being philosophically demure, being conceptually mindful

an introduction to thick concepts

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I’ve been reading about thick concepts for a book I’m writing and I thought I’d spill the tea. This should help me absorb the material better — which is inevitably somewhat dry — and help you to be cool and fun, which is the main ‘how-to’ question you lot DM me about.

It begins with Bernard Williams, the insensitive monster who made Derek Parfit cry by not possessing the concept of a normative reason. In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Williams coined the term “thick concept”. Since I can’t find any quotable definitions in Williams’ book, you’ll have to settle for my explanation.

DEMURE, MINDFUL, ELOQUENT, RUGGED, FAIR, FINE. These are all things you’ve called me. But they’re also examples of thick concepts. LEWD, LAZY, BLASPHEMOUS, SLOPPY, BORING, SOPHOMORIC. These are all things you’ve called my Substack secondary,

Bentham's Bulldog

. They’re thick concepts too.

What in tarnation is a thick concept? Roughly, a concept is thick when it has both a descriptive and an evaluative aspect to it. For example, GENEROSITY picks out a pattern of behaviour. In that sense, it’s descriptive. Yet GENEROSITY — unlike, say, MARSHMALLOW — is also morally loaded: calling someone ‘generous’ is, in most contexts, a positive appraisal.

Why the flip would anyone want to understand thick concepts? Good question, but enough with the profanity. Here are a few ways in which thick concepts are philosophically interesting:

1. Debunking Non-Cognitivism: according to moral non-cognitivism, moral utterances like ‘Torture is wrong!’ or ‘Not subscribing to Going Awol is even worse!’ don’t even try to express something true. Rather, moral utterances are, generally speaking, the expression of an attitude or a command or something otherwise can’t be true or false. For example, non-cognitivists might translate the previous moral utterances as ‘Boo, torture! Thumbs down!’ or ‘Subscribe to Going Awol! Now!’. (Note: this is not meant to be an a priori claim about morality, deducible from in one’s head from the armchair. It’s an empirical claim about how moral language actually operates. In principle, a study could disprove it tomorrow.) According to some philosophers — Philippa Foot, for example — thick concepts show that non-cognitivism is a very failed view. To see Foot’s point, take a sentence like: “

   Glenn
   is rude”. Given his pattern of past behaviour — calling me a “very failed Substacker”, despite the fact that many people are calling him “Glenn whatshisface”, “a tad Jelly”, and “likely a Trump toadie or a Russian bot” — I think it’s fair to call him not only rude, but a very failed Substacker indeed. Note, though, that RUDE is a thick concept: it’s a term of opprobrium, yes, but it also has descriptive content packed into it (disregard for etiquette norms, for example, or a tendency to make disruptive fart noises.) When I say “Glenn is rude” in this context, I’m surely making a moral appraisal; yet — as Foot points out — my calling Glenn rude can’t merely be the expression of an attitude like “Glenn? ICK!”. After all, I’m making a set of descriptive, empirical claims about Glenn by calling him ‘rude’: e.g., that he chews with his mouth open, that he wears his hat indoors, that no one likes his company, and so forth. Since thick concepts make up an enormous share of our moral discourse (consider: people often choose to deploy thick terms like ‘nasty’, ‘boorish’, and ‘lewd’ in place of thinner, purely evaluative terms like ‘bad’ or ‘immoral’), non-cognitivism fails as an empirical claim about how moral language really operates, since it fails to account for thick terms in our day-to-day moral discourse.

2. The Normativity of Logic: there’s a debate about whether logic is normative. According to some logicians, logic just describes the entailments of, and inconsistencies between, propositions. According to other logicians, logic is also a normative discipline: it tells us what we ought to conclude, and which propositions we ought not accept in pairs. In “Validity As A Thick Concept”, Sophia Arbeiter argues for the normativity of logic on the grounds that LOGICAL VALIDITY is a thick concept: it describes relationships of entailment between propositions, yes, but ‘validity’ is also a virtue of an argument — if someone declares your argument valid, they’re appraising it positively. Since logic trades on validity, Arbeiter argues, logic is a normative discipline.

3. Are Catholics Cannibals?: Today I spooled a Twitter thread on why thinking about thick concepts can help us see why Catholics aren’t cannibals, even if they do eat Jesus’ flesh. (Oy! Follow my Twitter!)

4. Diagnosing The Gettier Problem: I’ve substacked about the Gettier problem before, but here’s a cheeky recap. In 1973, Edmund Gettier cooked up two devastating counterexamples to the ‘justified true belief’ definition of knowledge. Since then, epistemologists have been scrambling to find an adequate definition of knowledge, but every definition they come up with — it seems — faces a new and equally devastating counterexample. Increasingly, epistemologists are starting to think that the task of defining knowledge is not only hard, but impossible, and are spending their time trying to explain why no airtight definition of knowledge is forthcoming. In “Knowledge as a thick concept: explaining why the Gettier problem arises”, Brent Kyle argues that KNOWLEDGE is a thick concept, and that its thickness explains why defining it will forever be impossible. The argument is basically this: first, KNOWLEDGE is thicker than a snicker. Recall that for a concept to be thick, it has to contain both descriptive and evaluative content. KNOWLEDGE, it seems, contains both. On the descriptive side, KNOWLEDGE entails true belief — and ‘truth’ and ‘belief’ are both descriptive properties. On the evaluative side, KNOWLEDGE entails epistemic justification — or so Kyle thinks. While there’s significant controversy about what epistemic justification amounts to, saying ‘S is justified in believing p’ seems roughly equivalent to saying ‘S has good reason to believe p’, ‘S’s belief in p is permissible’, or ‘S’s grounds for believing p are adequate’. Since GOOD REASON, PERMISSIBLE, and ADEQUATE are evaluative, EPISTEMIC JUSTIFICATION must be too. And since KNOWLEDGE entails both TRUE BELIEF and EPISTEMIC JUSTIFICATION, KNOWLEDGE meets the definition of a thick concept. Second, Kyle argues, the fact that KNOWLEDGE is thick with twelve Cs explains why epistemologists have failed to analyse it. Why? Well, for reasons that are too fiddly to sum up here (sorry), Kyle thinks thick concepts, in particular, might be unanalysable in virtue of their thickness. This view charts a middle course between diagnoses of the Gettier problem that say the reason we haven’t analysed knowledge yet either has something to do with KNOWLEDGE, in particular, or something to do with human concepts generally. If Kyle is right, the Gettier problem arises for thick concepts generally — not just KNOWLEDGE — but not necessarily for all concepts.

Those were just a few examples. When you go digging, thick concepts turn up all over the place. As philosophers in training, we’d do well to understand the debates around thick concepts. Unfortunately (for you. I’m fine with it), I won’t unpack every disagreement philosophers have about thick concepts: I haven’t the intellectual facility, and we’d probably be here till Christmas.

Instead, I’ll just outline the two sides of the most important debate about thick concepts — separationism vs. non-separationism — and try to keep it peppy. If you want to read the only ‘splainer on the separationism/non-separationism debate available on the World Wide Web that won’t make you want to gouge those pretty little eyes out (*bites lip*), you’ll have to pay me money.¹ The more I’m able to wring from Substack’s coffers, the more time I’ll have to write things like this, for you! Besides, chipping in is very demure, very mindful, whereas not chipping in is Scrooge-like and miserly.