Conceptual Change

Intellectual progress involves forming a more accurate picture of the world. But it also figuring out which concepts to use for theorizing about the world. Bayesian epistemology has had much to say about the former aspect of our cognitive lives, but little if at all about the latter. I outline a framework for formulating questions about conceptual change in a broadly Bayesian framework. By enriching the resources of Epistemic Utility Theory with a more expansive conception of epistemic value, I offer (...) a picture of our cognitive economy on which adopting new conceptual tools can sometimes be epistemically rational. (shrink)

Cognitive science has been beset for thirty years by foundational disputes about the nature and extension of cognition—e.g. whether cognition is necessarily representational, whether cognitive processes extend outside the brain or body, and whether plants or microbes have them. Whereas previous philosophical work aimed to settle these disputes, I aim to understand what conception of cognition scientists could share given that they disagree so fundamentally. To this end, I develop a number of variations on traditional conceptual explication, and defend a (...) novel explication of cognition called the sensitive management hypothesis. -/- Since expert judgments about the extension of “cognition” vary so much, I argue that there is value in explication that accurately models the variance in judgments rather than taking sides or treating that variance as noise. I say of explications that accomplish this that they are ecumenically extensionally adequate. Thus, rather than adjudicating whether, say, plants can have cognitive processes like humans, an ecumenically adequate explication should classify these cases differently: human cognitive processes as paradigmatically cognitive, and plant processes as controversially cognitive. -/- I achieve ecumenical adequacy by articulating conceptual explications with parameters, or terms that can be assigned a number of distinct interpretations based on the background commitments of participants in a discourse. For example, an explication might require that cognition cause “behavior,” and imply that plant processes are cognitive or not depending on whether anything plants do can be considered “behavior.” Parameterization provides a unified treatment of embattled concepts by isolating topics of disagreement in a small number of parameters. -/- I incorporate these innovations into an account on which cognition is the “sensitive management of organismal behavior.” The sensitive management hypothesis is ecumenically extensionally adequate, accurately classifying a broad variety of cases as paradigmatically or controversially cognitive phenomena. I also describe an extremely permissive version of the sensitive management hypothesis, arguing that it has the potential to explain several features of cognitive scientific discourse, including various facts about the way cognitive scientists ascribe representations to cognitive systems. (shrink)

ABSTRACTI defend the view that aspect-perception – seeing as a duck, or a face as courageous – typically involves concept-application. Seemingly obvious, this is contested by Avner Baz: ‘aspects ma...

Two currently much discussed views about truth, truth pluralism and truth relativism, are found in Sellars’s writings. I show that his motivations for adoping these views are interestingly different from those shared by most of their recent advocates. First, I explain how Sellars comes to embrace a version of truth pluralism. I argue that his version overcomes a difficulty confronting pluralists, albeit at a serious cost. Then I argue that Sellars’s truth pluralism isn’t motivated by his interest in domains of (...) discourse beyond the “matter-of-factual.” Rather, the key to his truth pluralism, his analysis of truth as “semantical assertibility,” is motivated by the same consideration that leads him to adopt truth relativism. This is his interest in applying semantic notions to discourse that embodies conceptual structures other than ours. Despite their common motivation, I conclude that Sellars’s relativism is independent of, and indeed stands in tension with, the analysis of truth that underlies his pluralism. (shrink)

Concepts stand at the centre of human cognition. We use concepts in categorizing objects and events in the world, in reasoning and action, and in social interaction. It is therefore not surprising that the study of concepts constitutes a central area of research in philosophy and psychology, yet only recently have the two disciplines developed greater interaction. Recent experiments in psychology that test the role of concepts in categorizing and reasoning have found a great deal of variation, across individuals and (...) cultures, in categorization behaviour. Meanwhile, philosophers of language and mind have investigated the semantic properties of concepts, and how concepts are related to linguistic meaning and linguistic communication. A key motivation behind this was the idea that concepts must be shared across individuals and cultures. With the dawn of experimental philosophy, the proposal that the experimental data from psychology lacks relevance to semantics is increasingly difficult to defend. -/- This volume brings together leading psychologists and philosophers to advance the interdisciplinary debate on the role of concepts in categorizing and reasoning, the relationship between concepts and linguistic meaning and communication, the challenges conceptual variation poses to communication, and the social and political effects of conceptual change. (shrink)

