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)

This paper aims to reassess a notion in the works of the later Husserl that is both historically important and philosophically insightful, but remains understudied, namely, that of type. In opposition to a standard reading which treats Husserl’s type presentations as pre-conceptual habits, this paper argues that these representations are a specific kind of concept. More precisely, it shows that Husserl’s account of type presentations is akin to the contemporary prototype theory of concepts. This is historically important, since the predecessor (...) of the prototype theory is usually said to be Wittgenstein. From a philosophical standpoint, the paper shows that Husserl has an innovative account of the connection between type concepts and their extension. Contrary to the standard view of extensions as sets and thus sharp entities, Husserl develops a correlationalist theory of concepts, according to which, for the specific characteristics in the structure of a concept, there are corresponding characteristics in the arrangement of its members, and vice versa. According to this theory, while sharp concepts lead to sharp extensions, vague concepts such as (proto)type concepts lead to vague extensions. The paper presents this understanding of Husserl in detail and explains its philosophical significance. (shrink)

Evidence is presented from a polyglot savant to suggest that double dissociations between linguistic and nonverbal abilities are more important than Müller's target article implies. It is also argued that the special nature of syntax makes its assimilation to other aspects of language or to nonhuman communication systems radically implausible.

Müller's review of the neuroscientific evidence undermines nativist claims for autonomous syntax and the argument from the poverty of the stimulus. Generativists will appeal to data from language acquisition, but here too there is growing evidence against the nativist position. Epigenetic naturalism, the developmental alternative to nativism, can be extended to epigenetic socionaturalism, acknowledging the importance of sociocultural processes in language and cognitive development.

The inductive category formation framework, an influential set of theories of learning in psychology and artificial intelligence, is deeply flawed. In this framework a set of necessary and sufficient features is taken to define a category. Such definitions are not functionally justified, are not used by people, and are not inducible by a learning system. Inductive theories depend on having access to all and only relevant features, which is not only impossible but begs a key question in learning. The crucial (...) roles of other cognitive processes (such as explanation and credit assignment) are ignored or oversimplified. Learning necessarily involves pragmatic considerations that can only be handled by complex cognitive processes.We provide an alternative framework for learning according to which category definitions must be based on category function. The learning system invokes other cognitive processes to accomplish difficult tasks, makes inferences, analyses and decides among potential features, and specifies how and when categories are to be generated and modified. We also examine the methodological underpinnings of the two approaches and compare their motivations. (shrink)

This paper defends the claim that pragmatic encroachment—the idea that knowledge is sensitive to the practical stakes of believing—can explain a distinctive kind of epistemic injustice: the injustice that occurs when prejudice causes someone to know less than they otherwise would. This encroachment injustice, as we call it, occurs when the threat of being met with prejudice raises the stakes for someone to rely on her belief when acting, by raising the level of evidential support required for knowledge. We explain (...) this notion of encroachment injustice, connect it to the empirical literature on implicit bias, and defend it against important objections. (shrink)

In this prcis we focus on phenomena central to the reaction against similarity-based theories that arose in the 1980s and that subsequently motivated the approach to semantic knowledge. Specifically, we consider (1) how concepts differentiate in early development, (2) why some groupings of items seem to form or coherent categories while others do not, (3) why different properties seem central or important to different concepts, (4) why children and adults sometimes attest to beliefs that seem to contradict their direct experience, (...) (5) how concepts reorganize between the ages of 4 and 10, and (6) the relationship between causal knowledge and semantic knowledge. The explanations our theory offers for these phenomena are illustrated with reference to a simple feed-forward connectionist model. The relationships between this simple model, the broader theory, and more general issues in cognitive science are discussed. (shrink)

In their exhaustive study of the cognitive operation of analogy, Hofstadter and Sander arrive at a paradox: the creative and inexhaustible production of analogies in our thought must derive from a “reminding” operation based upon the availability of the detailed totality of our experience. Yet the authors see no way that our experience can be stored in the brain in such detail nor do they see how such detail could be accessed or retrieved such that the innumerable analogical remindings we (...) experience can occur. Analogy creation, then, should not be possible. The intent here is to sharpen and deepen our understanding of the paradox, emphasizing its criticality. It will be shown that the retrieval problem has its origins in the failure of memory theory to recognize the actual dynamic structure of events. This structure is comprised of invariance laws as per J. J. Gibson, and this event “invariance structure” is exactly what supports Hofstadter and Sander’s missing mechanism for analogical reminding. Yet these structures of invariants, existing only over optical flows, auditory flows, haptic flows, etc., are equally difficult to imagine being stored in a static memory, and thus only exacerbate the problem of the storage of experience in the brain. A possible route to the solution of this dilemma, based in the radical model of Bergson, is also sketched. (shrink)

We agree with Müller's epigenetic view of evolution and ontogeny and applaud his multilevel perspective. With him, we stress the importance in ontogeny of progressive specialisation rather than prewired structures. However, we argue that he slips from “speech” to “language” and that, in seeking homologies, these two levels need to be kept separate in the analysis of evolution and ontogeny.

