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Philosophy of Mind
Intentionality
Concepts
Concepts
Edited by
Daniel Weiskopf
Georgia State University
About this topic
Summary
Concepts are the basic elements of thought. One of their primary functions is to connect the mind to the world; thus, to have a concept is to have available a way of thinking about something. There are concepts of particular individuals, general categories, natural kinds and artifacts, properties and relations, actions and events, and so forth. Concepts are also used in formulating beliefs, desires, plans, and other complex thoughts and judgments. They therefore play an important role in explaining cognitive processes such as categorization, inductive inference, causal reasoning, and decision making.
Key works
A collection of influential readings that makes a good starting point in getting acquainted with how theories of concepts have been handled in modern cognitive science is
Margolis & Laurence 1999
. An overview of the key phenomena that theories of concepts aim to cover, as well as the major theories themselves, can be found in the opening chapters of
Prinz 2002
Fodor 1998
presents a critique of the major assumptions lying behind these theories.
Introductions
General reviews of the subject may be found in
Laurence & Margolis 1999
and
Weiskopf 2013
Show all references
Related
Subcategories
Perception-Based Theories of Concepts
85
Inferential Theories of Concepts
108
Prototype and Exemplar Theories of Concepts
90
Theory-Based Theories of Concepts
92
Atomist Theories of Concepts
80
Theories of Concepts, Misc
163
Conceptual Analysis
580
Conceptual Change
185
Conceptual Engineering
461
Concept Possession
194
Ontology of Concepts
81
Phenomenal Concepts
332
Recognitional Concepts
27
Innate Concepts
83
Mental Files
318
Concepts, Misc
163
See also
Conceptual Analysis and A Priori Entailment
100
Phenomenal Concepts
332
Inferentialist Accounts of Meaning and Content
478
Conceptual and Nonconceptual Content
462
Folk Concepts and Folk Intuitions
212
History/traditions: Concepts
Berkeley: Ideas
131
| 84)
Hume: Ideas
132
| 7)
Locke: Ideas
223
Spinoza: Ideas
129
Jobs in this area
Institut Jean Nicod
Postdoctoral Fellowship in Philosophy of Action / Philosophy of Mind
Loyola University, Chicago
Philosophy, Lecturer (General), Non-Tenure Track
Ruhr University Bochum
2 PhD Positions in History and Philosophy of Science
Jobs from
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Contents
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Material to categorize
Experimental Philosophy.
Justin S. Sytsma
Kevin Reuter
Pascale Willemsen
2026
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
details
Experimental philosophy (or “x-phi”) is a methodological naturalist approach to philosophy that is distinguished by practitioners employing empirical methods for philosophical purposes. Both the methods employed and the purposes they are put to are diverse. As such, the practice cannot be adequately equated with any single approach, philosophical target, or argumentative gambit. With this diversity in mind, this entry will detail the broad practice of experimental philosophy. -/- While experimental philosophy is highly diverse, there are nonetheless prominent themes. Most notably,
...
this includes that experimentalists have often aimed to study “intuitions” concerning concepts of philosophical interest, usually by investigating the judgments of laypeople (or “the folk”). In line with this target, there is also a correspondingly prominent method in x-phi—the use of questionnaires soliciting judgments about short stories (or “vignettes”) based on philosophical thought experiments. After introducing and motivating the practice of experimental philosophy (§1), this entry will discuss the most common methods employed by experimental philosophers (§2) and illustrate how they have been applied to some particularly fruitful topics in contemporary philosophy (§3). -/- In addition to the direct contributions that experimentalists have made to a variety of first-order philosophical debates, experimental philosophy has also had a notable impact on metaphilosophical debates concerning the boundaries of philosophy and the methods that philosophers should employ. Most directly, the practice challenges the presumption of a clean methodological divide between the sciences and philosophy. More critically, some advocates of experimental philosophy have challenged aspects of non-empirical philosophical methodology, prominently including the use of intuitions as evidence for or against philosophical accounts. As such, this entry will conclude with a discussion of the primary ways in which experimental philosophy has featured in the metaphilosophical discussions, while contextualizing this portrayal with regard to the broader practice (§4). (
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Experimental Philosophy.
Justin Sytsma
Kevin Reuter
Pascale Willemsen
2026
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
details
Experimental philosophy (or “x-phi”) is a methodological naturalist approach to philosophy that is distinguished by practitioners employing empirical methods for philosophical purposes. Both the methods employed and the purposes they are put to are diverse. As such, the practice cannot be adequately equated with any single approach, philosophical target, or argumentative gambit. With this diversity in mind, this entry will detail the broad practice of experimental philosophy. -/- While experimental philosophy is highly diverse, there are nonetheless prominent themes. Most notably,
...
this includes that experimentalists have often aimed to study “intuitions” concerning concepts of philosophical interest, usually by investigating the judgments of laypeople (or “the folk”). In line with this target, there is also a correspondingly prominent method in x-phi—the use of questionnaires soliciting judgments about short stories (or “vignettes”) based on philosophical thought experiments. After introducing and motivating the practice of experimental philosophy (§1), this entry will discuss the most common methods employed by experimental philosophers (§2) and illustrate how they have been applied to some particularly fruitful topics in contemporary philosophy (§3). -/- In addition to the direct contributions that experimentalists have made to a variety of first-order philosophical debates, experimental philosophy has also had a notable impact on metaphilosophical debates concerning the boundaries of philosophy and the methods that philosophers should employ. Most directly, the practice challenges the presumption of a clean methodological divide between the sciences and philosophy. More critically, some advocates of experimental philosophy have challenged aspects of non-empirical philosophical methodology, prominently including the use of intuitions as evidence for or against philosophical accounts. As such, this entry will conclude with a discussion of the primary ways in which experimental philosophy has featured in the metaphilosophical discussions, while contextualizing this portrayal with regard to the broader practice (§4). (
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From Felt Manifestation to Narrative Concepts: A Hierarchical Account of Concept Formation, Social Encoding, and Functional Migration.