(Recipient of the 2020 Everett Mendelsohn Prize.) This article revisits the development of the protoplasm concept as it originally arose from critiques of the cell theory, and examines how the term “protoplasm” transformed from a botanical term of art in the 1840s to the so-called “living substance” and “the physical basis of life” two decades later. I show that there were two major shifts in biological materialism that needed to occur before protoplasm theory could be elevated to have equal status (...) with cell theory in the nineteenth century. First, I argue that biologists had to accept that life could inhere in matter alone, regardless of form. Second, I argue that in the 1840s, ideas of what formless, biological matter was capable of dramatically changed: going from a “coagulation paradigm” that had existed since Theophrastus, to a more robust conception of matter that was itself capable of movement and self-maintenance. In addition to revisiting Schleiden and Schwann’s original writings on cell theory, this article looks especially closely at Hugo von Mohl’s definition of the protoplasm concept in 1846, how it differed from his primordial utricle theory of cell structure two years earlier. This article draws on Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of “ontological metaphors” to show that the cell, primordial utricle, and protoplasm can be understood as material container, object, and substance, and that these overlapping distinctions help explain the chaotic and confusing early history of cell theory. (shrink)

Harold Brown has written an ambitious work, which traces the formation of concepts in individuals and cultures, examines case studies of concepts in calculus, mathematics, biology and related fields, summarises important philosophical works on the theory of concepts, and seeks to reconcile scientific realism with conceptual change. Brown considers himself a scientific realist but concedes that this very label is one that depends on a long history of concepts that came before, and may indeed be superseded as conceptual change continues. (...) Yet, concepts are not strictly relative to their contexts. ‘‘The usual claim is that truth is relative – period; and this claim assumes a non-relativized truth-concept’’ (p. 309). Crucial to his goal of developing a theory of concepts is how Brown reconciles conceptual change with objectivity. (shrink)

The rise of Bayesianism in cognitive science promises to shape the debate between nativists and empiricists into more productive forms—or so have claimed several philosophers and cognitive scientists. The present paper explicates this claim, distinguishing different ways of understanding it. After clarifying what is at stake in the controversy between nativists and empiricists, and what is involved in current Bayesian cognitive science, the paper argues that Bayesianism offers not a vindication of either nativism or empiricism, but one way to talk (...) precisely and transparently about the kinds of mechanisms and representations underlying the acquisition of psychological traits without a commitment to an innate language of thought. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper is about conceptual engineering. Specifically, it discusses a common objection to CE, which I call the Discontinuity Objection. According to the Discontinuity Objection, CE leads to problematic discontinuities in subject and/or inquiry – making it philosophically uninteresting or irrelevant. I argue that a conceptual engineer can dismiss the Discontinuity Objection by showing that the pre-engineering concept persists through the proposed changes. In other words, the Discontinuity Objection does not apply if the proposal involves identity-preserving changes. Two existing views (...) on identity-preserving changes are considered and rejected. I then argue that an identity-preserving conceptual change is one that allows the concept to continue to perform its function. A concept’s function is its job, its point and purpose, its role in a conceptual repertoire. In a slogan: Preserve a concept’s function, and you preserve the concept itself; preserve the concept, and you preserve the subject. The paper concludes by discussing some implications of this view. (shrink)

