CONCEPTS: NEITHER REPRESENTATIONS NOR ABILITIES BUT RULES

New Perspectives on Concepts, 2010

This article investigates whether the concept of a concept can be given a fairly uniform explanation through a 'cognitivist' account, one that accepts that concepts exist independently of individual subjects, yet nonetheless invokes mental achievements and capacities. I consider various variants of such an account, which identify a concept, respectively, with a certain kind of abilitiy, rule and way of thinking. All of them are confronted with what I call the 'proposition problem', namely that unlike these explananda concepts are standardly regarded as components of propositions. The paper ends by suggesting that this problem can be resolved by recognizing the different ways in which concepts can be involved in judgements or propositions, and by undermining the building-block model of concepts as abstract parts of abstract wholes.

in: Christoph Demmerling, Dirk Schröder (eds.), Concepts in Thought, Action, and Perception, London / New York: Routledge 2021, 117-138.

In a series of intriguing and far-reaching papers, Hannah Ginsborg introduced the notion of “primitive normativity” as the cornerstone of a novel account of the normativity of concepts, thought, and meaning. Her account is supposed to steer a middle course between what she regards as the two horns of a dilemma first laid out by Saul Kripke in his seminal reading of Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following. I propose to investigate Ginsborg’s conception. I begin by establishing the conceptual relations between the notions of having concepts and of following rules, between concepts and normativity, in Section 7.1. I outline the Kripkean dilemma in Section 7.2 and derive from it, in Section 7.3, a criterion of adequacy for any philosophical account purporting to explain what it is to have concepts in terms of normativity. I go on to explain Ginsborg’s notion of primitive normativity and how it is supposed to meet the criterion of adequacy. In Sections 7.4 and 7.5, I introduce and evaluate two core claims of her position and argue that each of them leads her account to founder on its own criterion of adequacy. Thus I conclude that the notion of primitive normativity offers no viable escape from the Kripkean dilemma.

Abstract Anyone coming fresh to the literature would quickly observe that philosophers and psychologists have very different notions underlying their use of the word" concept". It is generally agreed by both that concepts are the building blocks or atoms from which thoughts are created. However the way in which concepts (and hence thoughts) can be described and investigated has become a source of conflict between psychology and philosophy.

Causation, Coherence, and Concepts, 2008

In this paper I address a challenge regarding if theories of cognition that are not committed to the Representational Theory of Mind need to posit the existence of concepts. I will examine whether there are cognitive phenomena for which attribution of concepts is the only available explanatory strategy. I identify their explananda as directedness and categorization using Prinz's (2002) list of desiderata for a theory of concepts. Then, I present alternative preliminary explanations to these phenomena that do not require us to appeal to concepts. They are based mainly on social interaction, sensorimotor coordination and the influence of language in human categorization. Thus, as it is possible to provide alternative explanations to these phenomena, I conclude that alternative programs do not need to posit concepts to explain cognition. Finally, I briefly suggest that this conclusion may be part of a deeper crisis that involves the subject matter of cognitive science.

Mind & language, 1995

2010

Recognitional concepts have the following characteristic property: thinkers are disposed to apply them to objects merely on the basis of undergoing certain perceptual experiences. I argue that a prominent strategy for defending the existence of constitutive connections among concepts, which appeals to thinkers’ semantic-cum-conceptual intuitions, cannot be used to defend the existence of recognitional concepts. I then outline and defend an alternative argument for the existence of recognitional concepts, which appeals to certain psychological laws.

New Perspectives on Concepts, 2010

Much recent work on concepts has been inspired by and is developed within the bounds of the representational theory of the mind often taken for granted by philosophers of mind, cognitive scientists, and psychologists alike (see e.g. Margolis and Laurence 1999; Stich and Warfield 1994). The contributions to this volume take a more encompassing perspective on the issue of concepts. Rather than modelling details of our representational architecture in line with the dominant paradigm, they explore three traditional issues concerning concepts. Inquiring into how language and the mind are interrelated, Brandom, Bermúdez, Nida-Rümelin and Racokzy ask:  Is mastery of a language necessary for thought? Pondering whether drawing on concepts to explain our thinking requires us to adopt the representational paradigm of the mind in the first place, Kenny, Glock, and Saporiti are concerned with the question:  Do concepts reduce to abilities? Finally, in order to assess the prospects for philosophical reliance on conceptual analysis, Jackson, Nimtz, Spicer, and Textor discuss:  Is the analysis of concepts a viable means to ascertain truths from the proverbial armchair? Needless to say, there is no consensus to be had on either issue. This introductory essay explores the backdrop to the debate our authors engage in. We will provide a rough geography of key ideas and issues shaping the overall debate on concepts within contemporary philosophy. We will proceed in two steps. In a first step, we will present and discuss key ideas

How people acquire and classify knowledge, interrelate classified knowledge and apply it in solving problems remains a central question in cognition research. notes "Concept learning has been the primary focus of machine learning research" (p.2). Within the past two decades a probabilistic understanding of concepts emerged and attracted many researchers. It now appears probabilistic theories are less powerful than initially thought. Keil (1989) and Medin (1989), for example, are re-evaluating concept theories. Medin (1989) observes "the viability of probabilistic view theories...is being seriously questioned" (p. 1473) and Keil (1989) argues "concepts are not mere probabilistic distributions of features or properties or passive reflections of feature frequencies and correlations in the world " (p. 1).

Philosophy and the mind sciences, 2023

Concept eliminativists argue that we should eliminate the term 'concept' from our vocabulary in psychology because there is no single natural kind that is picked out by it. I argue that the most developed version of concept eliminativism by Edouard Machery depends on the assumption that concepts are defined as stable and context-independent bodies of information. It is this assumption that leads Machery to eliminativism and it is an assumption we have reason to reject. Another assumption that leads to the eliminativist conclusion and that we have reason to reject is that the type of content represented in long-term memory is the relevant property based on which we should individuate certain natural kinds in cognitive psychology. Finally, I argue that certain pieces of information are functionally integrated enough to meet the conditions for being a natural kind. Concepts • Concept eliminativism • Concept pluralism • Concept hybridism • Contextualism • Natural kinds