Nuoheng Du
manuscript
details
This paper develops a hierarchical account of concept formation that distinguishes the manifestation of originary qualitative feel from the public, norm-governed concepts through which subjects later articulate experience. Its central claim is not merely that concepts differ in abstractness, but that they differ in constraint profile: some remain tightly corrigible by recurrent felt manifestations delivered through relatively stable experiential channels, whereas others depend far more heavily on social reweighting, comparison, and narrative organization. To capture this difference, I distinguish four strata:
...
(1) the manifestation of originary qualitative feel, (2) channel-bound concepts, (3) integrative judgments, and (4) narrative concepts. The pivotal case is smart. In some contexts, smart functions as a third-level integrative judgment anchored by a relatively stable cue-cluster such as rapid learning, flexible problem solving, and quick comprehension. In other contexts, the same lexical item is drawn into fourth-level use, where application depends on broader evaluations of which forms of knowledge, achievement, or tradition count as genuinely worthwhile. This shift shows that semantic drift does not abolish embodiment; it redistributes which embodied, affective, and inferential resources are recruited as operative sense changes. The paper then reorganizes its dialogue with contemporary theory around this problem of functional migration. Barsalou and Dove help explain embodied anchoring but do not sufficiently account for the reweighting of application rules within public evaluative space. Borghi and collaborators illuminate the role of language, sociality, inner speech, and conversational coordination in abstract concepts, yet their frameworks can be sharpened by distinguishing lexical stabilization from discursive reorganization and by connecting internal cue-stabilization with sentence-level and discourse-level renegotiation. Brandom and Jorem and Lohr clarify the public inferential dimension of concept use, but require a stronger account of differential experiential corrigibility. Searle helps explain how high-level concepts approach recognition and status, but not every narrative concept is thereby reduced to a full institutional fact. The conclusion is that the decisive issue is not whether a concept is social, but how lower-level cues, public norms, and narrative frames are combined in use. (
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Philosophy of Mind
Embodiment and Situated Cognition
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Philosophy of Cognitive Science
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The Uncommon Sense Effect: experimental evidence for underspecification as the mental basis of logical inference.
Elliot Schwartz
Griffin Pion
Jake Quilty-Dunn
Eric Mandelbaum
Spencer Caplan
manuscript
details
Logical reasoning is one of humanity's most powerful abilities. A widespread assumption across psychology, linguistics, and philosophy holds that reasoning operates over concepts that refer to objects and properties in the world, yet this has rarely been tested empirically. We introduce a novel paradigm that exploits lexical ambiguity to differentiate candidate representations for human inference: word-forms, reference-fixing concepts, or more abstract "underspecified representations" that constrain meaning without fully determining it. Across three experiments (N=158), participants evaluated deductive arguments equivocating over polysemous
...
or homonymous terms. Although these arguments are logically equivalent under standard analyses, participants reliably accepted non-truth-preserving polysemous arguments while rejecting homonymous ones. This asymmetry—the Uncommon Sense Effect—points to underspecified representations as the default basis of logical inference. This challenges a foundational assumption about meaning, and opens new empirical avenues for studying the link between what we think and why we think it. (
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Ambiguity and Polysemy
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Philosophy of Language
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Philosophy of Mind
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Psycholinguistics
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Philosophy of Language
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Schopenhauer și problematica deconstituirii.
Remus Breazu
2023
In Viorel Cernica,
Studies in Pre-Judicative Hermeneutics And Meontology
. Bucharest: Bucharest University Press. pp. 213-228.
details
In this paper, I investigate the possibility of deconstituion in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. The paper is structured as follows: I start from Schopenhauer’s distinction between idea and concept, and I analyse their differences from the points of view of determination, adequacy, genesis, and constitution. Starting from the last, I investigate the characteristic of the idea of being in constant development in the light of the relation between will and the principle of sufficient reason. Finally, I show that there is a metaphysical
...
equivocalness in Schopenhauer's approach, and it is precisely this equivocalness that allows us to talk about the possibility of deconstitution, even though his intentions are different. (
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Arthur Schopenhauer
in
19th Century Philosophy
Concepts
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Philosophy of Mind
Hermeneutics
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Continental Philosophy
Ontology
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Metaphysics
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The First Lesson: Bounded Particulars Against Indeterminate Backgrounds.