In this paper, I explore the implications of recent empirical research on concept representation for the philosophical enterprise of conceptual analysis. I argue that conceptual analysis, as it is commonly practiced, is committed to certain assumptions about the nature of our intuitive categorization judgments. I then try to show how these assumptions clash with contemporary accounts of concept representation in cognitive psychology. After entertaining an objection to my argument, I close by considering ways in which conceptual analysis might be altered (...) to accord better with the empirical work. (shrink)

Neurobiological models of language need a level of analysis that can account for the typical range of language phenomena. Because linguistically motivated models have been successful in explaining numerous language properties, it is premature to dismiss them as biologically irrelevant. Models attempting to unify neurobiology and linguistics need to be sensitive to both sources of evidence.

The aim of this paper is to reconcile two claims that have long been thought to be incompatible: that we compositionally determine the meaning of complex expressions from the meaning of their parts, and that prototypes are components of the meaning of lexical terms such as fish, red, and gun. Hypotheses and are independently plausible, but most researchers think that reconciling them is a difficult, if not hopeless task. In particular, most linguists and philosophers agree that is not negotiable; so (...) they tend to reject. Recently, there have been some attempts to reconcile these claims, but they all adopt an implausibly weak notion of compositionality. Furthermore, parties to this debate tend to fall into a problematic way of individuating prototypes that is too externalistic. In contrast, I propose that we can reconcile and if we adopt, instead, an internalist and pluralist conception of prototypes and a context-sensitive but strong notion of compositionality. I argue that each of this proposals is independently plausible, and that, when taken together, provide the basis for a satisfactory account of prototype compositionality. (shrink)

The meaning that expressions take on particular occasions often depends on the context in ways which seem to transcend its direct effect on context-sensitive parameters. ‘Truth-conditional pragmatics’ is the project of trying to model such semantic flexibility within a compositional truth-conditional framework. Most proposals proceed by radically ‘freeing up’ the compositional operations of language. I argue, however, that the resulting theories are too unconstrained, and predict flexibility in cases where it is not observed. These accounts fall into this position because (...) they rarely, if ever, take advantage of the rich information made available by lexical items. I hold, instead, that lexical items encode both extension and non-extension determining information. Under certain conditions, the non-extension determining information of an expression e can enter into the compositional processes that determine the meaning of more complex expressions which contain e. This paper presents and motivates a set of type-driven compositional operations that can access non-extension determining information and introduce bits of it into the meaning of complex expressions. The resulting multidimensional semantics has the tools to deal with key cases of semantic flexibility in appropriately constrained ways, making it a promising framework to pursue the project of truth-conditional pragmatics. (shrink)

A common presupposition in the concepts literature is that concepts constitute a sin- gular natural kind. If, on the contrary, concepts split into more than one kind, this literature needs to be recast in terms of other kinds of mental representation. We offer two new arguments that concepts, in fact, divide into different kinds: (a) concepts split because different kinds of mental representation, processed independently, must be posited to explain different sets of relevant phenomena; (b) concepts split because different kinds (...) of mental representation, processed independently, must be posited to explain responses to different kinds of category. Whether these arguments are sound remains an open empirical question, to be resolved by future empirical and theoretical work. (shrink)

It has been shown that Recurrent Artificial Neural Networks automatically acquire some grammatical knowledge in the course of performing linguistic prediction tasks. The extent to which such networks can actually learn grammar is still an object of investigation. However, being mostly data-driven, they provide a natural testbed for usage-based theories of language acquisition. This mini-review gives an overview of the state of the field, focusing on the influence of the theoretical framework in the interpretation of results.

