In cognitive psychology, concepts are those data structures that are stored in long-term memory and are used by default in human beings.

The concepts expressed by social role terms such as artist and scientist are unique in that they seem to allow two independent criteria for categorization, one of which is inherently normative. This study presents and tests an account of the content and structure of the normative dimension of these “dual character concepts.” Experiment 1 suggests that the normative dimension of a social role concept represents the commitment to fulfill the idealized basic function associated with the role. Background information can affect (...) which basic function is associated with each social role. However, Experiment 2 indicates that the normative dimension always represents the relevant commitment as an end in itself. We argue that social role concepts represent the commitments to basic functions because that information is crucial to predict the future social roles and role-dependent behavior of others. (shrink)

We propose a nonmonotonic Description Logic of typicality able to account for the phenomenon of the combination of prototypical concepts. The proposed logic relies on the logic of typicality ALC + TR, whose semantics is based on the notion of rational closure, as well as on the distributed semantics of probabilistic Description Logics, and is equipped with a cognitive heuristic used by humans for concept composition. We first extend the logic of typicality ALC + TR by typicality inclusions of the (...) form p :: T(C) v D, whose intuitive meaning is that “we believe with degree p about the fact that typical Cs are Ds”. As in the distributed semantics, we define different scenarios containing only some typicality inclusions, each one having a suitable probability. We then exploit such scenarios in order to ascribe typical properties to a concept C obtained as the combination of two prototypical concepts. We also show that reasoning in the proposed Description Logic is EXPTIME-complete as for the underlying standard Description Logic ALC. (shrink)

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)

This paper addresses theoretical problems arising from the vagueness of language terms, and intuitions of the vagueness of the concepts to which they refer. It is argued that the central intuitions of prototype theory are sufficient to account for both typicality phenomena and psychological intuitions about degrees of membership in vaguely defined classes. The first section explains the importance of the relation between degrees of membership and typicality (or goodness of example) in conceptual categorization. The second and third section address (...) arguments advanced by Osherson and Smith (1997), and Kamp and Partee (1995), that the two notions of degree of membership and typicality must relate to fundamentally different aspects of conceptual representations. A version of prototype theory—the Threshold Model—is proposed to counter these arguments and three possible solutions to the problems of logical selfcontradiction and tautology for vague categorizations are outlined. In the final section graded membership is related to the social construction of conceptual boundaries maintained through language use. (shrink)

A growing consensus in the philosophy and psychology of concepts is that while theories such as the prototype, exemplar, and theory theories successfully account for some instances of concept formation and application, none of them successfully accounts for all such instances. I argue against this ‘new consensus’ and show that the problem is, in fact, more severe: the explanatory force of each of these theories is limited even with respect to the phenomena often cited to support it, as each fails (...) to satisfy an important explanatory desideratum with respect to these phenomena. I argue that these explanatory shortcomings arise from a shared assumption on the part of these theories, namely, they take similarity judgements and application of causal knowledge to be discrete elements in a theory of concepts. I further propose that the same assumption carries over into alternative theories offered by proponents of the new consensus: pluralism, eliminativism, and hybrid theories. I put forth a sketch of an integrated model of concept formation and application, which rejects this shared assumption and satisfies the explanatory desiderata I discuss. I suggest that this model undermines the motivation for hybrid, pluralist, and eliminativist accounts of concepts. _1_ Introduction _2_ The Similarity-Based Approach and the Importance of Theory _2.1_ The similarity-based approach _2.2_ The selection desideratum _2.3_ Causal knowledge as satisfying the selection desideratum _3_ The Theory-Based Approach and the Importance of Similarity _3.1_ The theory-based approach _3.2_ The range desideratum _3.3_ Similarity as satisfying the range desideratum _4_ An Integrated Approach to Concepts _4.1_ An integrated model _4.2_ The integrated theory versus hybrid theories of concepts _5_ Conclusion. (shrink)