Eli Adam Deutscher
manuscript
details
ABSTRACT For over a century, theories of concept formation in linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science have been dominated by a single, intuitive premise: that we learn what things are by distinguishing them from what they are not. From Saussure’s differential semantics to modern distributional models in artificial intelligence, meaning has been understood as fundamentally contrastive and relational. This paper argues that this consensus is fundamentally backwards. -/- We present the Boundary-First Model, a cognitive architecture derived directly from the first principles
...
of Neo-Pre-Platonic Naturalism (NPN). Rather than synthesizing disparate observations from psychology or biology, we demonstrate how the geometric and thermodynamic necessities of existence—specifically the Zero Principle—dictate the structure of the mind. We argue that all learning begins with the detection of bounded particulars against an indeterminate background (Apeiron), driven by the thermodynamic imperative of the Hormē (the striving to persist). -/- In this framework, the "figure-ground" laws of Gestalt psychology and the "adaptive modules" of evolutionary biology are re-derived not as primary theories, but as functional consequences of a single navigational logic. We trace the Learning Stack—from the initial perceptual cut (Aisthēsis) to the construction of predictive boundary-models (Epistēmē)—showing how language labels these carved realities rather than creating them. This structural grounding resolves persistent anomalies: the a priori nature of moral intuitions, infant fast-mapping, and the grounding problem in AI. The result is a total unification: the logic that governs the metaphysical possibility of existence is the same logic that governs the architecture of the mind that perceives it. To learn is not first to compare, but to carve. -/- Keywords Concept Formation, Boundary-against-Ground, Figure/Ground, Zero Principle, Indeterminate Background, Differential Semantics, Infant Cognition, Fast-Mapping, Prototype Theory, Evolved Cognitive Templates, Symbol Grounding, AI Limitations, Embodied Cognition, Neo-Pre-Platonic Naturalism, Epistemic Foundations, Philosophy of Language, Cognitive Development, Educational Reform. (
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Concepts
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Philosophy of Mind
Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence
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Philosophy of Cognitive Science
Philosophy of Language
Philosophy of Learning
in
Philosophy of Social Science
Philosophy of Teaching
in
Philosophy of Social Science
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An Externalist Shared Thought View of Communication, Agreement, and Disagreement.
Sarah Sawyer
2025
In José Luis Bermúdez, Matheus Valente & Víctor M. Verdejo,
Sharing Thoughts: Philosophical Perspectives on Intersubjectivity and Communication
. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press. pp. 173-192.
details
It is natural to think that successful communication takes place between two people when a single propositional content is expressed by the first and understood by the second. This ‘shared content’ or ‘shared thought’ view also provides a natural account of agreement and disagreement. In this chapter, I defend the shared thought view. Specifically, I argue in favour of an externalist shared thought view and against an internalist non-shared thought view, focusing on Pollock’s claim that in cases of communication, agreement,
...
and disagreement, ‘the possibility for shared thought is not a necessity … but, at best, an irrelevance’. In responding to Pollock, I show more generally why an externalist shared thought view is preferable to an internalist non-shared thought view. (
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Concepts
in
Philosophy of Mind
Content Internalism and Externalism
in
Philosophy of Mind
Meaning
in
Philosophy of Language
Philosophy of Language, Miscellaneous
in
Philosophy of Language
Philosophy of Mind, Miscellaneous
in
Philosophy of Mind
The Nature of Contents
in
Philosophy of Mind
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Overview of
Concepts at the Interface
(2024, OUP).
Nicholas Shea
forthcoming
Philosophical Psychology
details
Author's overview of _Concepts at the Interface_ for a book symposium in _Philosophical Psychology_.
Cognition
in
Philosophy of Cognitive Science
Concepts
in
Philosophy of Mind
Thought and Thinking
in
Philosophy of Mind
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Empirische Forschung in der Philosophie- und EthikdidaktikEmpirische Forschung in der Philosophie- und Ethikdidaktik.
Johannes Rohbeck
(ed.) -
2017
Dresden: Thelem.
details
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Lebenswelt und Wissenschaft.
Markus Tiedemann
Bettina Bussmann
(eds.) -
2019
Dresden: Thelem.
details
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Inquiring to Understand.
Adham El Shazly
forthcoming
Philosophical Quarterly
details
We often inquire not just to know, but to understand. In this paper I give an account of inquiries that aim to illuminate or makes sense of their object and argue they don’t reduce to inquiries which concern forming beliefs or acquiring knowledge. My core claim is that inquiry aimed at understanding is a constructive and generative process, unlike inquiry aiming at knowledge acquisition, which culminates in the representation of pre-existing facts. Central to this process are sensemaking frames—representational devices that
...
interpret their target by structuring and organising information about it. To that end, I propose and defend the noetic account of inquiry, according to which epistemic improvement in inquiry is a matter of structuring information to illuminate and make sense of the object of inquiry. I conclude by explaining how inquiring to understand is distinctively open-ended, a creative process of structuring the information landscape, a landscape which isn’t always readily given to us. (
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Philosophy of Mind
Epistemic Norms
in
Epistemology
Inquiry
in
Epistemology
Knowledge
in
Epistemology
Moral Language
in
Meta-Ethics
Rationality
in
Epistemology
Salience
in
Philosophy of Mind
The Nature of Belief
in
Philosophy of Mind
Understanding
in
Epistemology
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The Interface Mind.