In the literature seeking to explain concepts in terms of their point, talk of ‘the point’ of concepts remains under-theorised. I propose a typology of points which distinguishes practical, evaluative, animating, and inferential points. This allows us to resolve tensions such as that between the ambition of explanations in terms of the points of concepts to be informative and the claim that mastering concepts requires grasping their point; and it allows us to exploit connections between types of points to understand (...) why they come apart, and whether they do so for problematic ideological reasons or for benignly functional reasons. (shrink)

This paper offers both exegetical and systematic reconsiderations of Donald Davidson’s view on metaphor. In his essay What Metaphors Mean, Davidson argued against the idea that metaphors have any kind of propositional content beyond the literal meaning of the relevant sentence. Apart from this negative claim, Davidson also made a constructive proposal by suggesting that metaphor’s distinctive effect is to prompt a mental state of seeing-as. These two points seem connected insofar as Davidson makes the following assumptions. First, metaphors cause (...) their distinctive effects in an a-rational way. Second, seeing-as is a nonpropositional mental state. If we side with Davidson in thinking of meaning as rational and propositional, then it follows that metaphors’ distinctive effects cannot be an instance of meaning. They have the wrong format and are brought about in the wrong way. Against this background, I distinguish a strong reading and a modest reading of Davidson’s wrong-kind objection to metaphorical meaning. By taking into account some of Davidson’s later pronouncements on the matter, this paper aims to show that Davidson did not hold on to the strong version of the wrong-kind objection. This would open up the way to conceiving of metaphorical meaning in terms of speaker’s meaning, were it not for the fact that Davidson sticks to the wrong-way objection. The two concluding sections examine the cogency of the wrong-way objection as applied to metaphorical speaker’s meaning, and offer a model for thinking about the a-rational mental causation Davidson thought metaphors exhibit. (shrink)

Examining previous discussions on how to construe the concepts of gender and race, we advocate what we call strategic conceptual engineering. This is the employment of a (possibly novel) concept for specific epistemic or social aims, concomitant with the openness to use a different concept (e.g., of race) for other purposes. We illustrate this approach by sketching three distinct concepts of gender and arguing that all of them are needed, as they answer to different social aims. The first concept serves (...) the aim of identifying and explaining gender-based discrimination. It is similar to Haslanger’s well-known account, except that rather than offering a definition of ‘woman’ we focus on ‘gender’ as one among several axes of discrimination. The second concept of gender is to assign legal rights and social recognitions, and thus is to be trans-inclusive. We argue that this cannot be achieved by previously suggested concepts that include substantial gender-related psychological features, such as awareness of social expectations. Instead, our concept counts someone as being of a certain gender solely based on the person’s self-identification with this gender. The third concept of gender serves the aim of personal empowerment by means of one’s gender identity. In this context, substantial psychological features and awareness of one’s social situation are involved. While previous accounts of concepts have focused on their role in determining extensions, we point to contexts where a concept’s role in explanation and moral reasoning can be more important. (shrink)

Susan Carey's account of Quinean bootstrapping has been heavily criticized. While it purports to explain how important new concepts are learned, many commentators complain that it is unclear just what bootstrapping is supposed to be or how it is supposed to work. Others allege that bootstrapping falls prey to the circularity challenge: it cannot explain how new concepts are learned without presupposing that learners already have those very concepts. Drawing on discussions of concept learning from the philosophical literature, this article (...) develops a detailed interpretation of bootstrapping that can answer the circularity challenge. The key to this interpretation is the recognition of computational constraints, both internal and external to the mind, which can endow empty symbols with new conceptual roles and thus new contents. (shrink)

An attempt to come to grips with the problem of how we acquire new concepts or how we develop new theories. Mr. Schon builds his theory on the basis of the idea that we do deal with new situations, or with old situations in new ways, and that we can do so only in terms of "old" theories—concepts which apply literally to other situations. He argues that we do so by "displacing" such concepts, using them as metaphors or projective models (...) for the new situation. This displacement both yields new concepts and conserves old assumptions uncritically. Mr. Schon devotes much attention to the role and nature of the metaphorical use of concepts, yet he fails to develop an explicit theory of their literal use.—K. P. F. (shrink)

