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For a more detailed account of these theories, see Chap. 4 of Machery's book. Gregory Murphy's splendid text provides another comprehensive account. See Murphy (2002).
This has frequently been emphasized by Jerry Fodor and his associates. See, Fodor (2008).
Many philosophers are adherents of this view, and so are a number of psychologists, including Susan Carey, Alison Gopnik, and Zenon Pylyshyn. Here, for example, is a relevant passage from Carey’s wonderful new book: “Concepts are units of thought, the constituents of beliefs and theories….” (Carey 2009, p. 5). And here is another: “Concepts are the units of thought—the building blocks of knowledge” (p. 498). Carey relies on this assumption heavily in various parts of the book.
Evidently many people find it quite plausible that concepts are the constituents of thoughts. Why is this so? In part, the answer is that concepts have logical properties that are congruent with the logical properties of thoughts: for example, the singular concept the mother of Oedipus and the predicate concept was a queen have just the right properties to explain the logical properties of the thought The mother of Oedipus was a queen. Also, they have just the right truth-conditional semantic properties to explain the truth conditions of thoughts. To continue with the example, the mother of Oedipus refers to the mother of Oedipus, and was a queen denotes women who have been queens. These facts can be used to explain why the thought The mother of Oedipus was a queen is true just in case the woman who gave birth to Oedipus was once a queen.
See, e.g., Fodor (1998), especially Chap. 5.
In a symposium on Machery’s book which took place on March 5, 2009 at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. As far as I know, Malt’s very interesting remarks have not been published.
As the reader will recognize, I am here adapting an objection to descriptional theories of the meanings of proper names that was originally put forward by Kripke. See Saul A. Kripke (1980).
Smith (1996).
This paper is based on my contribution to a symposium on Machery’s book at the 2009 meeting of the Canadian Philosophical Association. I have been helped considerably in preparing the present version of the paper by Machery’s reply to the earlier version.
References
Carey, S. (2009). The origin of concepts (p. 5). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1998). Concepts: Where cognitive science went wrong. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fodor, J. A. (2008). LOT 2: The language of thought revisited. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kripke, S. A. (1980). Naming and necessity (pp. 61–63). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Machery, E. (2009). Doing without concepts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Murphy, G. (2002). The big book of concepts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Smith, E. E., Jonides, J., & Koeppe, R. A. (1996). Dissociating verbal and spatial working memory using PET. Cerebral Cortex, 6, 11–20.
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Edouard Machery (2009). All citations in the text refer to pages of this book.
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Hill, C.S. I love Machery’s book, but love concepts more. Philos Stud 149, 411–421 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9528-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9528-x