Marcin Miłkowski
2025
Philosophical Psychology
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Nick Shea’s Concepts at the Interface offers a compelling and empirically rich account of concepts as working memory labels – flexible plug-and-play devices operating within a cognitive playground. Shea’s work demonstrates the enduring progressiveness and adaptability of computational, subpersonal approaches to cognitive representation. He moves beyond classical cognitivism by detailing how a hybrid architecture, in which concepts interface between general-purpose reasoning processes and the content-specific computations occurring within specialized informational models (including simulations), can address longstanding issues regarding the integration of
...
diverse representational formats and inferential processes. Furthermore, Shea enriches this computational picture by incorporating research on metacognition, showing how epistemic feelings help monitor and control these complex thought processes. While noting potential challenges regarding the empirical foundations drawn from areas like embodied cognition, I conclude that Shea provides a sophisticated, integrated, albeit disunified, and forward-looking vision of human cognition, highlighting the power that emerges from interfacing general-purpose flexibility with specialized cognitive resources. (
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Explanation in Cognitive Science
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Constructing Memories, Episodic and Semantic.
Hunter Gentry
2025
Cognitive Science
49 (9):e70113.
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What is the nature of semantic memory? Philosophers and cognitive scientists have long held that semantic memory stores invariant knowledge structures to be retrieved as such. In this paper, I argue that this conception of semantic memory is likely false. In particular, I argue that if episodic and semantic memory share causal mechanisms, and episodic memory is (re)constructive, then semantic memory is likely constructive too. I review evidence that suggests that episodic and semantic memory are subserved by a domain-general system
...
that supports representing and navigating relations among various kinds of stimuli, including space, time, events, and semantic relations. I then review the supposed hallmark properties of constructivism in episodic memory and show that they appear in semantic memory as well. To increase the inductive support for my proposal, I show how the view predicts some of the evidence others have marshaled in favor of a constructivist semantic memory system. Finally, I close by providing a proof of concept for the view on offer, the semantic pointer architecture. (
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Leibniz and Bolzano on conceptual containment.
Jan Claas
2021
European Journal of Philosophy
30 (3):924-942.
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Philosophers often rely on the notion of conceptual containment and apply mereological terminology when they talk about the parts or constituents of a complex concept. In this paper, I explore two historical approaches to this general notion. In particular, I reconstruct objections Bernard Bolzano puts forward against a criterion that played a prominent role in the history of philosophy and that was endorsed, among others, by Leibniz. According to this criterion, a concept that represents objects contains all and only the
...
concepts that represent properties the objects must have in order to be represented by the former concept. Bolzano offers several counterexamples and arguments against the criterion. I argue that while some of them presuppose a strongly mereological understanding of containment, which Leibniz is not committed to, one of them also succeeds without relying on demanding mereological principles. (
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Bernard Bolzano
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19th Century Philosophy
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Leibniz: Metaphysics
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17th/18th Century Philosophy
Leibniz: Philosophy of Language
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17th/18th Century Philosophy
Mereology
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Metaphysics
Philosophy of Language
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How Language-Like is the Language of Thought?
Juan Murillo Vargas
forthcoming
Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy
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The language of thought hypothesis (LoTH) claims that thoughts are underpinned by language-like vehicles. A central motivation is that there is a relevant similarity between language and thought explained by LoTH. But how language-like is the language of thought? I argue that this question has no obvious answer—many candidate answers render LoTH trivial or false. Thus LoTH faces a similarity problem: the challenge of fleshing out the similarity between natural language and the language of thought. There are two promising solutions
...
to this problem: conservatism and liberalism. Conservatism is the received view. It says the language of thought is similar to natural language only insofar as it features propositional contents. I challenge the received view by defending liberalism—the view that the language of thought can feature both propositional and non-propositional contents. Liberalism should be preferred on empirical and theoretical grounds. I conclude by showing liberalism has broader consequences for other philosophical issues, such as the nature of concepts, Frege’s Puzzle, and the possibility of non-propositional intentionality. (
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On travelling concepts.
Martin Stokhof
2025
Proceedings of the Paris Institute for Advanced Study
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The paper discusses the idea of ‘travelling concepts’ in the context of ‘philo- sophie pauvre’, resulting in a Wittgenstein-inspired, pluralist but non-relativist view on conceptual structures. It is contrasted with that of various approaches in conceptual analysis and conceptual engineering. By way of illustration, the paper explores how a travelling concept view might help clarify discussions of understanding as applied to generative artificial intelligence systems.
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Metaphilosophy
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Mechanistic Indicators of Understanding in Large Language Models.
Pierre Beckmann
Matthieu Queloz
2026
Philosophical Studies
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Large language models (LLMs) are often portrayed as merely imitating linguistic patterns without genuine understanding. We argue that recent findings in mechanistic interpretability (MI), the emerging field probing the inner workings of LLMs, render this picture increasingly untenable—but only once those findings are integrated within a theoretical account of understanding. We propose a tiered framework for thinking about understanding in LLMs and use it to synthesize the most relevant findings to date. The framework distinguishes three hierarchical varieties of understanding, each
...