The history of concepts is relevant in philosophy because conceptual distinctions fundamentally shape cognition. Because these conceptual distinctions are deeply entrenched in our way of thinking, we are not usually aware of this influence. How we view the world depends crucially on the concepts we have. These concepts, however, are the products of their history. Following Herbart, Gustav Teichmüller viewed philosophy as the systematic analysis and refinement of concepts. Refining concepts in such a way allows us to make new distinctions, (...) or to transform or abandon old ones. In contrast to Herbart, Teichmüller emphasized that this process presupposes detailed historical studies. This does not mean, however, that Teichmüller embraced a kind of historicism---the view that philosophy and its history are one and the same thing. On the contrary, he derogatorily referred to such a view as "historical psychology". Rather, the history of concepts in Teichmüller's sense has to be understood as a history of problems which are reflected in conceptual distinctions. This means that the history of concepts, which brings to light explicit and implicit distinctions, can be applied as a kind of hermeneutics of world views---as the basis on which we can systematically reconstruct concepts in a new light. It is the aim of this presentation to unfold such an understanding of the history of concepts in view of Teichmüller's contribution to it. (shrink)

Concepts are widely agreed to be the basic constituents of thought. Amongst philosophers and psychologists, however, the question of how concepts are structured has been a longstanding problem and a locus of disagreement. I draw on recent work describing how representational content is ascribed to populations of neurons to develop a novel solution to this problem. Because disputes over the structure of concepts often reflect divergent explanatory goals, I begin by arguing for a set of six criteria that a good (...) theory ought to accommodate. These criteria address philosophical concerns related to content, reference, scope, publicity, and compositionality, and psychological concerns related to categorization phenomena and neural plausibility. Next, I evaluate a number of existing theoretical approaches in relation to these six criteria. I consider classical views that identify concepts with definitions, similarity-based views that identify concepts with prototypes or exemplars, theory-based views that identify concepts with explanatory schemas, and atomistic views that identify concepts with unstructured mental symbols that enter into law-like relations with their referents. I conclude that none of these accounts can satisfactorily accommodate all of the criteria. I then describe the theory of representational content that I employ to motivate a novel account of concept structure. I briefly defend this theory against competitors, and I describe how it can be scaled from the level of basic perceptual representations to the level of highly complex conceptual representations. On the basis of this description, I contend that concepts are structured dynamically through sets of transformations of single source representation, and that the content of a given concept specifies the set of potential transformations it can enter into. I conclude by demonstrating that the ability of this account to meet all of the criteria introduced beforehand. I consider objections to my views throughout. (shrink)

New concepts are constantly being introduced into our thinking. _Conceptual Systems_ explores how these new concepts are entered into our systems along with sufficient continuity with older ideas to ensure understanding. The encyclopedic breadth of this text highlights the many different aspects and disciplines that together present an insightful view into the various theories of concepts. Harold Brown, a reputable author in the philosophy of science examines several historically influential theories of concepts as well as presenting a clear view on (...) the general theory of conceptual change. Case studies discuss examples of conceptual change in the history of physics including the move in seventeenth century physics from Galileo to Descates to Newton; and the conceptual framework of the 'standard model' in the late twentieth century high-energy physics. The key central themes in the philosophy of science that are explored in detail in this enormous book make it an essential read for academics in this field. (shrink)

New concepts are constantly being introduced into our thinking. _Conceptual Systems_ explores how these new concepts are entered into our systems along with sufficient continuity with older ideas to ensure understanding. The encyclopedic breadth of this text highlights the many different aspects and disciplines that together present an insightful view into the various theories of concepts. Harold Brown, a reputable author in the philosophy of science examines several historically influential theories of concepts as well as presenting a clear view on (...) the general theory of conceptual change. Case studies discuss examples of conceptual change in the history of physics including the move in seventeenth century physics from Galileo to Descates to Newton; and the conceptual framework of the 'standard model' in the late twentieth century high-energy physics. The key central themes in the philosophy of science that are explored in detail in this enormous book make it an essential read for academics in this field. (shrink)