The modelling of concepts, besides involving disciplines like philosophy of mind and psychology, is a fundamental and lively research problem in several artificial intelligence (AI) areas, such as knowledge representation, machine learning, and natural language processing. In this scenario, the most prominent proposed solutions adopt different (often incompatible) assumptions about the nature of such a notion. Each of these solutions has been developed to capture some specific features of concepts and support some specific (artificial) cognitive operations. This paper critically reviews (...) the most notable computational approaches to the representation of concepts. The main goals are (i) to provide a shared terminology for the desiderata of concepts and their computational representation; (ii) to classify and assess the heterogeneous computational approaches according to the provided terminology; (iii) to provide a reader who may not be very familiar with theories of concepts with an introduction to major themes in this research and with pointers to different research projects, and (iv) to offer philosophers, and potentially AI practitioners, a well-informed guide for selecting among various (and possibly competing) computational representations of concepts. (shrink)

Understanding novel phrases (e.g. upside‐down daisy) and classifying objects in categories named by phrases ought to have common properties, but you'd never know it from current theories. The best candidate for both jobs is the Theory Theory, but it faces difficulties when theories are impoverished. A potential solution is a dual approach that couples theories (representations‐about categories) with fixed mentalese expressions (representations‐of categories). Both representations combine information in parallel when understanding phrases. Although there are objections to the notion that theories (...) can combine, some of them lose their force when applied to a suitable dual model. (shrink)

This paper describes a theory that explains both the creativity and the efficiency of people's conceptual combination. In the constraint theory, conceptual combination is controlled by three constraints of diagnosticity, plausibility, and informativeness. The constraints derive from the pragmatics of communication as applied to compound phrases. The creativity of combination arises because the constraints can be satisfied in many different ways. The constraint theory yields an algorithmic model of the efficiency of combination. The C3 model admits the full creativity of (...) combination and yet efficiently settles on the best interpretation for a given phrase. The constraint theory explains many empirical regularities in conceptual combination, and makes various empirically verified predictions. In computer simulations of compound phrase interpretation, the C3 model has produced results in general agreement with people's responses to the same phrases. (shrink)

This article critically examines the contemporary resurgence of empiricism (or “neo-empiricism”) in philosophy, psychology, neuropsychology, and artificial intelligence. This resurgence is an important and positive development. It is the first time that this centuries-old empiricist approach to cognition is precisely formulated in the context of cognitive science and neuroscience. Moreover, neo-empiricists have made several findings that challenge amodal theories of concepts and higher cognition. It is argued, however, that the theoretical foundations of and the empirical evidence for neo-empiricism are not (...) as strong as is usually claimed by its proponents. The empirical evidence for and against neo-empiricism is discussed in detail. (shrink)

Four studies examined how people combine social concepts that have conflicting implications (e.g., Harvard‐educated and carpenter). Several kinds of evidence indicated that such combinations are guided by causal reasoning that draws upon both causal relations contained within the constituent concepts and on broader world knowledge. Open‐ended descriptions of members of combinations contained explicit causal descriptors, as well as emergent attributes not used to describe members of constituents. Ratings of the likelihood that combination members possessed various attributes were not fully predicted (...) by comparable ratings of constituents. Causal reasoning appeared to be most pervasive for combinations viewed as more surprising, suggesting that surprise may have triggered the generation of causal accounts. (shrink)

Within analytic philosophy, induction has been seen as a problem concerning inferences that have been analysed as relations between sentences. In this article, we argue that induction does not primarily concern relations between sentences, but between properties and categories. We outline a new approach to induction that is based on two theses. The first thesis is epistemological. We submit that there is not only knowledge-how and knowledge-that, but also knowledge-what. Knowledge-what concerns relations between properties and categories and we argue that (...) it cannot be reduced to knowledge-that. We support the partition of knowledge by mapping it onto the long-term memory systems: procedural, semantic and episodic memory. The second thesis is that the role of inductive reasoning is to generate knowledge-what. We use conceptual spaces to model knowledge-what and the relations between properties and categories involved in induction. (shrink)