tied to a corresponding level of computational organization: conceptual understanding emerges when a model forms “features” as directions in latent space, learning connections between diverse manifestations of a single entity or property; state-of-the-world understanding emerges when a model learns contingent factual connections between features and dynamically tracks changes in the world; principled understanding emerges when a model ceases to rely on memorized facts and discovers a compact “circuit” connecting these facts. Across these tiers, MI uncovers internal organizations that can underwrite understanding-like unification. However, these also diverge from human cognition in their parallel exploitation of heterogeneous mechanisms. Fusing philosophical theory with mechanistic evidence thus allows us to transcend binary debates over whether AI understands, paving the way for a comparative, mechanistically grounded epistemology that explores how AI understanding aligns with—and diverges from—our own. (
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Artificial Minds, Misc
in
Philosophy of Cognitive Science
Concepts
in
Philosophy of Mind
Deep Learning
in
Philosophy of Cognitive Science
Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, Misc
in
Philosophy of Cognitive Science
Knowledge, Miscellaneous
in
Epistemology
Large Language Models
in
Philosophy of Cognitive Science
Philosophy of AI, Misc
in
Philosophy of Cognitive Science
Representation in Connectionism
in
Philosophy of Cognitive Science
Subsymbolic Computation
in
Philosophy of Cognitive Science
Understanding and Artificial Intelligence
in
Philosophy of Cognitive Science
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Final Report on DFG Research Project
Parameterised Frames and Conceptual Spaces
Gerhard Schurz
Gottfried Vosgerau
Sebastian Scholz
manuscript
details
This is the final report on the DFG funded research project "Parameterised frames and conceptual spaces", funding period 1.10.2021 – 30.09.2024.
Concepts
in
Philosophy of Mind
Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Miscellaneous
in
Philosophy of Cognitive Science
The Nature of Contents
in
Philosophy of Mind
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Generics revisited: Analyzing generalizations in children’s books and caregivers’ speech.
Sunny Yu
Alvin Tan
Siying Zhang
Phillip Miao
Riley Carlson
Gerstenberg Tobias
David Rose
forthcoming
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
details
Generics, general statements about categories, are believed to transmit essentialist beliefs--the idea that things have a hidden true nature. Research suggests that people essentialize natural (biological and non-living) and social kinds, but not artifacts. Previous studies using small datasets found that generics are often used to describe animate beings in speech to children. Using a larger corpus of children's books and parent speech, we examined a wider range of kinds and generalizing statements (including habituals and universals). Our results show that
...
generics are more likely used for biological kinds than artifacts and that their use increases in parent speech as children age. However, generics weren't more likely used for non-living or social kinds than artifacts. Habituals, at least in speech, were more likely used for social kinds than artifacts. Generalizing statements were more likely used for about non-living natural kinds than artifacts. These findings inform the debate over whether generics transmit essentialist beliefs. (
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The brain at rest: how the art and science of doing nothing has the power to improve your life.
Joseph Jebelli
2025
New York, NY: Dutton.
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From Joseph Jebelli, PhD, neuroscientist and author of In Pursuit of Memory, a narrative exploration of the science of doing nothing and its benefits for the brain and body We are constantly told to make the most of our time. Work harder, with more focus. Stop procrastinating. Optimize. To be happy, creative, and successful requires discipline. The most important thing is to be efficient with every precious hour. But what if all that advice was wrong, and letting the brain rest,
...
and the mind wander, could improve our lives? Dr. Joseph Jebelli proves this surprising and fascinating point in The Brain at Rest, blending science and personal stories with practical tips about using the brain's "default network," which turns itself on when we turn off the constant need to always do and achieve. By activating our default network through long walks, baths, and spending time in nature, we can all be more content, less stressed, and actually more productive. Perfect for anyone interested in science and creativity, or anyone feeling overwhelmed in their day-to-day lives, The Brain at Rest is a deeply researched and entertaining antidote to overwork and burnout, showing readers the way to happier, healthier, and more balanced lives"-- Provided by publisher. (
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Groundwork for Neo-Aristotelian Theories of Meaning.
Michael DeBord-Hall
manuscript
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La función Cp: una perspectiva materialista emergente para la ingeniería conceptual.
Catarina Machioni Spagnol
2024
Dissertation, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
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En este artículo, basada en una perspectiva materialista emergente, discutiré la función Cp como una función que emerge y actúa dentro del sistema cognitivo, proponiendo una visión refinada para la ingeniería conceptual. Basada en el funcionalismo y teorías de la emergencia de Dennett, Romero y Boden, presentaré un enfoque que sugiere que los cambios conceptuales profundos requieren más que simples ajustes semánticos; dependen de la interacción dinámica de los procesos que componen la función Cp. Concluiré que, para que la ingeniería
...
conceptual sea efectiva, debe tener en cuenta no solo el significado, sino también un conjunto de procesos integrados. In this article, based on an emerging materialist perspective, I will discuss the Cp function as one that emerges and operates within the cognitive system, proposing a refined view for conceptual engineering. Drawing on functionalism and emergent theories from Dennett, Romero and Boden, I will present an approach that suggests profound conceptual changes require more than simple semantic adjustments; they depend on the dynamic interaction of the processes that compose the Cp function. I will conclude that, for conceptual engineering to be effective, it must account not only for meaning but also for a set of integrated processes. (
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Polysemy and Inference: Reasoning with Underspecified Representations.
