(1) Re Bill's first comment, on implicit conception:

     I share Bill's reservations about requiring that the content given in (i)-(iii)
be somewhere represented 'within an ordinary person'.  But I want to point out that
this kind of problem is with us in other areas as well.  There is a large body of
literature concerning knowledge of meaning which discusses the question whether we
should think of truth-conditions (understood a la Davidson) are 'internalized' and
represented by competent speakers and if so how.  Several Brits (including Martin
Davies, to whom Peacocke refers) have discussed the issue.<fn.1>

    A standard problem raised for the implicit knowledge of truth-conditions is that
it seems implausible to credit speakers with implicit knowledge of truth-conditions
where they cannot be said to possess the relevant concepts involved in the
truth-conditions (e.g, the concpet of satisfaction by infinite sequences, which is a
concept used by Tarskian truth-theories).  Bill's worry reminded me of that
complaint.  The difficulty for Peacocke may be even more acute, since he wants
implicit conceptions to play a role in justification/rationalization.  And the more
tacit and inexplicitly represented his implicit conceptions are, the less plausible
it is that they can play that role.
 
    (2) I think the identification of implicit conceptions with possession conditions is
problematic, so long as we keep the idea that possession conditions serve to
individuate concepts.  So I'm not sure what to make of Bill's reading of
Peacocke's present view.  (On a naive reading, the identification makes perfect
sense: to possess a concept C is to have the relevant implicit conception.  The
trouble is that it doesn't seem to work so well given all the different things
Peacocke says about implicit conceptions and possession.)

    (3) Re the quotation Bill gives from from p. 136-7: "the concept _limit_ as deployed
by Newton" is distinct from the complex concept expressed by the Bolzano-Weierstrass
definition; they must be distinct, because they differ cognitively.  Yet Newton's
(and Leibniz') possession of the concept
 _limit_ consisted in their posession of the B.-W. implicit conception."

    What he may be saying here is that there is no more to possessing the limit concept
by Newton, psychologically speaking than his possessing the B-W implicit
conception (so I read "consisted in" as "realized in").  But a single implicit
conception may 'realize' possession of different concepts - which concept someone
has is determined by the Fregean criterion of cognitive significance.  I wasn't sure
whether that's how Bill was reading it when he said
"I am not sure whether, for Peacocke, "the concept _limit_ as deployed by Newton" =
the concept _limit_ possessed by Newton in virtue of having the B.-W. implicit
conception, though that's what it sounds as though he means."

    (4) I fully agree with Bill's rejection of the notion of unintellgibility  appealed
to on p. 138.

    (5) Re belief ascirption: I'm not sure Peacocke is advocating a transparent as
opposed to an opaque reading of attitude complements.  I'm wondering whether what is
at work here, rather, is the idea he presents on p. 50, that someone (in this case,
the first person with only an intuitive understanding of the notion of limit from
p.139) can be credited with a concept she does not "sharply grasp", and where no
deference to others is involved.  I'm not sure.

    (6) I think it is interesting to reflect on the extent to which the two roles
Peacocke assigns for his implicit conceptions (the descriptive- psychological and
the normative-epistemological) are germane to any satisfactory philosophical
theory of concepts.

    Also, if anyone undertakes Bill's recommendation to go through Peacocke carefully
and try to sort it out, I would recommend trying to bear in mind which role he's
addressing at which point, and to what extent (apparent) tensions in his view can be
relieved by keeping the roles distinct.

    That's it for now.
 

<fn.1> For references and some discussion of implicitness in connection with
knowledge of meaning, see my "Anti-Realism and Speaker Knowledge", a copy of which I
can make available to those interested.  I am struck by how similar some of the
issues are, and it would be interesting to detemine whether there are any special
difficulties with concepts as contrasted with meanings.