The modifier effect refers to the fact that the perceived likelihood of a property in a noun category is diminished if the noun is modified. For example, “Pigs live on farms” is rated as more likely than “Dirty pigs live on farms.” The modifier effect has been demonstrated in many studies, but the underlying cognitive mechanisms are still unclear. This paper reports two series of experiments that jointly point to the conclusion that the modifier effect is the result of a (...) superposition of three cognitive mechanisms: (a) probabilistically softened default inheritance, (b) pragmatic implicatures due to Gricean relevance assumptions, and (c) inference based on world knowledge. We present evidence that the pragmatic effects operate largely on an unconscious level and that their influence can be reduced by changing the presentation format of the cognitive task. (shrink)

Beginning in the late 1960s, psychologists began to challenge the view the definitional theory of concepts. According to that theory a concept is a mental representation comprising representations of properties (or “features”) that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for membership in a category. In place of the definitional view, psychologists initially put forward the prototype theory of concept, according to which concepts comprise representations of features that are typical, salient, and diagnostic for category membership, but not necessarily necessary. The (...) prototype theory gained considerable support in the 1970s, but came under attack in the 1980s. One objection, most forcefully advanced by Jerry Fodor, is that prototypes do not combine compositionally. Compositionality is said to be an adequacy condition on a theory of concepts. If prototypes don’t compose, then prototypes are not concepts. Or so the argument goes. (shrink)

Many aspects of how humans form and combine concepts are notoriously difficult to capture formally. In this paper, we focus on the representation of three particular such aspects, namely overexten- sion, underextension, and dominance. Inspired in part by the work of Hampton, we consider concepts as given through a prototype view, and by considering the interdependencies between the attributes that define a concept. To approach this formally, we employ a recently introduced family of operators that enrich Description Logic languages. These (...) operators aim to characterise complex concepts by collecting those instances that apply, in a finely controlled way, to ‘enough’ of the concept’s defin- ing attributes. Here, the meaning of ‘enough’ is technically realised by accumulating weights of satisfied attributes and comparing with a given threshold that needs to be met. (shrink)

Forty years of experimentation on class inclusion and its probabilistic relatives have led to inconsistent results and conclusions about human reasoning. Recent research on the conjunction "fallacy" recapitulates this history. In contrast to previous results, we found that a majority of participants adhere to class inclusion in the classic Linda problem. We outline a theoretical framework that attributes the contradictory results to differences in statistical sophistication and to differences in response mode-whether participants are asked for probability estimates or ranks-and propose (...) two precise cognitive algorithms for ranking probabilities. Our framework allows us to make novel predictions about when and why people adhere to class inclusion. Evidence obtained in several studies supports these predictions and demonstrates that the proposed ranking algorithms can account for about three-quarters of participants' inferences in the Linda problem. (shrink)

The goal of inquiry in this essay is to ascertain to what extent the Principle of Compositionality – the thesis that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meaning of its parts and its mode of composition – can be justifiably imposed as a constraint on semantic theories, and thereby provide information about what meanings are. Apart from the introduction and the concluding chapter the thesis is divided into five chapters addressing different questions pertaining to the overarching (...) goal of inquiry. Chapter Two is an attempt to determine whether the Principle of Compositionality is a trivial principle. It is argued that this is not the case in the context of providing the semantics of natural languages since it is an open question whether the best theories that respect available syntactic and semantic data are compositional. Chapter Three and Chapter Four ask whether there are reasons to think that the Principle of Compositionality is true. It is argued that the three most commonly cited reasons for thinking that correct semantic theories must be compositional – Linguistic Creativity, Productivity and Systematicity – in fact only give us reasons to think that the meaning of complex expressions depend on the meanings of their parts and their modes of composition, but not that the meaning of complex expressions depend ONLY on those factors. Chapter Five asks whether there are any reasons to think that the Principle of Compositionality is false. It is argued that all the phenomena that have been suggested entail non-compositionality are in fact compatible with some versions of compositionality. Even if this conclusion is reached in this chapter, the conclusion of the previous two chapters entails that we are not justified in imposing the Principle of Compositionality as an adequacy constraint on Semantic theories. Chapter Six explores the ways in which information about what meanings are can be derived by imposing constraints on semantic theories. It is argued that the distinction emphasized in Chapter Three and Chapter Four between depending on and depending ONLY on is of critical importance. It is demonstrated that the informative potential of the Principle of Compositionality goes far beyond that of the principle we are in fact justified in imposing on semantic theories. So not only is it the case that we cannot learn anything about meanings from the justified imposition of the Principle of Compositionality – since we cannot justifiably impose it as a constraint on semantic theories – what we could have learned from it had we been justified in imposing it is very different from what we can learn from the principle that we are justified in imposing. (shrink)