Elliot Schwartz
Griffin Pion
Jake Quilty-Dunn
Eric Mandelbaum
Spencer Caplan
2025
In David Barner, Neil Bramley, Azzurra Ruggeri & Caren Walker,
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 47
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Lexical ambiguity has classically been categorized into two kinds. Homonyms are single word forms that map to multiple, unrelated meanings (e.g., “bat” meaning baseball equipment or a flying mammal). Polysemes are single word forms that map to multiple, related senses (e.g., “breakfast” meaning a plate of food or an event). Yet there is a longstanding debate as to whether polysemy and homonymy reflect distinct cognitive representations. Some (e.g., Fodor & Lepore, 2002; Klein & Murphy, 2001) posit that they do not
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— merely describing differing patterns of usage — while others (e.g., Falkum & Vicente, 2015; Pietroski, 2018) argue that polysemes, but not homonyms, involve an underspecified representation that is neutral with respect to the form’s multiple senses. While some extant experimental evidence supports the latter view (Klepousniotou, Titone, & Romero, 2008; Srinivasan, Berner, & Rabagliati, 2019), there has not yet been clear evidence of the representation of lexical ambiguity affecting domain-general reasoning. Using a novel inference paradigm, we compare participants’ dispositions to endorse deductive, Aristotelian arguments with equivocating polysemes versus comparable arguments with equivocating homonyms. We find that participants endorse the former substantially more than the latter, a phenomenon that we dub the "Uncommon Sense Effect". Our results provide direct evidence that polysemes and homonyms have underlyingly distinct mental representations — in particular that polysemes uniquely invoke an underspecified representation that allows for rule-based inferences across distinct senses. (
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Conceptual spaces: Naturalness or cognitive sparseness?
Sebastian Scholz
Gottfried Vosgerau
2025
Synthese
205 (3):1-21.
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The conceptual spaces framework posits that conceptual content is structured geometrically, and is equipped with cognitive criteria of naturalness (namely, convexity and principles of cognitive economy). Its proponents suggest that cognitive naturalness is naturalness simpliciter, a novel move in a debate that is traditionally focused on how the world, and not the mind, is structured. We argue that “cognitive naturalness” is a misnomer and that the framework describes cognitive sparseness instead. To demonstrate this, we explore the approach’s shortcomings across various
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branches of the naturalness debate, most notably its failure to distinguish natural kinds from fictional kinds. Our diagnosis is that the evolutionary pragmatism employed by its proponents fails to establish a connection to the real world, thus failing to secure the ontological and epistemic objectivity required for a theory of naturalness. We propose an alternative view, ecological empiricism, which posits that natural concepts or properties are those revealed through interaction with the real world. (
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Learning incommensurate concepts.
Hayley Clatterbuck
Hunter Gentry
2025
Synthese
205 (3):1-36.
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A central task of developmental psychology and philosophy of science is to show how humans learn radically new concepts. Famously, Fodor has argued that such learning is impossible if concepts have definitional structure and all learning is hypothesis testing. We present several learning processes that can generate novel concepts. They yield transformations of the fundamental feature space, generating new similarity structures which can underlie conceptual change. This framework provides a tractable, empiricist-friendly account that unifies and shores up various strands of
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the neo-Quinean approach to conceptual development. (
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The illusion of credibility: How the pseudosciences appear scientific.
August Hämmerli
Claus Beisbart
David Joachim Grüning
Kevin Reuter
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The pseudosciences often bear a striking resemblance to the sciences. Using a mimicry account as a framework, this paper investigates how the appearance of social media posts influences people’s perception of the content of such posts as scientific. We present the results of two empiri- cal studies. The first, preparatory study identifies typical characteristics of “scientificness” in social media posts to inform feature manipulations for the main study. The main study then examines what happens if the features are systematically manipulated.
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The findings support the hypothesis that pseudoscientific digital content benefits from using features of scientificness. We discuss implications for understanding the appeal and persistence of pseudoscience. (
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Concepts: Core Readings, by Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurance.
[REVIEW]
Robert J. Stainton
2000
Philosophy in Review
20 (2):127-129.
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The Dual Character of Essentially Contested Concepts.
Joonas Pennanen
2023
In Panu Raatikainen,
_Essays in the Philosophy of Language._ Acta Philosophica Fennica Vol. 100.
Helsinki: Societas Philosophica Fennica. pp. 371-410.
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Communicating Understanding.
Adham El Shazly
forthcoming
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
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Knowledge can be transmitted through testimony. What about understanding? In this paper I argue against the possibility of testimonial understanding by giving an account of understanding in terms of ‘mental structures’. Then I argue while we cannot integrate communicating understanding into a propositional model of epistemic communication, we can do so on a perspectival model. I highlight the importance of this to the epistemology of education throughout.
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Unification of Artificial Intelligence and Psychology: Volume One - Foundations.
Petros A. M. Gelepithis
2024
Cham: Springer Nature.
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This book —the first of a two-volume monograph— seeks to unify the hitherto perceived-as-disparate foundations of psychology and artificial intelligence. It does this by replacing their constitutive notions with a novel common one: noémon system. The ensued Theory of Noémon Systems is developed in terms of an interdisciplinary, language-based axiomatic approach. The first volume details the development of the foundations of the theory and expounds ramifications for cognitive science and AI including novel solutions to the AGI debate and Darwin’s mental
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gap issue, while offering the first complete definition of AI. The book concurrently explores the similarities and differences between humans and AI/robot systems with respect to the evolution-dependent phenomena of representation, thinking, understanding and communication. The book is an extensive one; because of it’s extensiveness and broad ramifications, this book will appeal to scientists working on the interfaces of psychology, AI, philosophy of mind, neuroscience, and the humanities. The complicated and extensive unification of the fields of Artificial Intelligence and psychology is continued in the second volume that breaks further new ground for both disciplines, with thought-provoking and compelling implications for both. (
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The Cognitive and Ontological Dimensions of Naturalness – Editor’s Introduction.