In her recent (2009) book, The Origins of Concepts, Susan Carey argues that what she calls ‘Quinean Bootstrapping’ and processes of analogy in children show that the expressive power of a mind can be increased in ways that refute Jerry Fodor's (1975, 2008) ‘Mad Dog’ view that all concepts are innate. I argue that it is doubtful any evidence about the manifestation of concepts in children will bear upon the logico-semantic issues of expressive power. Analogy and bootstrapping may be ways (...) to bring about the former, but only by presupposing the very expressive powers Carey is claiming they explain. Analogies must be understood, and bootstrapping involves confirmation of hypotheses already expressible; otherwise they can't select among an infinitude of hypotheses compatible with the finite data the child has encountered, a fact rendered vivid by Goodman's ‘grue’ paradox and Chomsky's poverty of stimulus argument. The problems have special application to minds, since there is no reason to expect a child's concepts to be ‘projectible’ or to correspond to mind-independent natural kinds. I conclude with an ecumenical view that concepts are reasonably regarded as both innate and often learned, and that what is learned can in fact increase what really concerns Carey, the functioning psychological expressive power of the child, even if it leaves untouched what concerns Fodor, the semantic expressive power. Less ecumenically: maybe Fodor (2008) miscast the debate, and the real issue that bothers people concerns not nativism, but an issue on which Carey and Fodor surprisingly agree, his conceptual Atomism, or the view that all mono-morphemic concepts are primitive and unanalyzable. The issue deserves further discussion independently of Mad-doggery. (shrink)

A theoretical term gets its meaning from a set of meaning-constitutive or 'analytic' sentences of the relevant theory. The meanings of theoretical terms may change when the theories change. After a discussion of Kant and Frege, I propose a broadly Quinean view of analyticity, without adopting Quine's meaning skepticism. A sentence of a given theory in a certain language is called analytic if revising the theory so that this sentence is lost entails the abandonment of the given linguistic (alternatively, of (...) the given theoretical) framework. This solution to the problem of defining analyticity is rooted in intuitive judgements of the members of a linguistic community about the identity of languages or theories. (shrink)

In contrast to symbolic or associationist representations, I advocate a third form of representing information that employs geometrical structures. I argue that this form is appropriate for modelling concept learning. By using the geometrical structures of what I call conceptual spaces, I define properties and concepts. A learning model that shows how properties and concepts can be learned in a simple but naturalistic way is then presented. I also discuss the advantages of the geometric approach over the symbolic and associationist (...) traditions. (shrink)

A theory of how concept formation begins is presented that accounts for conceptual activity in the first year of life, shows how increasing conceptual complexity comes about, and predicts the order in which new types of information accrue to the conceptual system. In a compromise between nativist and empiricist views, it offers a single domain-general mechanism that redescribes attended spatiotemporal information into an iconic form. The outputs of this mechanism consist of types of spatial information that we know infants attend (...) to in the first months of life. These primitives form the initial basis of concept formation, allow explicit preverbal thought, such as recall, inferences, and simple mental problem solving, and support early language learning. The theory details how spatial concepts become associated with bodily feelings of force and trying. It also explains why concepts of emotions, sensory concepts such as color, and theory of mind concepts are necessarily later acquisitions because they lack contact with spatial descriptions to interpret unstructured internal experiences. Finally, commonalities between the concepts of preverbal infants and nonhuman primates are discussed. (shrink)