A set of approximately 500 words taken from the literature on emotion was examined. The overall goal was to develop a comprehensive taxonomy of the affective lexicon, with special attention being devoted to the isolation of terms that refer to emotions. Within the taxonomy we propose, the best examples of emotion terms appear to be those that (a) refer to internal, mental conditions as opposed to physical or external ones, (b) are clear cases of stares, and (c) have affect as (...) opposed to behavior or cognition as a predominant (rather than incidental) referential focus. Relaxing one or another of these constraints yields poorer examples or nonexamples of emotions; however, this gradedness is not taken as evidence that emotions necessarily defy classical definition. (shrink)

Because Müiller fails to distinguish between two senses of the term “autonomy,” there is a danger that his results will be misinterpreted by both linguists and neuroscientists. Although he may very well have been successful in refuting one sense of autonomy, he may actually have helped to provide an explanation for the correctness of autonomy in its other sense.

Are concepts stable entities, unchanged from context to context? Or rather are they context-dependent structures, created on the fly? We argue that this does not constitute a genuine dilemma. Our main thesis is that the more a pattern of features is general and shared, the more it qualifies as a concept. Contextualists have not shown that conceptual structures lack a stable, general core, acting as an attractor on idiosyncratic information. What they have done instead is to give a contribution to (...) the comprehension of how conceptual structure organized around such a stable core can produce contextually appropriate representations on demand. (shrink)

A standard view within psychology is that there have been two important shifts in the study of concepts and that each has led to some improvements. The first shift was from the classical theory of concepts to probabilistic theories, including the prototype theory. The second shift was from probabilistic theories to theory-based theories. In this article, I critically evaluate the view that the first shift was a major advance and argue that the prototype theory suffers some of the same problems (...) that have been thought to challenge the classical theory. (shrink)

Machery (2009) has proposed that the notion of ‘concept’ ought to be eliminated from the theoretical vocabulary of psychology. I raise three questions about his argument: (1) Is there a meaningful distinction between concepts and background knowledge? (2) Do we need to discard the hybrid view? (3) Are there really categories of things in the world that are the basis for concepts? Although I argue that the answer to all three is ‘no’, I agree with Machery's conclusion that seeking a (...) single characterization of concepts will not be fruitful for understanding cognitive representations and processes. (shrink)

In our view, the way of thinking involved in insight problem solving is very close to the process involved in the understanding of an utterance, when a misunderstanding occurs. In this case, a more appropriate meaning has to be selected to resolve the misunderstanding , the default interpretation has to be dropped in order to “restructure”, to grasp another meaning which appears more relevant to the context and the speaker's intention. A new conception of unconscious, implicit thought emerges, informed by (...) relevance. In this article we support our view with experimental evidence, focusing on how a misunderstanding is formed. We have explored two problems, in which a trivial arithmetical task is represented as an insight problem and vice versa. Studying how an insight problem is formed, and not just how it is solved, may well become an important topic in the contemporary debate on thought. (shrink)

Although cognitive scientists have learned a lot about concepts, their findings have yet to be organized in a coherent theoretical framework. In addition, after twenty years of controversy, there is little sign that philosophers and psychologists are converging toward an agreement about the very nature of concepts. Doing without Concepts (Machery 2009) attempts to remedy this state of affairs. In this article, I review the main points and arguments developed at greater length in Doing without Concepts.

Recent theoretical and empirical work suggests that explanation and categorization are intimately related. This paper explores the hypothesis that explanations can help structure conceptual representations, and thereby influence the relative importance of features in categorization decisions. In particular, features may be differentially important depending on the role they play in explaining other features or aspects of category membership. Two experiments manipulate whether a feature is explained mechanistically, by appeal to proximate causes, or functionally, by appeal to a function or goal. (...) Explanation type has a significant impact on the relative importance of features in subsequent categorization judgments, with functional explanations reversing previously documented effects of [”]causal status’. The findings suggest that a feature’s explanatory importance can impact categorization, and that explanatory relationships, in addition to causal relationships, are critical to understanding conceptual representation. (shrink)

Segregated neural circuits that effect particular domain-specific behaviors can be differentiated from neuroanatomical structures implicated in many different aspects of behavior. The basal ganglionic components of circuits regulating nonlinguistic motor behavior, speech, and syntax all function in a similar manner. Hence, it is unlikely that special properties and evolutionary mechanisms are associated with the neural bases of human language.

