Abstract
How do we construct ad hoc concepts, especially those characterised by emergent properties? A reasonable hypothesis, suggested both in psychology and in pragmatics (Relevance Theory), is that some sort of inferential processing must be involved. I argue that this inferential processing can be accounted for in associative terms. My argument is based on the notion of inference as associative pattern completion based on schemata, with schemata being conceived in turn as patterns of concepts and their relationships. The possible role of conscious attention in inferential processes of this sort is also addressed.
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Notes
It might also be argued that an associative account of inferences is not compatible with RT’s modularism. This point, however, is beyond the scope of this paper.
“Everything about the production of inferences via pattern completion has a statistical character” (Barsalou 2005: 629).
One of the referees has argued that, since I am concerned with a descriptive enterprise, questions of justification had better be left aside. His/her suspicion is that “justifies” here is ultimately just a placeholder for “causes”. To be sure, I am not concerned here with normative epistemological issues. However, there is a cognitive reason for speaking of justification and not of cause: while associations in a restrictive sense can only be causes of concept activation, schematic associations in my sense can be thought to justify concept activation, to the extent that they can act as premises in rules of inference having certain concepts as their conclusions. I have described these rules of inference in terms of generalised modus ponens. (Thus, to be precise, it is the use of schemata in these rules of inference, not schemata in themselves, that justifies the conclusion.) If this is a special, cognitive use of “justification”, so be it.
The referee has two further objections to these considerations. One is that only sentential entities can act as inferential premises and conclusions. However, section 4 is precisely devoted to explaining why my generalised notion of modus ponens is thought to apply to non-sentential entities as well. The general idea is that sensorimotor representations have structure and can be combined productively in a way that is largely isomorphic to linguistic productivity. This is sufficient for sensorimotor representations to be subject to normative considerations, although this is not my concern here. The other objection is that my non-normative use of “justified” is scarcely clear. Does it mean “seems justified”? “This seems implausible—the referee says—since it would presuppose conscious awareness of the transition”. I agree that conscious awareness cannot be a general requirement for the kind of associative processes described here. As a matter of fact, in section 5 I propose that conscious awareness adds stability to the processes at issue, but the inferential structure is already provided by the schematic organization of associative knowledge. I insist that there is a clear distinction between the claim that associations are mere representations of co-occurrences and the claim that associations have schematic organization: in the latter case, but not in the former, activations can provide motivated transitions, that is, transitions from one content (p) to another (q) by means of a schema (if p then q), even when these transitions are not accompanied by conscious awareness.
Incidentally, that notation may be used for co-indexing of arguments (as Recanati 2004 has shown), but for our purposes we can leave this issue aside.
At least if we suppose that the metaphor is fresh and BULLDOZER* is not lexicalised. Otherwise, one should substitute an actual fresh metaphor for this example.
It has even been suggested that attentional processing emerges itself “from the operations and interactions of very elementary processing units” (Shanks 2010: 275), that is, from basic associative mechanisms. However, for the present purposes we can leave this aside.
In Barsalou’s account, ad hoc concepts are expressed by phrasal structures such as, for instance, “things to pack in a suitcase”. However, a concept combination such as PET BIRDS can be re-described in terms of the phrasal structure “birds which are also pets”.
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Mazzone, M. Crossing the Associative/Inferential Divide: Ad hoc Concepts and the Inferential Power of Schemata. Rev.Phil.Psych. 5, 583–599 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0201-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0201-8