This thesis aims to develop a psychologically plausible account of concepts by integrating key insights from philosophy (on the metaphysical basis for concept possession) and psychology (on the mechanisms underlying concept acquisition). I adopt an approach known as informational atomism, developed by Jerry Fodor. Informational atomism is the conjunction of two theses: (i) informational semantics, according to which conceptual content is constituted exhaustively by nomological mind–world relations; and (ii) conceptual atomism, according to which (lexical) concepts have no internal structure. I (...) argue that informational semantics needs to be supplemented by allowing content-constitutive rules of inference (“meaning postulates”). This is because the content of one important class of concepts, the logical terms, is not plausibly informational. And since, it is argued, no principled distinction can be drawn between logical concepts and the rest, the problem that this raises is a general one. An immediate difficulty is that Quine’s classic arguments against the analytic/synthetic distinction suggest that there can be no principled basis for distinguishing content-constitutive rules from the rest. I show that this concern can be overcome by taking a psychological approach: there is a fact of the matter as to whether or not a particular inference is governed by a mentally-represented inference rule, albeit one that analytic philosophy does not have the resources to determine. I then consider the implications of this approach for concept acquisition. One mechanism underlying concept acquisition is the development of perceptual detectors for the objects that we encounter. I investigate how this might work, by drawing on recent ideas in ethology on ‘learning instincts’, and recent insights into the neurological basis for perceptual learning. What emerges is a view of concept acquisition as involving a complex interplay between innate constraints and environmental input. This supports Fodor’s recent move away from radical concept nativism: concept acquisition requires innate mechanisms, but does not require that concepts themselves be innate. (shrink)

In contrast to symbolic or associationist representations, I advocate a third form of representing information that employs geometrical structures. I argue that this form is appropriate for modelling concept learning. By using the geometrical structures of what I call conceptual spaces, I define properties and concepts. A learning model that shows how properties and concepts can be learned in a simple but naturalistic way is then presented. I also discuss the advantages of the geometric approach over the symbolic and associationist (...) traditions. (shrink)

My dissertation is concerned with philosophical problems that attend to our capacity to acquire concepts. Philosophical problems with learning are not new, however, they are especially acute when applied to concept acquisition. What I hope to show is that we can offer an account of concepts which at once overcomes our concerns about first concept acquisition and is nevertheless compatible with the view that concepts are acquired through rational learning mechanisms. Towards this end I consider both cognitivist and noncognitivist theories (...) of concept acquisition. Fodor's noncognitivism fails, I argue, because it requires an untenable nativism, whereas I suggest that Block's theory of concepts makes rational learning impossible. ;To solve this problem, I argue that concepts can be split into two component parts, an ontological classifier and a recognitional criterion. The OC is a kind of sortal term that designates the kind classification for a given concept, what sort of thing it refers to. The RC gives us information relative to our environment that enables us to pick out the referent of the concept. ;But how do we acquire concepts of this type? If every concept of a thing requires a kind of sortal, we would face a regress if we tried to claim that all concepts are learned. However, it seems clear that at least some concepts aren't learned. Our first cognitive steps, I maintain, are a function of the innate classificatory schema that children appear to possess very early in infancy. Cognitive psychologists have begun to show that infants and very young children appear to make specific assumptions about the nature of individual objects and kinds that populate their world. Children have concepts of objects and causes, of particular relations amongst kinds and their numbers, and as such make inferences about what can be expected from their future interactions with those objects. These early sortal classifications correspond very closely to the sorts of ontological classifiers adults employ in making kind determinations. I argue that these classifiers work in combination with the child's rudimentary perceptual or recognitional skills to outline individuals or substances as of various types. Construals of individual type classifications can be bound to other identificatory criteria to form new classifiers and hence new possibilities for rational concept acquisition. (shrink)

