On Eklund on Foot

According to Eklund (2011, 2017), Foot’s view of thick concepts is both intuitively appealing and incorrect. Attending to where and how her reasoning goes wrong, he argues, can generate an account of thick concepts that overcomes two puzzles: the puzzle of ‘seeming sufficiency’ and the puzzle of ‘emptiness’. There is some ambiguity, to my mind, concerning exactly what Foot’s view is. This has to do with how she understands the notion of the descriptive. If she means ‘descriptive’ to be equivalent to ‘non-normative’ (or ‘non-evaluative’) then I think Eklund has presented her view correctly, but it is puzzling that he finds it intuitively appealing, and he misidentifies where her reasoning goes wrong. If she has a more complicated notion of the descriptive in mind, then Eklund fails to present her view correctly. I proceed as follows: I outline Eklund’s interpretation of Foot in §1. In §2 I explain why I think there is ambiguity in her use of the notion of the descriptive, ambiguity which allows for two different interpretations of her view, and I explain what these two interpretations are. The second interpretation gets us closer to what is, in my view, the correct account of the thick. Nonetheless, it still falls short. I explain why this is so in §3. In §4 I put forward an account of thick concepts that avoids the shortfall, and I show how this view solves Eklund’s puzzles of seeming sufficiency and of emptiness.