Doing Without Concepts

In Doing without Concepts, Edouard Machery argues that the dominant psychological theories of concept fail to provide a coherent framework to organize our extensive empirical knowledge about concepts. Machery proposes that to develop such a framework, drastic conceptual changes are required.

This creative collection of nonfiction books teaches students about colors, shapes, and numbers through vivid photos and stimulating text. These titles apply knowledge of counting objects, and recognizing primary colors and mathematical shapes to a real world setting for practice across the content areas. This collection includes: Around Home; At the Pond; In the Garden; and The Toy Store. (GRL ranges A-D).

Carey begins by characterizing the innate starting point for conceptual development, namely systems of core cognition. Representations of core cognition are the output of dedicated input analyzers, as with perceptual representations, but these core representations differ from perceptual representations in having more abstract contents and richer functional roles. Carey argues that the key to understanding cognitive development lies in recognizing conceptual discontinuities in which new representational systems emerge that have more expressive power than core cognition and are also incommensurate with core cognition and other earlier representational systems. Finally, Carey fleshes out Quinian bootstrapping, a learning mechanism that has been repeatedly sketched in the literature on the history and philosophy of science. She demonstrates that Quinian bootstrapping is a major mechanism in the construction of new representational resources over the course of children's cognitive development.

New essays by leading philosophers and cognitive scientists that present recent findings and theoretical developments in the study of concepts. The study of concepts has advanced dramatically in recent years, with exciting new findings and theoretical developments. Core concepts have been investigated in greater depth and new lines of inquiry have blossomed, with researchers from an ever broader range of disciplines making important contributions. In this volume, leading philosophers and cognitive scientists offer original essays that present the state-of-the-art in the study of concepts. These essays, all commissioned for this book, do not merely present the usual surveys and overviews; rather, they offer the latest work on concepts by a diverse group of theorists as well as discussions of the ideas that should guide research over the next decade. The book is an essential companion volume to the earlier Concepts: Core Readings, the definitive source for classic texts on the nature of concepts. The essays cover concepts as they relate to animal cognition, the brain, evolution, perception, and language, concepts across cultures, concept acquisition and conceptual change, concepts and normativity, concepts in context, and conceptual individuation. The contributors include such prominent scholars as Susan Carey, Nicola Clayton, Jerry Fodor, Douglas Medin, Joshua Tenenbaum, and Anna Wierzbicka. Contributors Aurore Avarguès-Weber, Eef Ameel, Megan Bang, H. Clark Barrett, Pascal Boyer, Elisabeth Camp, Susan Carey, Daniel Casasanto, Nicola S. Clayton, Dorothy L. Cheney, Vyvyan Evans, Jerry A. Fodor, Silvia Gennari, Tobias Gerstenberg, Martin Giurfa, Noah D. Goodman, J. Kiley Hamlin, James A. Hampton, Mutsumi Imai, Charles W. Kalish, Frank Keil, Jonathan Kominsky, Stephen Laurence, Gary Lupyan, Edouard Machery, Bradford Z. Mahon, Asifa Majid, Barbara C. Malt, Eric Margolis, Douglas Medin, Nancy J. Nersessian, bethany ojalehto, Anna Papafragou, Joshua M. Plotnik, Noburo Saji, Robert M. Seyfarth, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Sandra Waxman, Daniel A. Weiskopf, Anna Wierzbicka

Concepts embody our knowledge of the kinds of things there are in the world. Tying our past experiences to our present interactions with the environment, they enable us to recognize and understand new objects and events. Concepts are also relevant to understanding domains such as social situations, personality types, and even artistic styles. Yet like other phenomenologically simple cognitive processes such as walking or understanding speech, concept formation and use are maddeningly complex. Research since the 1970s and the decline of the "classical view" of concepts have greatly illuminated the psychology of concepts. But persistent theoretical disputes have sometimes obscured this progress. The Big Book of Concepts goes beyond those disputes to reveal the advances that have been made, focusing on the major empirical discoveries. By reviewing and evaluating research on diverse topics such as category learning, word meaning, conceptual development in infants and children, and the basic level of categorization, the book develops a much broader range of criteria than is usual for evaluating theories of concepts.

“Concept” in a historic and systematic perspective In his paper “What Happened to the Sense of a Concept-Word?”, Carlo Penco deals with the boundary between semantics and pragmatics and discusses some misunderstandings in the shift from the sense/reference distinction in Frege to the intension/extension distinction in semantics. Building on Fodor, Margolis and Laurence Jacob Beck defends in “Sense, Mentalese, and Ontology” the latter Fregean view on concepts by arguing that the mind-independence of Fregean senses renders them ontologically suspect in a way that mentalese symbols are not. Maria C. Amoretti explores the model of Davidson’s triangulation and its specific role in concept acquisition. In “A Critique of David Chalmers’ and Frank Jackson’s Account of Concepts” Ingo Brigandt suggests a more pragmatic approach to natural kind term meaning, arguing that the epistemic goal pursued by a term’s use is an additional semantic property. Agustin Vicente, Fernando Martinez-Manrique discuss whether this variability in the languages generates a corresponding variability in the conceptual structure of the speakers of those languages in “The Influence of Language on Conceptualization: Three Views”. The connection between “Views of Concepts and of Philosophy of Mind—From Representationalism to Contextualism” is explored by Sofia Miguens, in respect of Edmund Husserl to Jocelyn Benoist. Richard Manning argues some “Changes in View: Concepts in Experience” with the main thesis that the content of perceptual experience must be conceived as concept-involving. In “Concepts and Fat Plants” Marcello Frixione suggests that typicality effects are more plausibly the consequence of some “ecological constraints” acting on the mind. What does cognitive neuroscience contribute to our philosophical under-standing of concepts? That is the main question for Joseph B. McCaffrey in “Con-cepts in the Brain: Neuroscience, Embodiment, and Categorization”. The volume is completed by articles on the historical perspective on concept, starting with “Conceptual Distinctions and the Concept of Substance in Descartes” by Alan Nelson. “The Concept of Body in Hume’s Treatise” is examined by Miren Boehm. Lewis Powell argues the “Conceiving without Concepts: Reid vs. The Way of Ideas”. And Thomas Vinci asks: “Why the ‘Concept’ of Spaces is not a Concept for Kant”, while Sonja Schierbaum reconstructs “Ockham on Concepts of Beings”. Content and abstracts: www.protosociology.de

It's hard to conceive of a topic of more broad and personal interest than the study of the mind. In addition to its traditional investigation by the disciplines of psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience, the mind has also been a focus of study in the fields of philosophy, economics, anthropology, linguistics, computer science, molecular biology, education, and literature. In all these approaches, there is an almost universal fascination with how the mind works and how it affects our lives and our behavior. Studies of the mind and brain have crossed many exciting thresholds in recent years, and the study of mind now represents a thoroughly cross-disciplinary effort. Researchers from a wide range of disciplines seek answers to such questions as: What is mind? How does it operate? What is consciousness? This encyclopedia brings together scholars from the entire range of mind-related academic disciplines from across the arts and humanities, social sciences, life sciences, and computer science and engineering to explore the multidimensional nature of the human mind.