Practical Concepts

This paper is a successor to the author’s ‘In Defence of Thick Concepts’. It asks first whether all thick concepts have a default valence. It then considers how to account for the combination of the descriptive and the evaluative (which is sometimes called ‘interpenetration’) in a thick concept, and suggests that the so-called ‘no-priority’ view fails to do this. We might also wonder why the descriptive element is not always capable of separate instantiation. Various alternative moves are considered. The paper offers a considerably more varied list of supposedly thick concepts than is normal. It ends by suggesting that thick concepts are evaluative because competence with them involves grasp of their evaluative point.