Sebastian Scholz
Gottfried Vosgerau
2024
Philosophia
52 (4):845-848.
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Editor’s Introduction to the Special Issue ‘The Cognitive Ontological Dimensions of Naturalness’, including brief introductions of the individual contributions.
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Perception and its Content. Toward the Propositional Attitude View.
Daniel Kalpokas
2024
Maryland: Lexington Books.
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What is perception? What is, if any, its content? What is the contribution of perception to knowledge? This book addresses these questions clearly and directly. The chief thesis the author argues for is that perception has conceptual, propositional, and world-dependent content. After criticizing those theories of experience that conceive it as contentless (the causal-linkage approach and naïve realism), the book examines the nature of perceptual content. Here, the author critically scrutinizes different varieties of non-conceptualism and claims that the content of
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experience is partly conceptual. Having established that thesis, the author defends the propositional-attitude view, according to which perceptual content is propositional in nature. A crucial step in the book comes when the author explores the world-dependent character of such content. He holds here that the content of experience is composed of concepts and the presented objects, such as they appear from the subject’s point of view and determined environmental conditions. This view allows him to state that perception provides non-inferential knowledge of the truth-makers of our judgments and beliefs. Furthermore, and importantly, that view sheds light on how the mind relates to the world. (
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Perceptual Categorization and Perceptual Concepts.
E. J. Green
forthcoming
Philosophical Quarterly
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Conceptualism is the view that at least some perceptual representation is conceptual. This paper considers a prominent recent argument against Conceptualism due to Ned Block. Block’s argument appeals to patterns of color representation in infants, alleging that infants exhibit categorical perception of color while failing to deploy concepts of color categories. Accordingly, the perceptual representation of color categories in infancy must be non-conceptual. This argument is distinctive insofar as it threatens not only the view that all perception is conceptual, but
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also views that restrict the Conceptualist thesis to perceptual categorization. However, I contend that it fails at two stages. Block’s arguments for the perceptual representation of color categories in infancy, and against color concept deployment in infancy, are unpersuasive. Thus, Block has not vanquished Conceptualism. I draw out implications for debates about the perception-cognition border and for the question of whether explicit categorization occurs in perception. (
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Having a concept has a cost.
Michael Deigan
2024
Synthese
204 (2):1-20.
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Having a concept usually has some epistemic benefits. It might give one means to knowing certain facts, for example. This paper explores the possibility that having a concept can have an epistemic cost. I argue that it typically does, even putting aside our contingent limitations, assuming that there is epistemic value in understanding others from their own perspectives.
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Concepts.
Nicholas Shea
2024
Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (Michael C Frank and Asifa Majid, Eds.), MIT Press
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Defending Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering.
Matthieu Queloz
2024
Analysis
84 (2):385-400.
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In this paper, I respond to three critical notices of The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering, written by Cheryl Misak, Alexander Prescott-Couch, and Paul Roth, respectively. After contrasting genealogical conceptual reverse-engineering with conceptual reverse-engineering, I discuss pragmatic genealogy’s relation to history. I argue that it would be a mistake to understand pragmatic genealogy as a fiction (or a model, or an idealization) as opposed to a form of historical explanation. That would be to rely on precisely the
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stark dichotomy between idealization and history that I propose to call into question. Just as some historical explanations begin with a functional hypothesis arrived at through idealization as abstraction, some pragmatic genealogies embody an abstract form of historiography, stringing together, in a way that is loosely indexed to certain times and places, the most salient needs responsible for giving a concept the contours it now has. I then describe the naturalistic stance that I find expressed in the pragmatic genealogies I consider in the book before examining the evaluative standard at work in those genealogies, defusing the charge that they involve a commitment to a ‘stingy axiology’. (
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Concept formation in the wild.
Yrjö Engeström
2024
New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
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Based on cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), this book provides a new theoretical framework for understanding the collective formation of concepts that can guide the course of development in different activities and organizations. It is essential reading for researchers, advanced students and practitioners across human and social sciences.
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Breaking the language barrier: conceptual representation without a language-like format.
Iwan Williams
forthcoming
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
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An important part of the explanatory role of concepts is that they enable us to combine a wide variety of objects, properties and relations in thought, with contents spanning diverse domains. I discuss an argument that appears to show that paradigmatic non-linguistic representational formats are unsuited to play this role, and thus conceptual representation could not occur in these formats. I show that this argument fails, because it overlooks the possibility of individual concepts being shared between a number of special
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purpose representational systems. Demonstrating this requires defending the possibility of cross-format redeployment of concepts. (
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HOTT and Heavy: Higher-Order Thought Theory and the Theory-Heavy Approach to Animal Consciousness.
Jacob Berger
Myrto Mylopoulos
2024
Synthese
203 (98):1-21.
