Victor Verdejo and Joost Joosten
Affiliation: Pompeu Fabra University
Category: Philosophy
Keywords: concepts, coordination, rationality
Date: Wednesday 3rd of September
Time: 16:00
Location: Gen. Henryk Dąbrowski Hall (006)
View the full session: Polysemy & Communication
On a standard philosophical characterisation, a concept is the constituent of a thought or proposition which an individual recruits in referring to an entity in the world (e.g., an object, property or event). It is widely held that concept coordination is key to understanding action, communication, and inference. Suppose that the concept C1, used by individual I1, and the concept C2, used by individual I2, both refer to a worldly entity α. To say that C1 and C2 are coordinated is to say that they represent α as the same entity (cf. Fine 2007, 40). Roughly, it is because C1 and C2 are (un)coordinated in this sense that we can explain the fact that trains of thought involving these concepts may lead to (in)effective interaction, (un)successful communication, and (in)valid inference by I1 and I2 over α. In recent years, a growing number of authors suggest that concept coordination is not a transitive relation. Call this the intransitivity view.
Influential developments have invoked intransitive concept coordination as (part of) a solution to puzzles concerning rationality-based thought individuation (Taschek 1998, 347-351; Fine 2007, 108-115). It has also been seen as a consequence of semantic analyses of anaphora (Soames 1994; Pinillos 2011; cf. Goodale 2014; Contim 2016; Yoon 2021); as a constraint for the satisfactory account of communication (Valente & Onofri 2023); as a plausible result in harmony with the metaphysics of personhood (Prosser 2019, 2020); or a possibility to be kept open—and eventually endorsed—in the theory of concepts or files (Recanati 2016; Goodman & Gray 2022); as well as the elucidation of logical validity (Fine 2007, 119-121; Gray 2025).
These developments strongly support the explanatory value of intransitive coordination. Nonetheless, the scope of the intransitivity view remains largely unspecified in the literature. On some formulations, it appears to be unrestricted—e.g., when coordination is modelled on the general metaphysical principles of stage theory (Prosser 2020). By contrast, “our informal understanding of coordination is as some form of sameness—in meaning or representation” (Fine 2007, 107). From a pre-theoretical standpoint, therefore, concept coordination must not merely be transitive, but indeed an equivalence relation: transitive, reflexive and symmetric. Does the intransitivity view entail that we must abandon this pre-theoretical conception entirely? How often should we expect concept coordination to be intransitive in real and indefinitely large conceptual systems? To make progress on this front, in this paper I aim to highlight unexplored limitations of intransitive coordination from a formal, cognitive and interpersonal linguistic point of view; and to offer, in the light of this, a diagnosis of its scope and explanatory significance.
Formally, two versions of the intransitivity view are in fact available. On one reading, the intransitivity view amounts to the claim that coordination is an ‘anti-transitive’ relation. Anti-transitivity means that, for all triples of individual concepts in the system, transitivity never obtains. A moment’s reflection is only needed to see that this view would lead to inconsistency granted reflexivity on non-empty domains. On another, more interesting, reading, the intransitivity view must be understood as the negation of transitivity. While viable, this version leads to acknowledging a substantial upper bound on the amount of transitivity actually allowed in the system (author reference). The basic idea here is that assuming reflexivity, there will always be a transitive core: a majority of ineliminable number of triples of elements which will satisfy transitivity. This is not an unusual feature of violations of transitivity which has a substantive upper bound, with the majority of triples constituting a transitive instance (cf. Klaška 1997; Pfeiffer 2004; Dekker et al. 2019). The upshot is that intransitivity can at most be a relatively exceptional feature of largely transitive coordinated networks of individual concepts.
Further context for the assessment of the intransitivity view can be provided via cognitive considerations and rationality theory. Violations of transitivity seem to involve higher cognitive demands. This picture is encouraged, for instance, by neuroscientific evidence that indicates that preference inconsistencies engage valuation-related brain regions, including the orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate cortex, increasing cognitive effort (e.g., Kalenscher et al. 2010; Padoa-Schioppa 2011; Rustichini & Padoa-Schioppa 2015). While decision theory distinctively allows for intransitive preference cycles (Tversky 1969), subjects do not usually target or track complex intransitive relations per se, but by seeking choices that are “good enough” given cognitive constraints (Gingerenzer & Selten 2001). This suggests that transitive coordination is the default or preferred option from a computational point of view.
Other explanatory limitations of the intransitivity view are brought out by the fact that, while discussions of concept coordination often focus on specific and contextually-constrained cases of transitivity violation, concept coordination picks out relations of entire systems connecting indefinitely large—and virtually infinite—sets of individual concepts in real communities. We can illustrate the point by reflecting on intersubjective phenomena such as collective inquiry and public debate. These phenomena show that concept coordination is not merely an individual endeavour but a structural feature of collective cognition which involves public concepts (Fodor 1998) and obtains within a particular “representational tradition” (Schroeter & Schroeter 2014, 2025). While individual subjects might occasionally exhibit intransitive conceptual relations due to cognitive strain, shared discourse and collective reasoning pressures seem to push toward transitivity.
What is then the proper explanatory scope and significance of intransitive coordination? Current developments on the semantics and the transparency of coordination suggest that intransitivity must play a central role in our conceptual systems. Nonetheless, on the proposed diagnosis, such violations concern for the most part the demands of individual rationality, particularly when constrained by specific and presumably incidental conditions in which subjects are exposed to unpredictable environments, or demanding epistemic standards, such as in slow-switching scenarios or Paderewski cases. By contrast, formal, cognitive and interpersonal considerations offer grounds to suppose that these are, if at all, exceptional deviations of largely transitive actual conceptual networks. From this broader angle, the explanatory import of intransitive coordination may be acknowledged but qualified, certain inconsistent formulations ruled out, and the pre-theoretical conception of coordination as a transitive relation ultimately vindicated.