On the Limits of Intransitive Coordination

ABSTRACT A growing number of authors suggest that concept coordination—the kind of relation we pick out when we say that the concepts of one or more individuals represent something as the same—is not a transitive relation. Here we consider global features of representational systems to break new ground in the assessment of the intransitivity view. From this angle, two versions of the view are in fact available. Provided that we grant the reflexivity of the coordination relation, one of them—which we call “anti‐transitivity”—leads to logical inconsistency. We therefore focus on the “non‐transitive” version which, while viable, leads to acknowledging a substantial upper bound on the amount of intransitivity actually allowed in the system. We shall argue that this result, together with the consideration of local and global rationality features of representational systems, clearly constrains the scope and the explanatory significance of intransitive coordination.