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there to be a primitive concept of a self-contradictory property; e.g. a primitive concept
ROUND SQUARE. (Remember that ROUND SQUARE is a name, not a structural
description. The notation leaves it open whether the corresponding
end p.163
concept is atomic.) How the argument goes will depend on the details of IA's
formulation. But, roughly: IA says that concepts have to be locked to properties. Maybe
it's OK for a concept to lock to a property that exists but happens not to be instantiated
(like being a gold mountain), but presumably there isn't any property of being a round
square for the necessarily uninstantiated concept ROUND SQUARE to lock to.
That's all right if ROUND SQUARE is assumed to be complex; it's pretty plausible that
there really isn't anything to having ROUND SQUARE beyond the inferential
dispositions that its compositional semantics bestows (viz. the disposition to infer
ROUND and SQUARE). But the corresponding primitive concept would have neither
content (there's no property for it to lock to) nor compositional structure (it has no
constituents), so there could be nothing to having it at all. The objection is that it's not
obvious that it's metaphysically necessary that ROUND SQUARE couldn't be primitive.
A possible reply is that it's also not obvious that it could, so all you get is a hung jury. But
I think maybe we can do a little better. Consider a non-self-contradictory property like
being a red square. It's common ground for any RTM that there is a complex concept of
this property (constructed from the concepts RED and SQUARE). But it's built into
informational versions of RTM that it also allows there to be a simple concept of this
property; viz. a primitive mental representation REDSQUARE (sic; this is intended to be
a structural description) that is locked to being red and square. Presumably, one could
acquire REDSQUARE ostensively. That is, one could get locked to being red and square
(not by first getting locked to being red and being square, but) by learning that
redsquares (sic) are the things that look like those. So Informational Atomism
acknowledges the metaphysical possibility of having the concept of a red square without
having either the concept RED or the concept SQUARE. (You won't, of course, admit
that RED SQUARE could be, in this sense, primitive if you boggle at concepts without
conceptual roles. But if you boggle at concepts without conceptual roles you can't accept
a pure informational semantics at all, so why should you care what a pure informational
semantics says about concepts of self-contradictory properties?)
If, on the other hand, you find it intuitively plausible that there are two ways of having a
concept of a red square (viz. RED SQUARE, which you can't have unless you've got
RED and SQUARE, and REDSQUARE, which you can because it's primitive) then
everything is OK about IA's treatment of the concept ROUND SQUARE. For the
(anyhow, my)
end p.164
intuition is very strong that there is only one way to have that concept. In particular, that
there is no concept of a round square that one could have without also having ROUND
and SQUARE. If you share the intuition that there is this asymmetry, between RED
SQUARE and ROUND SQUARE, then you should be very happy with IA. IA explains
the asymmetry because it entails that there can be no primitive concept without a
corresponding property for it to lock to.
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