes.

Although subsequent conversations we had led me to believe I did not get his views wrong, it is, of course, always possible that I did.

In our further discussions he clarified his position on why he calls concepts "linguistic entities," a term I find problematic, by explaining that my "objection is based on a misunderstanding of what a concept is. A concept in philosophy," he went on, is a linguistic description of a word with denotations and connotations, much like the meaning of a word but more elaborated."

Of course I have no dispute with that. My problem comes from his calling the thing in question (the concept) an entity at all. I agree that we can use words in novel ways (as he seems to be doing here) and that we can assign meanings to them for particular purposes (which he says he is NOT doing) but I disagree that there are no misleading connotations that arise when we use a word like "entity," which typically refers to some discreet observable phenomenon in the world rather to an abstraction, to denote an abstract idea.

I certainly agree that we have and use concepts and even agree that all we mean by the term "concept" is whatever we take the word itself to mean. Concepts are meanings in this important sense but this only leads to the further problem of what "meaning," as in "a meaning of a word," is. Meanings exist and as Wittgenstein pointed out in the PI In a large number of cases, the meaning of a term is just the use. So if meanings are concepts and concepts meaning why do we distinguish the terms at all? Are they just synonyms? Or does "concept" connote something beyond "meaning" at least in some contexts? If concepts are just meanings, as my interlocutor wants to put it, then the next question this kicks up is how do we explain meaning?

A concept is, indeed, a meaning, even, as my interlocutor puts it, one that is more "elaborate" than what is found in dictionaries (though it would, of course, include the dictionary definition to the extent that is accurate. But if meanings are not just what is found in dictionaries, if a more elaborate account of a word's meaning is what we mean by "concept," then what is the more elaborate part?

My objection to his claim is to speaking of a concept as an entity, even a linguistic one. To the extent all my interlocutor wants to say is that a concept is the meaning of a term I have no beef. But the reason this became an issue between us was when I attempted to offer an account of how we recognize meaning, in this case what it is to get the meaning of a word or phrase, etc. What he objected to was my suggestion that, while philosophy is about conceptual analysis in the end (something we did not disagree on) and not speculations meant to compete with scientific theories, conceptual analysis, the activity of philosophy as seen in this way, is more than just reporting and dissecting the meanings of terms.

I offered the suggestion that conceptual analysis qua philosophy involves teasing out and following the connections between our terms, our ideas, and that this is done by, in essence, tracing out a map of associations retained in our heads (in the brain), associations which give meaning to our words. I suggested that meaning, itself, is about where any word-thought resides in a complex web of beliefs/ideas we hold. He objected to this, asserting the right to reserve theorizing about minds to psychologists and argued that philosophers should not intrude on the psychologist's turf by attempting to formulate accounts of how mental phenomena might work.

This claim of his, of course, is precisely what led me to write the above piece, i.e., to get at the differences between the discipline he espouses, and the turf he believes it has proprietary claim on vs. what philosophers are engaged in doing. After all, since both disciplines look at similar issues, i.e., what is going on in our minds when and if we think about things, make claims, form and hold beliefs, could his claim that psychologists (and some other scientific specialists, e.g., neuroscientists and cognitive scientists) have an exclusive claim on talk about what minds, and having one, involve, be right?

If it is, his other claim, that all philosophers can do is analyze concepts, means that philosophical work, to be meaningful, must finally confine itself to unpacking definitions. To be a philosopher, on this view, would be to be a kind of glorified lexicographer.

My response to this implication was to offer a suggestion that meaning involves mental mapping -- which is consistent with the work of others, like Quine, by the way, who argued that meanings are made by the web of connections our words achieve in the process of our use of language. This raised my interlocutor's ire because it meant that I was, as a philosopher, doing more than just analyzing particular word uses, unpacking and refining meanings of terms. It meant that I took myself to be making affirmative suggestions about how the rational mind works. This, he said (albeit not in these words), is off limits to philosophers.

Leave it to those who actually study the mind, to psychologists he said (again I am not quoting his precise words, only following the line of thought he was pressing). Just as he had argued with me that philosophers had no business challenging Chomsky on his theory of language acquisition and how language came about and what underlies it in the human brain, so he maintained philosophers have no business making suggestions about how meaning itself works, about what concepts ultimately are. Leave it to those who know about how minds work or at least are prepared to study how they do by observation and experimentation. Leave it, in other words, to psychologists.

In his view concepts are "linguistic entities" and what he means by that he explains as "a linguistic description of a word with denotations and connotations, much like the meaning of a word but more elaborated." In other words he reduces concepts to meanings and maintains that the philosopher's job is nothing more than engaging in a more "elaborate" explication than what can be offered in a dictionary. Taking this to its logical end point he is proposing that philosophical works, if they are to be meaningful, are roughly on the order of more "elaborate" dictionaries.

In the end we could not find agreement here and so I have added this addendum to the article above to allow him to offer his own response. Since my interlocutor declined to come to this site himself to defend his position (which includes the claim that I totally misunderstand him, but is not limited to that!), I have added this to help put the debate we had in better perspective and allow him to speak in his own words to the extent he is willing to here. Needless to say, we remain at loggerheads on this issue.