Concepts

Edited by Daniel Weiskopf (Georgia State University)
About this topic
Summary Concepts are the basic elements of thought. One of their primary functions is to connect the mind to the world; thus, to have a concept is to have available a way of thinking about something. There are concepts of particular individuals, general categories, natural kinds and artifacts, properties and relations, actions and events, and so forth. Concepts are also used in formulating beliefs, desires, plans, and other complex thoughts and judgments. They therefore play an important role in explaining cognitive processes such as categorization, inductive inference, causal reasoning, and decision making.
Key works A collection of influential readings that makes a good starting point in getting acquainted with how theories of concepts have been handled in modern cognitive science is Margolis & Laurence 1999. An overview of the key phenomena that theories of concepts aim to cover, as well as the major theories themselves, can be found in the opening chapters of Prinz 2002. Fodor 1998 presents a critique of the major assumptions lying behind these theories.
Introductions General reviews of the subject may be found in Laurence & Margolis 1999 and Weiskopf 2013.
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  1. Against Arguments From Diagnostic Reasoning.Jeske Toorman - 2023 - Cognitive Science 47 (11):e13376.
    Recent work in cognitive psychology and experimental semantics indicates that people do not categorize natural kinds solely by virtue of their purported scientific essence. Two attempts have been made to explain away the data by appealing to the idea that participants in these studies are reasoning diagnostically. I will argue that an appeal to diagnostic reasoning will likely not help to explain away the data.
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  2. Ressentiment As Morally Disclosive Posture? Conceptual Issues from a Psychological Point of View.Natalie Rodax, Markus Wrbouschek, Katharina Hametner, Sara Paloni, Nora Ruck & Leonard Brixel - 2021 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology:1-17.
    In psychological research, ressentiment is alluded to as a negative emotional response directed at social groups that are mostly marked as ‘inferior others’. However, conceptual work on this notion is sorely missing. In our conceptual proposal, we use the notion of ‘moral emotions’ as a starting point: typically referred to as “other-condemning” moral emotions (Haidt), psychologists have loosely conceptualised anger, contempt and disgust as a set of negative emotions that have distinct elicitors and involve affective responses to sanction moral misconduct (...)
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  3. Implementing conceptual engineering: lessons from social movements.Carme Isern-Mas - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Communication strategies to shape public opinion can be applied to the philosophical program of conceptual engineering. I propose to look for answers to the implementation challenge for conceptual engineering on similar challenges that arise in other contexts, such as that of social movements. I claim that conceptual engineering is successfully practiced in other areas with direct consequences on the political landscape, and that we can apply to philosophy what we might learn from those successful practices. With that end in mind, (...)
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  4. The meaning of ‘reasonable’: Evidence from a corpus-linguistic study.Lucien Baumgartner & Markus Kneer - forthcoming - In Kevin P. Tobia (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Jurisprudence. Cambridge University Press.
    The reasonable person standard is key to both Criminal Law and Torts. What does and does not count as reasonable behavior and decision-making is frequently deter- mined by lay jurors. Hence, laypeople’s understanding of the term must be considered, especially whether they use it predominately in an evaluative fashion. In this corpus study based on supervised machine learning models, we investigate whether laypeople use the expression ‘reasonable’ mainly as a descriptive, an evaluative, or merely a value-associated term. We find that (...)
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  5. Debunking Concepts.Matthieu Queloz - forthcoming - Midwest Studies in Philosophy.
    Genealogies of belief have dominated recent philosophical discussions of genealogical debunking at the expense of genealogies of concepts, which has in turn focused attention on genealogical debunking in an epistemological key. As I argue in this paper, however, this double focus encourages an overly narrow understanding of genealogical debunking. First, not all genealogical debunking can be reduced to the debunking of beliefs—concepts can be debunked without debunking any particular belief, just as beliefs can be debunked without debunking the concepts in (...)
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  6. Millikan’s consistency testers and the cultural evolution of concepts.Nicholas Shea - 2023 - Evolutionary Linguistic Theory 5 (1):79-101.