Embracing an inter-disciplinary approach grounded on Gärdenfors’ theory of conceptual spaces, we introduce a formal framework to analyse and compare selected theories about technical artefacts present in the literature. Our focus is on design-oriented approaches where both designing and manufacturing activities play a crucial role. Intentional theories, like Kroes’ dual nature thesis, are able to solve disparate problems concerning artefacts but they face both the philosophical challenge of clarifying the ontological nature of intentional properties, and the empirical challenge of testing (...) the attribution of such intentional properties to artefacts. To avoid these issues, we propose an approach that, by identifying different modalities to characterise artefact types, does not commit to intentional qualities and is able to empirically ground compliance tests. (shrink)

We investigate the hypothesis that our conceptual systems provide two formally distinct ways of representing categories by investigating the manner in which lexical nominals (e.g., tree, picnic table) and phrasal nominals (e.g., black bird, birds that like rice) are interpreted. Four experiments found that lexical nominals may be mapped onto kind representations, whereas phrasal nominals map onto class representations but not kind representations. Experiment 1 found that phrasal nominals, unlike lexical nominals, are mapped onto categories whose members need not be (...) of a single kind. Experiments 2 and 3 found that categories named by lexical nominals enter into both class inclusion and kind hierarchies and thus support both class inclusion (is a) and kind specification (kind of) relations, whereas phrasal nominals map onto class representations which support only class inclusion relations. Experiment 4 showed that the two types of nominals represent hierarchical relations in different ways. Phrasal nominals (e.g., white bear) are mapped onto classes that have criteria of membership in addition to those specified by the class picked out by the head noun of the phrase (e.g., bear). In contrast, lexical nominals (e.g., polar bear) specify one way to meet the criteria specified by the more general kind concept (e.g., bear). Implications for the language–conceptual system interface, representation of hierarchical relations, lexicalization, and theories of conceptual combination are discussed. (shrink)

Comparative concepts such as greener than or higher than are ways of ordering objects. They are fundamental to our grasp of gradable concepts, that is, the type of meanings expressed by gradable general terms, such as "is green" or "is high", which are embeddable in comparative constructions in natural language. Some comparative concepts seem natural, whereas others seem gerrymandered. The aim of this paper is to outline a theoretical approach to comparative concepts that bears both on the account of naturalness (...) for comparative concepts and on the theory of gradable concepts. The approach is novel in that it carries some basic assumptions from Peter Gärdenfors' conceptual spaces account of categorical concepts over to comparative concepts. The offered approach is more general than Gärdenfors' account in that it supplies a framework of graded categorisation that includes his categorisation rule as a limiting case. Importantly, it provides also a new argument for adopting Gärdenfors' particular model of categorisation. (shrink)

