Abstract
Concepts are the constituents of thoughts. Therefore, concepts are vital to any theory of cognition. However, despite their widely accepted importance, there is little consensus about the nature and origin of concepts. Thanks to the work of Lawrence Barsalou, Jesse Prinz and others concept empiricism has been gaining momentum within the philosophy and psychology literature. Concept empiricism maintains that all concepts are copies, or combinations of copies, of perceptual representations—that is, all concepts are couched in the codes of perceptual representation systems. It is widely agreed that any satisfactory theory of concepts must account for how concepts semantically compose (the compositionality requirement) and explain how their intentional content is determined (the content determination requirement). In this paper, I argue that concept empiricism has serious problems satisfying these two requirements. Therefore, although stored perceptual representations may facilitate some traditionally conceptual tasks, concepts should not be identified with copies of perceptual representations.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
I’ll use small caps to denote concepts.
Some have argued that identity of reference is not required, only similarity of reference. Fodor and Lepore, however, have strongly argued that concepts must be identical in reference (Fodor 1998a; Fodor and Lepore 1992). If they are right, then some of my criticisms of concept empiricism will be even stronger. My objections, however, persist even if a weakened version of the stability requirement turns out to be true. In short, the more stability that is required of concepts, the more problematic some of my objections to concept empiricism will be.
For instance, one might acquire the concept red hair, but fail to have a general concept for red since red hair tends to be orangish red and not a very good instance of red. For some other kinds of exceptions to RC see (Johnson 2006). These kinds of cases, however, are certainly the exception rather than the rule. In general, we simply don’t find people who have say red square, but haven’t got red or square (Fodor 2001). Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for the red hair example.
Although it has been argued that reverse-compositionality isn’t required for natural languages, these arguments don’t show that reverse-compositionality isn’t true of thought.
Just how much RC is required is unclear. It suffices for my purposes in this paper to assume that concepts that are RC should be the overriding rule rather than the exception.
The concept concept is perhaps a rare exception.
Such as the sounds dogs make being linked to visual representations of dogs.
Long-term memory networks can also store linguistic information such as a representation of the word “dog”.
This is Prinz’s alternative to Fodor’s asymmetric dependence.
In later papers Prinz suggests a somewhat different story about how proxytypes acquire their referents, one that appeals to a proxytype’s long-term memory network (or mental file). This is importantly different from the traditional way of employing informational semantics suggested in the 2002 book. For now I will simply flag the issue and wait until later in the paper to offer a critique of this alternative proposal.
It should be noted that Prinz believes that the required compositionality is not as demanding as Fodor has made it out to be. All that is required to explain productivity and systematicity, according to Prinz, is that concepts have the capacity to compose not that any of our complex concepts actually be compositional.
Exemplar knowledge is knowledge deduced from stored perceptual representations of category members. I’ll follow Prinz in calling category instances stored in the mind exemplars, to distinguish them from instances of categories in the world.
Examples of complex concepts with emergent features can be easily multiplied; e.g. blind lawyers are emergently motivated and harvard carpenters are emergently non-materialistic.
Here I do not mean to suggest that Alice could have a dog concept without experiencing multiple kinds of dogs. However, even if she does have a rich enough network built up, Alice’s Great Dane representation is a dog concept on Prinz’s view, and that representations’ capabilities for detection and, therefore, reference will be limited. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for forcing me to be clearer in this example.
I want to thank an anonymous reviewer for an important comment that prompted the addition of this paragraph.
Of course, spelling out exactly what are “normal conditions” is notoriously difficult. Nevertheless, it is clear that the majority of the additional cases in which proxytypes will yield false negatives will be cases in which the conditions for detecting category instances are good. That is, they are the paradigm cases in which we would expect the concept to be tokened since there are no extraordinary conditions that might be used to explain why the concept failed to be tokened.
The use of complex proxytype here might be misleading. To be clear, when I say complex proxytype I intend to refer to the proxytype (i.e. the representation) that constitutes a complex concept such as red truck.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this alternative.
To put the point differently, Prinz’s story would only appear to entail that ‘accessing the mental file’ is what refers to category instances, but this fails to show how the representations within that file are able to acquire the appropriate reference, even when considered as a collection.
What is more, the relationship between a long-term memory network and individual concepts is not one of nomological covariation at all, since neither category members nor network activation will have a law-like connection with any particular proxytype being tokened.
References
Armstrong, S. L., Gleitman, L. R., & Gleitman, H. (1983). What some concepts might not be. Cognition, 13, 263–308.
Barsalou, L. (1999). Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 577–609.
Barsalou, L. (2009). Situating concepts. In P. Robbins & M. Aydede (Eds.), Cambridge handbook for situated cognition. New York: Cambridge Universtiy Press.
Barsalou, L., Simmons, W. K., Barbey, A. K., & Wilson, C. D. (2003). Grounding conceptual knowledge in modality-specific systems. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(2), 84–91.
Connolly, A. C., Fodor, J. A., Gleitman, L. R., & Gleitman, H. (2006). Why stereotypes don’t even make good defaults. Cognition, 103, 1–22.
Dretske, F. (1981). Knowledge and the flow of information. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. (1981). Representations: Philosophical essays on the foundations of cognitive science (1st ed.). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. (1990). A theory of content i & ii. In J. A. Fodor (Ed.), A theory of content and other essays. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. (1998a). Concepts: Where cognitive science went wrong. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fodor, J. (1998b). In critical condition: Polemical essays on cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. (2001). Language, thought, and compositionality. Mind & Language, 16(01), 1–15.
Fodor, J., & Lepore, E. (1992). Holism: A shopper’s guide. Cambridge: Blackwell.
Fodor, J., & Lepore, E. (2001). Why compositionality won’t go away: Reflections on Horwich’s ‘deflatioary’ theory. Ratio: An International Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 14(4), 350–368.
Johnson, K. (2006). On the nature of reverse compositionality. Erkenntnis, 64, 37–60.
Machery, E. (2006a). Concept empiricism: A methodological critique. Cognition, 104, 19–46.
Machery, E. (2006b). Two dogmas of neo-empiricism. Philosophy Compass, 1(4), 398–412.
Margolis, E., & Laurence, S. (Eds.). (1999). Concepts: Core readings. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Prinz, J. J. (2002). Furnishing the mind: Concepts and their perceptual basis. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Prinz, J. J. (2005). The return of concept empiricism. In H. Cohen & C. Lefebvre (Eds.), Handbook of categorization in cognitive science. Oxford: Elsevier.
Robbins, P. (2005). The myth of reverse compositionality. Philosophical Studies, 125, 251–275.
Acknowledgments
I would especially like to thank Philip Robbins for helpful comments, guidance, and encouragement. I would also like to thank Andrew Melnyk, Zac Ernst, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments that improved the final version. Finally, I am indebted to André Ariew and Randall Westgren for their continued support.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Rice, C. Concept empiricism, content, and compositionality. Philos Stud 162, 567–583 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9782-6
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9782-6