Online research in philosophy

In cognitive psychology, concepts are those data structures that are stored in long-term memory and are used by default in human beings.

We argue that Machery provides no convincing evidence that prototypes and exemplars are typically used in distinct cognitive processes. This partially undermines the fourth tenet of the Heterogeneity Hypothesis and thus casts doubts on Machery’s way of splitting concepts into different kinds. Although Machery may be right that concepts split into different kinds, such kinds may be different from those countenanced by the Heterogeneity Hypothesis.

Over recent years, the psychology of concepts has been rejuvenated by new work on prototypes, inventive ideas on causal cognition, the development of neo-empiricist theories of concepts, and the inputs of the budding neuropsychology of concepts. But our empirical knowledge about concepts has yet to be organized in a coherent framework.

In Doing without Concepts, Edouard Machery argues that the dominant psychological theories of concepts fail to provide such a framework and that drastic conceptual changes are required to make sense of the research on concepts in psychology and neuropsychology. Machery shows that the class of concepts divides into several distinct kinds that have little in common with one another and that for this very reason, it is a mistake to attempt to encompass all known phenomena within a single theory of concepts. In brief, concepts are not a natural kind. Machery concludes that the theoretical notion of concept should be eliminated from the theoretical apparatus of contemporary psychology and should be replaced with theoretical notions that are more appropriate for fulfilling psychologists' goals. The notion of concept has encouraged psychologists to believe that a single theory of concepts could be developed, leading to useless theoretical controversies between the dominant paradigms of concepts. Keeping this notion would slow down, and maybe prevent, the development of a more adequate classification and would overshadow the theoretical and empirical issues that are raised by this more adequate classification. Anyone interested in cognitive science's emerging view of the mind will find Machery's provocative ideas of interest.

Natural kind terms don’t have descriptive meanings, Devitt claims. The paper argues that this claim is tantamount to denying the existence of natural kind concepts, in the usual sense of “concept”, since concepts are predicate meanings. The denial is counterintuitive, and has bad epistemological consequences, since natural kind concepts are among the building blocks of our understanding of the world. The paper ends with a positive proposal, featuring a bold claim: if the standard Kripke-Putnam, line on semantics of natural kind terms is correct, and if there are natural kind concepts, then propositions analyzing these concepts are not apriori knowable. Analyticity does not entail apriority.

Machery’s argument that concepts split into different kinds is bold and inspiring but not fully persuasive. We will focus on the lack of evidence for the fourth tenet of Machery’s..

The argument known as the 'McKinsey Recipe' tries to establish the incompatibility of semantic externalism (about natural kind concepts in particular) and _a priori _self- knowledge about thoughts and concepts by deriving from the conjunction of these theses an absurd conclusion, such as that we could know _a priori _that water exists. One reply to this argument is to distinguish two different readings of 'natural kind concept': (i) a concept which _in fact _denotes a natural kind, and (ii) a concept which _aims_ to denote a natural kind. Paul Boghossian has argued, using a _Dry Earth _scenario, that this response fails, claiming that the externalist cannot make sense of a concept aiming, but failing, to denote a natural kind. In this paper I argue that Boghossian's argument is flawed. Borrowing machinery from two-dimensional semantics, using the notion of 'considering a possible world as actual', I claim that we can give a determinate answer to Boghossian's question: which concept would 'water' express on Dry Earth?

Machery argues that “philosophical theories of concepts” and “psychological theories of concepts” are about different things (31).2 To begin with, the expression “philosophical theory of concept” is somewhat obscure. Machery seems to use it as a synonym for “theory of concepts developed by a philosopher” (33, 34). Now, it may be true that some theories of concepts proposed by philosophers are about something different than the theories proposed by psychologists. But other theories of concepts proposed by professional philosophers – including Machery! – are explicitly after same thing (e.g., Fodor 2008, which Machery cites). Roughly speaking, they are after the building blocks of thought. Slightly more precisely, concepts – the target of theories proposed by both psychologists and many philosophers – are representations posited to explain certain cognitive phenomena, including recognition, naming, inference, and language understanding (cf. Piccinini and Scott 2006, 396).3 To be sure, philosophers tend to emphasize aspects of concepts, such as how concepts get to represent categories, that..

A common presupposition in the concepts literature is that concepts constitute a sin- gular natural kind. If, on the contrary, concepts split into more than one kind, this literature needs to be recast in terms of other kinds of mental representation. We offer two new arguments that concepts, in fact, divide into different kinds: (a) concepts split because different kinds of mental representation, processed independently, must be posited to explain different sets of relevant phenomena; (b) concepts split because different kinds of mental representation, processed independently, must be posited to explain responses to different kinds of category. Whether these arguments are sound remains an open empirical question, to be resolved by future empirical and theoretical work.

A common presupposition in the concepts literature is that concepts constitute a singular natural kind. If, on the contrary, concepts split into more than one kind, this literature needs to be recast in terms of other kinds of mental representation. We offer two new arguments that concepts, in fact, divide into different kinds: ( a ) concepts split because different kinds of mental representation, processed independently, must be posited to explain different sets of relevant phenomena; ( b ) concepts split because different kinds of mental representation, processed independently, must be posited to explain responses to different kinds of category. Whether these arguments are sound remains an open empirical question, to be resolved by future empirical and theoretical work. *Received April 2005; revised May 2006. †To contact the authors, please write to: Gualtiero Piccinini, Department of Philosophy, Washington University in St. Louis, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130‐4899; e‐mail: gpiccini@artsci.wustl.edu . Sam Scott, 11‐1317 King Street West, Toronto, ON, M6K 1H2, Canada; e‐mail: SamScott@Canada.com .