    Ruth Millikan has hypothesised that human cognition contains ‘consistency testers’. Consistency testers check whether different judgements a thinker makes about the same subject matter agree or conflict. Millikan’s suggestion is that, where the same concept has been applied to the world via two routes, and the two judgements that result are found to be inconsistent, that makes the thinker less inclined to apply those concepts in those ways in the future. If human cognition does indeed include such a capacity, its (...)
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  7. Normative concepts.Matti Eklund - forthcoming - In David Copp & Connie Rosati (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Metaethics.
  8. Editorial Introduction: Indigenous Philosophies of Consciousness.Radek Trnka & Radmila Lorencova - 2023 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (5):99-102.
    Indigenous understandings of consciousness represent an important inspiration for scientific discussions about the nature of consciousness. Despite the fact that Indigenous concepts are not outputs of a research driven by rigorous, scientific methods, they are of high significance, because they have been formed by hundreds of years of specific routes of cultural evolution. The evolution of Indigenous cultures proceeded in their native habitat. The meanings that emerged in this process represent adaptive solutions that were optimal in the given environmental and (...)
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  9. Variability in Cultural Understandings of Consciousness: A Call for Dialogue with Native Psychologies.Radmila Lorencova & Radek Trnka - 2023 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (5):232-254.
    Investigation of Indigenous concepts and their meanings is highly inspirational for contemporary science because these concepts represent adaptive solutions in various environmental and social milieus. Past research has shown that conceptualizations of consciousness can vary widely between cultural groups from different geographical regions. The present study explores variability among a few of the thousands of Indigenous cultural understandings of consciousness. Indigenous concepts of consciousness are often relational and inseparable from environmental and religious concepts. Furthermore, this exploration of variability reveals the (...)
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  10. The Hypothesis of Nonverbal Continuum: Meaning as an Innate Capacity to Interpret? (in Lithuanian).Mindaugas Gilaitis - 2014 - Problemos:29-38.
    This paper is dedicated to a critical discussion of the logical-philosophical conceptions of language that are presented in Rolandas Pavilionis’ book Language. Logic. Philosophy, its primary focus being an analysis of Pavilionis’ hypothesis of meaning as nonverbal continuous system. The paper consists of two parts. Two types of theories of meaning are distinguished and an analysis of the discussed conceptions of natural languages is proposed in the first, analytic, part of the paper: assumptions that are relevant for the philosophical semantics (...)
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  11. A fogalmak dialektikája.Sándor Szigetvári - 1981 - Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.
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  12. Funkcjonowanie pojęć u afatyków z zaburzeniami nazywania.Anna Bolewska - 1983 - [Warsaw]: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego.
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  13. Noēmosynē kai phylo: ho sexismos stis epistēmonikes idees gia tis gnōstikes ikanotētes.Dēmētra Katē - 1990 - Athēna: Ekdoseis Odysseas.
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  14. Kotoba konseputo jiten =.Shōichi Watanabe (ed.) - 1992 - Tōkyō: Daiichi Hōki.
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  15. Si wei fa sheng xue: cong dong wu si wei dao ren di si wei.Hao Zhang - 1994 - Beijing: Xin hua shu dian jing xiao.
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  16. The Space of Motivations, Experience, and the Categorial Given.Jacob Rump - forthcoming - In Daniele De Santis & Danilo Manca (eds.), Wilfrid Sellars and Phenomenology: Intersections, Encounters, Oppositions. Athens, Ohio, USA: Ohio University Press.
    This paper outlines an Husserlian, phenomenological account of the first stages of the acquisition of empirical knowledge in light of some aspects of Wilfrid Sellars’ critique of the myth of the given. The account offered accords with Sellars’ in the view that epistemic status is attributed to empirical episodes holistically and within a broader normative context, but disagrees that such holism and normativity are accomplished only within the linguistic and conceptual confines of the space of reasons, and rejects the limitation (...)
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  17. Mind as Metaphor: A Defence of Mental Fictionalism.Adam Toon - 2023 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    This book develops a new approach to the mind called mental fictionalism. The key idea behind this approach is that the mind is a useful fiction. The book begins with our ordinary conception of the mind (known as folk psychology). At present, the dominant interpretation of folk psychology sees it as an attempt to describe our inner machinery (a view the author calls Cartesianism). The representational theory of mind (or representationalism) argues that our folk theory is true, and that our (...)
