The essentialist approach to word meaning has been used to undermine the fundamental assumptions of the cognitive psychology of concepts. Essentialism assumes that a word refers to a natural kind category in virtue of category members possessing essential properties. In support of this thesis, Kripke and Putnam deploy various intuitions concerning word use under circumstances in which discoveries about natural kinds are made. Although some studies employing counterfactual discoveries and related transformations appear to vindicate essentialism, we argue that the intuitions (...) have not been investigated exhaustively. In particular, we argue that discoveries concerning the essential properties of whole categories (rather than simply of particular category members) are critical to the essentialist intuitions. The studies reported here examine such discovery contexts, and demonstrate that words and concepts are not used in accordance with essentialism. The results are, however, consistent with "representational change" views of concepts, which are broadly Fregean in their motivation. We conclude that since essentialism is not vindicated by ordinary word use, it fails to undermine the cognitive psychology of concepts. (shrink)

I develop in this paper a conception of artefacts based on L. Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblance. My approach peruses the notion of frame, which was invented in cognitive psychology as an operationisable extension of this philosophical idea. Following the metaphor of life-cycle I show how this schematic notion of frame may be filled with the content relevant for artefacts if we consider them from the point of view of their histories. The resulting conception of artefacts provides a new insight (...) into the current debate on artefact categorisation. (shrink)

[This is an earlier (1997), much longer and more detailed version of my entry on LOTH in the _Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy_] The Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOTH) is an empirical thesis about thought and thinking. For their explication, it postulates a physically realized system of representations that have a combinatorial syntax (and semantics) such that operations on representations are causally sensitive only to the syntactic properties of representations. According to LOTH, thought is, roughly, the tokening of a representation that (...) has a syntactic (constituent) structure with an appropriate semantics. Thinking thus consists in syntactic operations defined over representations. Most of the arguments for LOTH derive their strength from their ability to explain certain empirical phenomena like productivity, systematicity of thought and thinking. (shrink)

The present paper is an attempt at the investigation of the nature of polarity contrast in natural languages. Truth conditions for natural language sentences are incomplete unless they include a proper definition of the conditions under which they are false. It is argued that the tertium non datur principle of classical bivalent logical systems is empirically invalid for natural languages: falsity cannot be equated with non-truth. Lacking a direct intuition about the conditions under which a sentence is false, we need (...) an independent foundation of the concept of falsity. The solution I offer is a definition of falsity in terms of the truth of a syntactic negation of the sentence. A definition of syntactic negation is proposed for English. (shrink)

Glenberg's account falls short in several respects. Besides requiring clearer explication of basic concepts, his account fails to recognize the autonomous nature of perception. His account of what is remembered, and its description, is too static. His strictures against connectionist modeling might be overcome by combining the notions of psychological space and principled learning in an embodied and situated network.

This thesis comprises three main chapters—each comprising one relatively standalone paper. The unifying theme is fragmentalism about truth, which is the view that the predicate “true” either expresses distinct concepts or expresses distinct properties. -/- In Chapter 1, I provide a formal development of alethic pluralism. Pluralism is the view that there are distinct truth properties associated with distinct domains of subject matter, where a truth property satisfies certain truth-characterizing principles. On behalf of pluralists, I propose an account of logic (...) and semantics that shows how they can answer central conceptual and logical challenges for their view. -/- In Chapter 2, I motivate and develop a modal account of propositions on the basis of an iterative conception of propositions, where the modality is logico-mathematical. The modal account of propositions takes the conception to motivate an inherently potential hierarchy of propositions. I show that the account helps provide satisfying solutions to the intensional paradoxes of Russell-Myhill, Kaplan, and Prior. -/- In Chapter 3, I propose that “true” is polysemous. I suggest that “true” is initially polysemous between correspondence truth and disquotational truth, and further polysemous between the meanings corresponding to the subconcepts of the concept truth generated by the indefinite extensibility of that concept. I show that the proposal provides satisfying solutions to the semantic paradoxes. (shrink)

Self-knowledge is knowledge of one’s own states (or processes) in an indexical mode of presentation. The philosophical debate is concentrating on mental states (or processes). If we characterize self-knowledge by natural language sentences, the most adequate utterance has a structure like “I know that I am in mental state M”. This common sense characterization has to be developed into an adequate description. In this investigation we will tackle two questions: (i) What precisely is the phenomenon referred to by “self-knowledge” and (...) how can we adequately describe a form of self-knowledge which we might realistically enjoy? (ii) Can we have self-knowledge given the fact that the meaning of some words which we utter depends on the environment or the speech community? The theory we defend argues that we have to distinguish the public meaning of utterances, on the one hand, and the mental representations which are constituting a mental state of an individual, on the other. Self-knowledge should be characterized on the level of mental representations while the semantics of utterances self-attributing mental states should be treated separately. Externalism is only true for the public meaning of utterances but not for beliefs and other mental states including self-knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that an existing theory of concepts called dynamic frame theory, although not developed with that purpose in mind, allows for the precise formulation of a number of problems associated with induction from a single instance. A key role is played by the distinction we introduce between complete and incomplete dynamic frames, for incomplete frames seem to be very elegant candidates for the format of the background knowledge used in induction from a single instance. Furthermore, we (...) show how dynamic frame theory provides the terminology to discuss the justification and the fallibility of incomplete frames. In the Appendix, we give a formal account of incomplete frames and the way these lead to induction from a single instance. (shrink)

Drawing on the results of modem psychology and cognitive science we suggest that the traditional theory of concepts is no longer tenable, and that the alternative account proposed by Kuhn may now be seen to have independent empirical support quite apart from its success as part of an account of scientific change. We suggest that these mechanisms can also be understood as special cases of general cognitive structures revealed by cognitive science. Against this background, incommensurability is not an insurmountable obstacle (...) to accepting Kuhn's position, as many philosophers of science still believe. Rather it becomes a natural consequence of cognitive structures that appear in all human beings. (shrink)