What is the role of language in social interaction? What does language bring to social encounters? We argue that language can be conceived of as a tool for interacting minds, enabling especially effective and flexible forms of social coordination, perspective-taking and joint action. In a review of evidence from a broad range of disciplines, we pursue elaborations of the language-as-a-tool metaphor, exploring four ways in which language is employed in facilitation of social interaction. We argue that language dramatically extends the (...) possibility-space for interaction, facilitates the profiling and navigation of joint attentional scenes, enables the sharing of situation models and action plans, and mediates the cultural shaping of interacting minds. (shrink)

Recognitional concepts have the following characteristic property: thinkers are disposed to apply them to objects merely on the basis of undergoing certain perceptual experiences. I argue that a prominent strategy for defending the existence of constitutive connections among concepts, which appeals to thinkers’ semantic-cum-conceptual intuitions, cannot be used to defend the existence of recognitional concepts. I then outline and defend an alternative argument for the existence of recognitional concepts, which appeals to certain psychological laws.

Radical Concept Nativism (RCN) is the doctrine that most of our concepts are innate. In this paper I will argue in favour of RCN by developing a speculative account of concept acquisition that has considerable nativist credentials and can be defended against the most familiar anti-nativist objections. The core idea is that we have a whole battery of hard-wired dispositions that determine how we group together objects with which we interact. In having these dispositions we are effectively committed to an (...) implicit conceptual scheme and acquiring concepts is a matter of labelling the elements of that scheme. (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 this paper I defend the view that positing analytic, constitutive connections among concepts best explains certain semantic-cum-conceptual intuitions. Jerry Fodor and Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence offer alternative explanations according to which such intuitions can be explained without positing analyticities. I argue that these alternative explanations fail. As a partial diagnosis of their failure, I suggest that critics have failed to recognize the extent to which a psychologized notion of analyticity must depart from the traditional notion of ‘truth in (...) virtue of meaning alone’. (shrink)