This article presents a detailed formal approach to concepts and concept combination. Sense generation is a competence‐level theory that attempts to respect constraints from the various cognitive sciences, and postulates “quasi‐classical” conceptual structures where attributes receive only one value (but are defeasible and so do not represent necessary and sufficient conditions on category membership) and where classification is binary (but explicitly context‐sensitive). It is also argued that any general theory of concepts must account for “privative” combinations (e.g., stone lion, fake (...) gun, apparent friend) as extreme test‐cases of representational and classificatory flexibility. The approach presented therefore provides a treatment of these combinations. The approach differentiates between the “lexical concept” (the stable information represented in a mental lexicon) which acts as a base from which the various “senses” (flexible contents associated with words and phrases in context, and used in classification) are “generated.” Generation allows nonmonotonicity, so that in different circumstances, different attributes may be defeated or modified. Classification is treated as relative to the perspective adopted, so that a classification acceptable from one perspective may be unacceptable from another, without contradiction. The result is a view that assumes bottom‐up priority in concept combination, where the range of senses generated by bottom‐up rules of combination is tempered by pragmatic‐communicative constraints on classification. An account of the representational and classification behavior of privative combinations is outlined, and the article concludes with a discussion of some of the implications of the approach. (shrink)

Theories of embodied cognition hold that the conceptual system uses perceptual simulations for the purposes of representation. A strong prediction is that perceptual phenomena should emerge in conceptual processing, and, in support, previous research has shown that switching modalities from one trial to the next incurs a processing cost during conceptual tasks. However, to date, such research has been limited by its reliance on the retrieval of familiar concepts. We therefore examined concept creation by asking participants to interpret modality-specific compound (...) phrases (i.e., conceptual combinations). Results show that modality switching costs emerge during the creation of new conceptual entities: People are slower to simulate a novel concept (e.g., auditory jingling onion) when their attention has already been engaged by a different modality in simulating a familiar concept (e.g., visual shiny penny). Furthermore, these costs cannot be accounted for by linguistic factors alone. Rather, our findings support the embodied view that concept creation, as well as retrieval, requires situated perceptual simulation. (shrink)

Aerts et al. provide a valuable model to capture the interactive nature of conceptual combination in conjunctions and disjunctions. The commentary provides a brief review of the interpretation of these interactions that has been offered in the literature, and argues for a closer link between the more traditional account in terms of concept intensions, and the parameters that emerge from the fitting of the Quantum Probability model.

The species problem is often described as the abundance of conflicting definitions of _species_, such as the biological species concept and phylogenetic species concepts. But biologists understand the notion of species in a non-definitional as well as a definitional way. In this article I argue that when they understand _species_ without a definition in their mind, their understanding is often mediated by the notion of _good species_, or prototypical species, as the idea of ``prototype'' is explicated in cognitive psychology. This (...) distinction helps us make sense of several puzzling phenomena regarding biologists' dealing with species, such as the fact that in everyday research biologists often behave as if the species problem is solved, while they should be fully aware that it is not. I also briefly discuss implications of this finding, including that some extant attempts to answer what the nature of species is have an inadequate assumption about how the notion of species is represented in biologists' minds. (shrink)

We advance a model of human probability judgment and apply it to the design of an extrapolation algorithm. Such an algorithm examines a person's judgment about the likelihood of various statements and is then able to predict the same person's judgments about new statements. The algorithm is tested against judgments produced by thirty undergraduates asked to assign probabilities to statements about mammals.

This article presents results from a simulation‐based study of inheritance inference, that is, inference from the typicality of a property among a “base” class to its typicality among a subclass of the class. The study aims to ascertain which kinds of inheritance inferences are reliable, with attention to the dependence of their reliability upon the type of environment in which inferences are made. For example, the study addresses whether inheritance inference is reliable in the case of “exceptional subclasses” (i.e., subclasses (...) that are known to be atypical in some respect) and attends to variations in reliability that result from variations in the entropy level of the environment. A further goal of the study is to show that the reliability of inheritance inference depends crucially on which sorts of base classes are used in making inferences. One approach to inheritance inference treats the extension of any atomic predicate as a suitable base class. A second approach identifies suitable base classes with the cells of a partition (of a preselected size k) of the domain of objects that satisfies the condition of maximizing the similarity of objects that are assigned to the same class. In addition to permitting more inferences, our study shows that the second approach results in inheritance inferences that are far more reliable, particularly in the case of exceptional subclasses. (shrink)