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  18. Concepts as Plug & Play Devices.Nicholas Shea - 2022 - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 378:20210353.
    Research on concepts has focused on categorization. Categorization starts with a stimulus. Equally important are episodes that start with a thought. We engage in thinking to draw out new consequences from stored information, or to work out how to act. Each of the concepts out of which thought is constructed provides access to a large body of stored information. Access is not always just a matter of retrieving a stored belief (semantic memory). Often it depends on running a simulation. Simulation (...)
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  19. Vie de concepts : le vocabulaire philosophique au Japon.Romaric Jannel - 2015 - A L'Épreuve 2.
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  20. Defending Moderate De Se Skepticism.Henry Clarke - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (2):661-677.
    Moderate skepticism about de se thought accepts that there is a kind of mental state which is about the thinker and is psychologically indispensable for intentional action, but rejects the claim that this kind employs an indexical way of referring. Morgan (2021) has proposed an explanatory argument meant to show that the psychological kind does employ an indexical way of referring to the thinker, on the basis of the special connection between these thoughts and the use of the first-person pronoun (...)
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  21. Studies in No-Self Physicalism.Feng Ye - 2023 - Springer Nature Singapore.
    This book demonstrates how a radical version of physicalism (‘No-Self Physicalism’) can offer an internally coherent and comprehensive philosophical worldview. It first argues that a coherent physicalist should explicitly treat a cognitive subject merely as a physical thing and should not vaguely assume an amorphous or even soul-like subject or self. This approach forces the physicalist to re-examine traditional core philosophical notions such as truth, analyticity, modality, apriority because our traditional understandings of them appear to be predicated on a cognitive (...)
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  22. Die globale Denkgestalt: Grundriss eines Universalschemas zur vereinheitlichten Darstellung von Prozessen: Anwendungsbeispiel, die öffentliche Debatte über die Kernenergie in Deutschland.Peter Hollitzer - 2011 - [München]: Literareon.
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  23. Defending Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering.Matthieu Queloz - forthcoming - Analysis.
    In this paper, I respond to three critical notices of The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering, written by Cheryl Misak, Alexander Prescott-Couch, and Paul Roth, respectively. After contrasting genealogical conceptual reverse-engineering with conceptual reverse-engineering, I discuss pragmatic genealogy’s relation to history. I argue that it would be a mistake to understand pragmatic genealogy as a fiction (or a model, or an idealization) as opposed to a form of historical explanation. That would be to rely on precisely the (...)
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  24. Foreword to the Middle Way Philosophy Series.Iain McGilchrist - 2022 - In Robert M. Ellis (ed.), Absolutization: The Source of Dogma, Repression, and Conflict. Equinox Publishing.
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  25. Briefly, “What are concepts?” and the handmaiden of colonialism again.Terence Rajivan Edward - manuscript
    This paper makes two criticisms of the book Key Concepts in Social and Cultural Anthropology, by Nigel Rapport and Joanna Overing. The second criticism is that they do not acknowledge the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges as the conceiver of the fictional Chinese encyclopaedia. What they say raises the worry that anthropologists have not moved on much from being the handmaiden of colonialism.
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  26. Beyond essentialist fallacies: Fine‐tuning ideology critique of appeals to biological sex differences.Rebekka Hufendiek - 2020 - Journal of Social Philosophy 53 (4):494-511.
    Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.
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  27. Conceptos, flexibilidad semántica y caracterizaciones asociativas.Mariela Aguilera - 2015 - In Mariela Aguilera, Laura Danón, Carolina Scotto & Elisabeth Camp (eds.), Conceptos, lenguaje y cognición. Editorial Universidad Nacional de Córdoba.
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  28. Conceptos lógicos y caracterizaciones asociativas.Elisabeth Camp - 2015 - In Mariela Aguilera, Laura Danón, Carolina Scotto & Elisabeth Camp (eds.), Conceptos, lenguaje y cognición. Editorial Universidad Nacional de Córdoba.
