Jesse J. Prinz (2000), Philosophical Studies, 100(1), 1–34 — DOI-10.1023/A:1018612122389
Key takeaways
- Concepts have two distinct wide contents — a “nominal” content fixed by the observable features used to categorize, and a “real” (referential) content fixed by incipient causes plus nomological covariation — echoing Locke’s nominal vs real essences. (Reconstructed from secondary sources; unverified against the paper.)
Seeded from the abstract alone, not a reading. What follows is what the work says about itself.
No abstract was reachable, so this is reconstructed from secondary sources. Prinz argues that concepts carry two kinds of content, each wide rather than narrow. Nominal content is tied to the observable, appearance-level properties by which things are categorized. Real or referential content is the underlying kind or essence those properties depend on. On the secondary account, real content is fixed by a concept’s incipient cause (what first caused it to form) together with nomological covariation between the concept and its referent, a hybrid of Dretske’s informational theory and Fodor’s asymmetric dependence. The distinction is presented as a descendant of Locke’s nominal and real essences and as an alternative to the standard wide/narrow split. Prinz later calls nominal content “cognitive content” (Furnishing the Mind, 2002).
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 10 seconds of active reading over 1 session. Deferred because nobody has read it closely here yet, not on merit.
Priority for a deeper reading: low — 10 s dwell, the text was unreachable, and the view is better known through Prinz’s 2002 book.
What a deeper reading should check:
- A two-content theory of concepts (surface features vs referent) bears on how to describe what learned representations “mean”: features that track appearances versus the kinds behind them.
- A deeper reading must first establish Prinz’s own statement of the thesis, since everything above is second-hand. It should also check how nominal content relates to prototypes and proxytypes, and how the incipient-cause condition handles Twin-Earth and qua problems.
Access when seeded: The captured URL is JSTOR stable/4321065; the tracker title was “The Duality of Content on JSTOR”. I did not fetch JSTOR. The DOI came from Crossref. The Springer landing page (via rd.springer.com) confirmed author, volume, issue, pages and the July 2000 cover date, but it carries no abstract, and the PDF is paywalled. Academia.edu and ResearchGate copies returned 403. The content description below comes from a secondary source, Scielo’s “Prinz’s Naturalistic Theory of Intentional Content” (Crítica 2014), and from search snippets. It is not from Prinz’s own text, so treat it as provisional. Keywords are mine.