Edouard Machery has argued that the notion of concept should be eliminated from scientific theorising about cognition on the grounds that what psychologists call concepts do not form a natural kind and that keeping this notion would encumber scientific progress. His view is that the class of concepts really divides into three distinct yet co-referential kinds of bodies of knowledge typically used in distinct cognitive processes. The main purpose of this paper is to challenge Machery’s eliminativist conclusion on the grounds (...) that his alternative to concepts fails to be combined with any prominent account of content determination. As a case of philosophical scrutiny of a psychological proposal, the paper also intends to show how philosophical and psychological interests in concepts can be brought together. (shrink)

The principle of compositionality claims that the content of a complex concept is determined by its constituent concepts and the way in which they are composed. However, for prototype concepts this principle is often too rigid. Blurring the division between conceptual composition and belief update has therefore been suggested. Inspired by this idea, we develop a normative account of how belief revision and meaning composition should interact in modifications such as “red apple” or “pet hamster”. We do this by combining (...) the well-known selective modification model :485–527 1988) with the rules of Bayesian belief update. Moreover, we relate this model to systems of defeasible reasoning as discussed in the field of artificial intelligence. (shrink)

Recent metaphor research has revealed that metaphor comprehension involves both categorization and comparison processes. This finding has triggered the following central question: Which property determines the choice between these two processes for metaphor comprehension? Three competing views have been proposed to answer this question: the conventionality view (Bowdle & Gentner, 2005), aptness view (Glucksberg & Haught, 2006b), and interpretive diversity view (Utsumi, 2007); these views, respectively, argue that vehicle conventionality, metaphor aptness, and interpretive diversity determine the choice between the categorization (...) and comparison processes. This article attempts to answer the question regarding which views are plausible by using cognitive modeling and computer simulation based on a semantic space model. In the simulation experiment, categorization and comparison processes are modeled in a semantic space constructed by latent semantic analysis. These two models receive word vectors for the constituent words of a metaphor and compute a vector for the metaphorical meaning. The resulting vectors can be evaluated according to the degree to which they mimic the human interpretation of the same metaphor; the maximum likelihood estimation determines which of the two models better explains the human interpretation. The result of the model selection is then predicted by three metaphor properties (i.e., vehicle conventionality, aptness, and interpretive diversity) to test the three views. The simulation experiment for Japanese metaphors demonstrates that both interpretive diversity and vehicle conventionality affect the choice between the two processes. On the other hand, it is found that metaphor aptness does not affect this choice. This result can be treated as computational evidence supporting the interpretive diversity and conventionality views. (shrink)

The idea that concepts play a significant role in some perceptions is widespread but everybody seems to differ as to where to draw the line. Some researchers say that the difference between direct and indirect, concept driven acts of perception manifests itself whenever we perceive abstract or general properties. Others point at second order properties or causal properties. I call this inability to precisely differentiate between acts of direct and indirect perception “The Division Problem”. Furthermore there is always a question (...) as to how widespread indirect perceptions are. Can we attribute them to prelingual cognitive systems? I call this second problem “The Distribution Problem”. -/- The main aim of the paper is providing a solution to both problems by proposing a naturalistic explication of the notion of “concept”. -/- I propose to identify the role concepts were supposed to play in perception with a mechanism of “soft detection”. Unlike hard detectors which react to a specific target in virtue of their constitution and placement in the system, soft detectors are understood as dynamic categorization devices enabling the cognitive system to selectively react to an undetectable property via flexible exploitation of data from hard detectors. -/- I conclude by showing how the notion of soft detection retains some of the aspects traditionally attributed to concepts and how does it differ from similar accounts known from contemporary literature. (shrink)

We present an algorithm for concept combination inspired and informed by the research in cognitive and experimental psychology. Dealing with concept combination requires, from a symbolic AI perspective, to cope with competitive needs: the need for compositionality and the need to account for typicality effects. Building on our previous work on weighted logic, the proposed algorithm can be seen as a step towards the management of both these needs. More precisely, following a proposal of Hampton [1], it combines two weighted (...) Description Logic formulas, each defining a concept, using the following general strategy. First it selects all the features needed for the combination, based on the logical distinc- tion between necessary and impossible features. Second, it determines the threshold and assigns new weights to the features of the combined concept trying to preserve the relevance and the necessity of the features. We illustrate how the algorithm works exploiting some paradigmatic examples discussed in the cognitive literature. (shrink)

