Dual Character Eliminativism

Abstract

Extant dual character concept theories hold that utterances like `\textit{a} is not a scientist but, ultimately, \textit{a} is a true scientist' are felicitous because the head noun is polysemous, denoting a concept that permits dissociated categorization along descriptive and normative lines. This paper develops an eliminativist critique of such theories, arguing that this sort of dissociation is incoherent on a literal reading and requires pragmatic reinterpretation to achieve felicity at the level of speaker meaning. If such utterances are indeed coherent in context, they are more plausibly explained by context-sensitive category extension than by the hybrid lexical structures posited by dual character theories. Thus, eliminativism dispenses with dual character concepts and offers a semantically parsimonious treatment of double dissociation, {emphasizing} the importance of distinguishing between literal and loose categorization.