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  29. Estados cognitivos de magnitudes analógicas y conceptos.Laura Danón - 2015 - In Mariela Aguilera, Laura Danón, Carolina Scotto & Elisabeth Camp (eds.), Conceptos, lenguaje y cognición. Editorial Universidad Nacional de Córdoba.
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  30. El requisito de generalidad y la estructura del pensamiento.Jacob Beck - 2015 - In Mariela Aguilera, Laura Danón, Carolina Scotto & Elisabeth Camp (eds.), Conceptos, lenguaje y cognición. Editorial Universidad Nacional de Córdoba.
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  31. Poniendo en marcha los pensamientos : conceptos, sistemacidad e independencia del estímulo.Elisabeth Camp - 2015 - In Mariela Aguilera, Laura Danón, Carolina Scotto & Elisabeth Camp (eds.), Conceptos, lenguaje y cognición. Editorial Universidad Nacional de Córdoba.
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  32. Conceptos, conexiones causales y conexiones normativas.Federico Castellano - 2015 - In Mariela Aguilera, Laura Danón, Carolina Scotto & Elisabeth Camp (eds.), Conceptos, lenguaje y cognición. Editorial Universidad Nacional de Córdoba.
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  33. Pensamiento y lenguaje.Daniel Kalpokas - 2015 - In Mariela Aguilera, Laura Danón, Carolina Scotto & Elisabeth Camp (eds.), Conceptos, lenguaje y cognición. Editorial Universidad Nacional de Córdoba.
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  34. Dos argumentos a favor de la dependencia del pensamiento conceptual respecto del lenguaje.José Luis Bermúdez - 2015 - In Mariela Aguilera, Laura Danón, Carolina Scotto & Elisabeth Camp (eds.), Conceptos, lenguaje y cognición. Editorial Universidad Nacional de Córdoba.
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  35. Una concepción cognitivista acerca de los conceptos.Carolina Scotto - 2015 - In Mariela Aguilera, Laura Danón, Carolina Scotto & Elisabeth Camp (eds.), Conceptos, lenguaje y cognición. Editorial Universidad Nacional de Córdoba.
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  36. Qué son los conceptos?Hans-Johann Glock - 2015 - In Mariela Aguilera, Laura Danón, Carolina Scotto & Elisabeth Camp (eds.), Conceptos, lenguaje y cognición. Editorial Universidad Nacional de Córdoba.
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  37. Conceptos, lenguaje y cognición.Mariela Aguilera, Laura Danón, Carolina Scotto & Elisabeth Camp (eds.) - 2015 - [Córdoba, Argentina]: Editorial Universidad Nacional de Córdoba.
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  38. The abstraction engine: extracting patterns in language, mind and brain.Michael D. Fortescue - 2017 - Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
    The main thesis of this book is that abstraction, far from being confined to higher forms of cognition, language and logical reasoning, has actually been a major driving force throughout the evolution of creatures with brains. It is manifest in emotive as well as rational thought. Wending its way through the various facets of abstraction, the book attempts to clarify - and relate - the often confusing meanings of the word 'abstract' that one may encounter even within the same discipline. (...)
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  39. Concetti e processi di categorizzazione.Francesco Gagliardi, Marco Cruciani & Andrea Velardi (eds.) - 2018 - Canterano (RM): Aracne editrice.
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  40. Absolutization: the source of dogma, repression, and conflict.Robert M. Ellis - 2022 - Bristol, CT: Equinox Publishing.
    This book puts forward a theory of absolutization, bringing together a multi-disciplinary understanding of this central flaw in human judgement, and what we can do about it. This approach, drawing on Buddhist thought and practice, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, embodied meaning and systems theory, offers a rigorous introduction to absolutization as the central problem addressed in Middle Way Philosophy, which is a synthetic approach developed by the author over more than twenty years in a series of books. It challenges disciplinary boundaries (...)
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  41. Foreword to the Middle Way Philosophy Series.Iain McGilchrist - 2022 - In Robert M. Ellis (ed.), Absolutization: the source of dogma, repression, and conflict. Equinox Publishing.
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  42. What Are Abstract Concepts? On Lexical Ambiguity and Concreteness Ratings.Guido Löhr - 2022 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (3):549-566.