Invariantists argue that the notion of concept in psychology should be reserved for knowledge that is retrieved in a context-insensitive manner. Contextualists argue that concepts are to be understood in terms of context-sensitive ad hoc constructions. I review the central empirical evidence for and against both views and show that their conclusions are based on a common mischaracterization of both theories. When the difference between contextualism and invariantism is properly understood, it becomes apparent that the way the question of stability (...) is currently investigated will not lead to a consensus. Instead of focusing directly on stability, we should turn our attention to other desiderata on a theory of concepts. In particular, I show that invariantism, but not contextualism, fails to account for compositionality and abstract concepts. (shrink)

I discuss Edouard Machery’s claim that philosophers and psychologists when using the term ‘concept’ are really theorizing about different things. This view is not new, but it has never been developed or defended in detail. Once spelled out, we can see that Machery is right that the psychological literature uses a different notion of concept. However, Machery fails to acknowledge that the two notions are not only compatible but complementary. This fits more with the traditional view according to which philosophers (...) and psychologists are merely interested in different aspects of the same kind. The main aim of this paper is then to show how precisely the two notions of ‘concept’ relate. Distinguishing them resolves the long-standing debate on whether concepts can be prototypes and allows me to formulate success conditions of a theory of categorization that are independent of the success conditions of a theory of concepts. (shrink)

Speaking: from Intention to Articulation Willem J. M. Levelt, 1989 (1993 paperback) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press ISBN: 0–262–12137–9(hb), 0–262–62089–8(pb)Rules for Reasoning Richard E. Nisbett (Ed.), 1993 Hillsdale, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates ISBN: 0–8058–1256–3(hb), 0–8085–1257–1 (pb)Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science Alvin I. Goldman, 1993 Cambridge, MA, MIT Press ISBN: 0–262–07153–3(hb), 0–262–57100–5(pb)Language Comprehension in Ape and Child, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, Serial No. 233, Vol. 58, Nos 3–4 Sue Savage‐Rumbaugh, Jeannine Murphy, Rose A. Sevcik, Karen E. (...) Brakke, Shelly L. Williams & Duane M. Rumbaugh, with commentary by Elizabeth Bates, and a reply by the authors, 1993 Chicago: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0–226–73542–7Language, Music and Mind Diana Raffman, 1993 Cambridge, MIT Press/Bradford Books ISBN: 0–262–18150–9Psychology of Proof Lance J. Rips, 1994 Cambridge, MA, MIT Press ISBN: 0–262–18153–3Human and Machine Thinking P. Johnson‐Laird, 1993 Hillsdale, NJ, Erlbaum ISBN: 0–8058–0921‐XIntelligent Behavior in Animals and Robots David McFarland & Thomas Bosser, 1993 Cambridge, MA and London, UK: MIT Press/ Bradford Books ISBN: 0–262–13293–1The Eye and the Mind: Reflections on Perception and the Problem of Knowledge Charles Landesman, 1993 Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers ISBN: 0–7923–2586–9The Moral Self GilG. Noam & Thomas E. Wren (Eds), in cooperation with Gertud Nunner‐Winkler & Wolfgang Edelstein, 1993 Cambridge, MA: MIT Press ISBN: 0–262–14052–1The Logic of Discovery: A Theory of the Rationality of Scientific Research Scott A. Kleiner, 1993 Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers ISBN: 0–7923–2371–8Folk Psychology and the Philosophy of Mind S.M. Christenson & D.R. Turner (Eds), 1993 Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum ISBN: 0–805–80931–7. (shrink)

In response to Casasanto, Brookshire, and Ivry, we address four points: First, we engaged in conceptual replications of Brookshire, Casasanto, and Ivry, not direct replications. Second, we did not question the validity of Brookshire et al.'s results, nor the similar findings of other researchers, but instead explained divergent findings within an integrated theoretical framework. Third, challenges to the construct of automaticity, including ours, were widespread, long before Brookshire et al.'s article. Fourth, the planned comparisons that we reported tested our theoretical (...) claims and offered strong evidence for them. (shrink)

According to grounded cognition, words whose semantics contain sensory-motor features activate sensory-motor simulations, which, in turn, interact with spatial responses to produce grounded congruency effects. Growing evidence shows these congruency effects do not always occur, suggesting instead that the grounded features in a word's meaning do not become active automatically across contexts. Researchers sometimes use this as evidence that concepts are not grounded, further concluding that grounded information is peripheral to the amodal cores of concepts. We first review broad evidence (...) that words do not have conceptual cores, and that even the most salient features in a word's meaning are not activated automatically. Then, in three experiments, we provide further evidence that grounded congruency effects rely dynamically on context, with the central grounded features in a concept becoming active only when the current context makes them salient. Even when grounded features are central to a word's meaning, their activation depends on task conditions. (shrink)