We argue that a comprehensive theory of reciprocals must rely on a general taxonomy of restrictions on the interpretation of relational expressions. Developing such a taxonomy, we propose a new principle for interpreting reciprocals that relies on the interpretation of the relation in their scope. This principle, the Maximal Interpretation Hypothesis (MIH), analyzes reciprocals as partial polyadic quantifiers. According to the MIH, the partial quantifier denoted by a reciprocal requires the relational expression REL in its scope to denote a maximal (...) relation in REL’s interpretation domain. In this way the MIH avoids a priori assumptions on the available readings of reciprocal expressions, which are necessary in previous accounts. Relying extensively on the work of Dalrymple et al. (Ling Philos 21:159–210, 1998), we show that the MIH also exhibits some observational improvements over Dalrymple et al.’s Strongest Meaning Hypothesis (SMH). In addition to deriving some attested reciprocal interpretations that are not expected by the SMH, the MIH offers a more restrictive account of the way context affects the interpretation of reciprocals through its influence on relational domains. Further, the MIH generates a reciprocal interpretation at the predicate level, which is argued to be advantageous to Dalrymple et al.’s propositional selection of reciprocal meanings. More generally, we argue that by focusing on restrictions on relational domains, the MIH opens the way for a more systematic study of the ways in which lexical meaning, world knowledge and contextual information interact with the interpretation of quantificational expressions. (shrink)

Establishing reasonable, prior distributions remains a significant obstacle for the construction of probabilistic expert systems. Human assessment of chance is often relied upon for this purpose, but this has the drawback of being inconsistent with axioms of probability. This article advances a method for extracting a coherent distribution of probability from human judgment. The method is based on a psychological model of probabilistic reasoning, followed by a correction phase using linear programming.

A concept is traditionally defined via the necessary and sufficient conditions that clearly determine its extension. By contrast, cognitive views of concepts intend to account for empirical data that show that categorisation under a concept presents typicality effects and a certain degree of indeterminacy. We propose a formal language to compactly represent concepts by leveraging on weighted logical formulas. In this way, we can model the possible synergies among the qualities that are relevant for categorising an object under a concept. (...) We show that our proposal can account for a number of views of concepts such as the prototype theory and the exemplar theory. Moreover, we show how the proposed model can overcome some limitations of cognitive views. (shrink)

Most people find it obvious that concepts like APPLE, DOG, WATER, CACTUS, SWIM, CHIRP, FURRY, and SMOOTH are acquired from perceptual experiences along with some kind of inferential procedure. Models of how these concepts are inferentially acquired, however, force the acquired concepts to be representationally complex, built from, and composed by, the more primitive representations. Since at least the time of Plato, philosophers and psychologists have struggled to find complex sets of representations that have the same meanings, definitionally or probabilistically, (...) as these concepts. For example, to think about the property-kind being gold is not the same as to think about the complex property-kind being yellowish & shiny & malleable.... I call this Fodor's Challenge: Find an acquisition process that is genuinely inferential and yields a concept that genuinely is one of these lexical concepts. Rather than continue the pursuit of a complex representation that has the same meaning as our concept GOLD. I offer a model on which many lexical concepts are acquired from perception and inference, without being built up from, and composed by, the representations involved. The model, Baptizing Meanings for Concepts, is inspired in part by Saul Kripke's baptism process for assigning meanings to linguistic terms. Many lexical concepts, according to the BMC, are acquired by inferring the presence a new property-kind, picking out the property-kind in terms of those perceptible features, and then assigning a simple mental term, a concept, for that property-kind. (shrink)

has to do with the acquisition of encyclopedic knowledge.