    In psycholinguistics, concepts are considered abstract if they do not apply to physical objects that we can touch, see, feel, hear, smell or taste. Psychologists usually distinguish concrete from abstract concepts by means of so-called _concreteness ratings_. In concreteness rating studies, laypeople are asked to rate the concreteness of words based on the above criterion. The wide use of concreteness ratings motivates an assessment of them. I point out two problems: First, most current concreteness ratings test the intuited concreteness of (...)
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  43. Conceptos, contenido y cognición: una propuesta comunitarista para la determinación del contenido.Erika Torres - 2020 - Dissertation, National Autonomous University of Mexico
    La tesis aborda uno de los temas centrales en la filosofía de la mente y las ciencias cognitivas: los conceptos como unidades básicas de la cognición humana. La tesis central que se defiende es que el contenido de los conceptos es determinado parcialmente por las comunidades a las que pertenecen los sujetos cognitivos, en la medida en la que dichas comunidades guían y constriñen las interacciones entre el sistema cognitivo conceptual y el entorno del que forma conceptos. La novedad de (...)
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  44. Thinking Off Your Feet: Reply to My Critics.Michael Strevens - 2022 - Analysis 82 (2):343-353.
  45. Précis of "Thinking Off Your Feet".Michael Strevens - 2022 - Analysis 82 (2):303-306.
    Précis of "Thinking Off Your Feet".
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  46. Meanings of Pain, Volume 3: Vulnerable or Special Groups of People.Simon Van Rysewyk - 2022 - Springer.
    - First book to describe what pain means in vulnerable or special groups of people - Clinical applications described in each chapter - Provides insight into the nature of pain experience across the lifespan -/- This book, the third and final volume in the Meaning of Pain series, describes what pain means to people with pain in “vulnerable” groups, and how meaning changes pain – and them – over time. -/- Immediate pain warns of harm or injury to the person (...)
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  47. The role of language in building abstract, generalized conceptual representations of one- and two-place predicates: A comparison between adults and infants.Mohinish Shukla & Jill de Villiers - 2021 - Cognition 213 (C):104705.
    Theories of relations between language and conceptual development benefit from empirical evidence for concepts available in infancy, but such evidence is comparatively scarce. Here, we examine early representations of specific concepts, namely, sets of dynamic events corresponding either to predicates involving two variables with a reversible, asymmetric relation between them (such as the set of all events that correspond to a linguistic phrase like “a dog is pushing a car,”) or to comparatively simpler, one-variable predicates (such as the set of (...)
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  48. Nonsense: a user's guide.Manish Oza - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Many philosophers suppose that sometimes we think we are saying or thinking something meaningful when in fact we’re not saying or thinking anything at all: we are producing nonsense. But what is nonsense? An account of nonsense must, I argue, meet two constraints. The first constraint requires that nonsense can be rationally engaged with, not just mentioned. In particular, we can reason with nonsense and use it within that-clauses. An account which fails to meet this constraint cannot explain why nonsense (...)
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  49. Teleological essentialism across development.Rose David, Sara Jaramillo, Shaun Nichols & Zachary Horne - forthcoming - Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
    Do young children have a teleological conception of the essence of natural kinds? We tested this by examining how the preservation or alteration of an animal’s purpose affected children’s persistence judgments (N = 40, ages 4 - 12, Mean Age = 7.04, 61% female). We found that even when surface-level features of an animal (e.g., a bee) were preserved, if the entity’s purpose changed (e.g., the bee now spins webs), children were more likely to categorize the entity as a member (...)
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  50. Modelling Equivalent Definitions of Concepts.Daniele Porello - 2015 - In Modeling and Using Context - 9th International and Interdisciplinary Conference, {CONTEXT} 2015, Lanarca, Cyprus, November 2-6, 2015. Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 9405. pp. 506-512.
    We introduce the notions of syntactic synonymy and referential syn- onymy due to Moschovakis. Those notions are capable of accounting for fine- grained aspects of the meaning of linguistic expressions, by formalizing the Fregean distinction between sense and denotation. We integrate Moschovakis’s theory with the theory of concepts developed in the foundational ontology DOLCE, in order to enable a formal treatment of equivalence between concepts.
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