In my thesis, I argue that the philosophical and psychological study of concept-learning mechanisms has failed to take the diversity of learning mechanisms into account, and that consequently researchers should embrace a new way of thinking about concept learning: `concept learning' as a class of psychological mechanisms is not a natural kind lending itself to unified study and should be eliminated. To arrive at this, I discuss several concept-learning models that attempt to overcome Jerry Fodor's challenge and base my judgement (...) on the plurality of feasible concept-learning mechanisms and on criteria for theoretical notions from the philosophy of science. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to the topic `concept learning' and highlights its importance as a research topic in the study of the mind. I argue that a mechanistic understanding of the shape of concept learning is best suited to explain the phenomena, in line with the recent resurgence of mechanism-based explanation in the philosophy of mind. As the main challenge to the idea that concepts can be learnt, I proceed to set up Fodor's challenge for concept learning in Chapter 2. This challenge is the idea that concepts cannot be learnt given the logically possible mechanisms of concept learning. I lay out the argumentative structure and background assumptions that support Fodor's argument, and propose to scrutinise his empirically based premise most closely in my thesis: this empirically based premise is that the only possible mechanism of concept learning is the process of forming and testing hypotheses. As replies to Fodor's challenge, I discuss Perceptual Learning, Perceptual Meaning Analysis, Quinean Bootstrapping, pattern-governed learning, joint-attentional learning, and the Syndrome-Based Sustaining Mechanism Model. I argue that almost every mechanism I discuss has some leverage against Fodors argument, suggesting that there may be a wide variety of non-hypothesis-based concept-learning mechanisms. The final chapter of my thesis, Chapter 7, takes a step back and reviews the fate of the notion of concept learning in light of the diverse set of learning mechanisms brought up in my thesis. My first and main worry is that it is questionable whether the previously discussed mechanisms of concept learning share many scientifically relevant properties that would justify seeing them as instances of the natural kind 'concept learning mechanism'. I argue that the substantiation of this worry would necessitate the elimination of 'concept learning' and 'concept-learning mechanism' as terms of the cognitive sciences. The chapter lays out the argumentative structure on which Concept Learning Eliminativism rests, along with a discussion of questions about natural kinds and pragmatics in theory construction. This is inspired by Edouard Machery's argument for the elimination of 'concept', but independent of Machery's own project. With this in place, I go on to give a conclusive argument that supports CLE, based on the claims that 'concept learning' is not a natural kind and that there are pragmatic advantages to eliminating 'concept learning'. In this final chapter, I also raise pragmatic considerations that support the argument for CLE, and propose new research directions that could pro t from the eliminativist position. (shrink)

A theory of conceptual development must provide an account of the innate representational repertoire, must characterize how these initial representations differ from the adult state, and must provide an account of the processes that transform the initial into mature representations. In Carey, 2009 (The Origin of Concepts), I defend three theses: 1) the initial state includes rich conceptual representations, 2) nonetheless, there are radical discontinuities between early and later developing conceptual systems, 3) Quinean bootstrapping is one learning mechanism that underlies (...) the creation of new representational resources, enabling such discontinuity. I also claim that the theory of conceptual development developed in The Origin of Concepts addresses two of Fodor's challenges to cognitive science; namely, to show how learning could possibly lead to an increase in expressive power and to defeat Mad Dog Nativism, the thesis that all concepts lexicalized as mono-morphemic words are innate. A recent article by Georges Rey (Mind & Language, 29.2, 2014) argues that my responses to Fodor's challenges fail, because, he says, I fail to distinguish concept possession from manifestation and I do not confront Goodman's new riddle of induction. My response is to show that, and how, new primitives in a language of thought can be learned, that there are easy routes and hard ones to doing so, and that characterizing the learning mechanisms involved is the key to understanding both concept possession and constraints on induction. (shrink)

The alternative offered by Professor Stemmer to cognitivist theories of the process whereby general terms acquire their meaning is criticised in its turn on the grounds that it presents an oversimplified view of the complex processes involved in the acquisition of word meanings.

In this path-breaking work, Paul Thagard draws on history and philosophy of science, cognitive psychology, and the field of artificial intelligence to develop a ...