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According to what Birch (2022) calls the theory-heavy approach to investigating nonhuman-animal consciousness, we select one of the well-developed theories of consciousness currently debated within contemporary cognitive science and investigate whether animals exhibit the neural structures or cognitive abilities posited by that theory as sufficient for consciousness. Birch argues, however, that this approach is in general problematic because it faces what he dubs the dilemma of demandingness—roughly, that we cannot use theories that are based on the human case to assess
...
consciousness in nonhuman animals and vice versa. We argue here that, though this dilemma may problematize the application of many current accounts of consciousness to nonhuman animals, it does not challenge the use of standard versions of the higher-order thought theory (“HOTT”) of consciousness, according to which a creature is in a conscious mental state just in case it is aware of being in that state via a suitable higher-order thought (“HOT”). We show this in two ways. First, we argue that, unlike many extant theories of consciousness, HOTT is typically motivated by a commonsense, and more importantly, neutral condition on consciousness that applies to humans and animals alike. Second, we offer new empirical and theoretical reasons to think that many nonhuman animals possess the relevant HOTs necessary for consciousness. Considering these issues not only reveals the explanatory power of HOTT and some of its advantages over rival accounts, but also enables us to further extend and clarify the theory. (
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Doing History Philosophically and Philosophy Historically.
Marcel van Ackeren
Matthieu Queloz
2025
In Marcel van Ackeren & Matthieu Queloz,
Bernard Williams on Philosophy and History
. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 14-30.
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Bernard Williams argued that historical and philosophical inquiry were importantly linked in a number of ways. This introductory chapter distinguishes four different connections he identified between philosophy and history. (1) He believed that philosophy could not ignore its own history in the way that science can. (2) He thought that when engaging with philosophy’s history primarily to produce history, one still had to draw on philosophy. (3) Even doing history of philosophy philosophically, i.e. primarily to produce philosophy, required a keen
...
sense of how historically distant from us past philosophers were, on his view, because the point of reading them was to confront something different from the present. (4) He held that systematic philosophy itself needed to be done historically, engaging not necessarily with its own history, but with that of the concepts it sought to understand. The chapter closes with an overview of the volume’s structure and content. (
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The omnitemporality of idealities.
James Sares
2024
Continental Philosophy Review
57 (1):113–134.
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This article develops an interpretation and defense of Husserl’s account of the omnitemporality of idealities. I first examine why Husserl rejects the atemporality and temporal individuation of idealities on phenomenological grounds, specifically that these attributions prove countersensical in how they relate idealities to consciousness. As an alternative to these conceptions, I develop a two-sided interpretation of omnitemporality expressed in modal terms of actuality and possibility, the actual referring to appearances in time and the possible, to reactivation at any time. In
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defense of this interpretation of omnitemporality, I consider influential criticisms against Husserl’s account of idealities as they concern time, particularly whether the historical genesis of idealities compromises their omnitemporality by binding them to time. Ultimately, I argue that the transcendental historicity of idealities, despite being relevant to the question of validity and access, proves indifferent to their omnitemporality. (
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Number Concepts: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry.
Richard Samuels
Eric Snyder
2024
Cambridge University Press.
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This Element, written for researchers and students in philosophy and the behavioral sciences, reviews and critically assesses extant work on number concepts in developmental psychology and cognitive science. It has four main aims. First, it characterizes the core commitments of mainstream number cognition research, including the commitment to representationalism, the hypothesis that there exist certain number-specific cognitive systems, and the key milestones in the development of number cognition. Second, it provides a taxonomy of influential views within mainstream number cognition research,
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along with the central challenges these views face. Third, it identifies and critically assesses a series of core philosophical assumptions often adopted by number cognition researchers. Finally, the Element articulates and defends a novel version of pluralism about number concepts. (
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Prospects for Engineering Personhood.
Max F. Kramer
2024
American Journal of Bioethics
24 (1):69-71.
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What is personhood? What do we want it to be? Blumenthal-Barby (2024) offers an answer to the first question: personhood is an unhelpful, harmful, and pernicious concept in the bioethical setting....
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Constructing Embodied Emotion with Language: Moebius Syndrome and Face-Based Emotion Recognition Revisited.
Hunter Gentry
forthcoming
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
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Some embodied theories of concepts state that concepts are represented in a sensorimotor manner, typically via simulation in sensorimotor cortices. Fred Adams (2010) has advanced an empirical argument against embodied concepts reasoning as follows. If concepts are embodied, then patients with certain sensorimotor impairments should perform worse on categorization tasks involving those concepts. Adams cites a study with Moebius Syndrome patients that shows typical categorization performance in face-based emotion recognition. Adams concludes that their typical performance shows that embodiment is false.
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Moebius patients must draw on amodal (non-embodied) emotion concepts. In this paper, I review face-based emotion recognition studies with Moebius patients yielding conflicting results and diagnose these conflicts as a difference in experimental design. When emotion labels are provided, patients have typical performance, but when labels are not provided patients are severely deficient. I then show how an embodied, psychological constructionist view of emotions predicts and explains these performance differences. The upshot is that embodied theories of concepts are vindicated. (
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Against Arguments From Diagnostic Reasoning.
Jeske Toorman
2023
Cognitive Science
47 (11):e13376.
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Recent work in cognitive psychology and experimental semantics indicates that people do not categorize natural kinds solely by virtue of their purported scientific essence. Two attempts have been made to explain away the data by appealing to the idea that participants in these studies are reasoning diagnostically. I will argue that an appeal to diagnostic reasoning will likely not help to explain away the data.
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Ressentiment As Morally Disclosive Posture? Conceptual Issues from a Psychological Point of View.
Natalie Rodax
Markus Wrbouschek
Katharina Hametner
Sara Paloni
Nora Ruck
Leonard Brixel
2021
Review of Philosophy and Psychology
(2):1-17.
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In psychological research, ressentiment is alluded to as a negative emotional response directed at social groups that are mostly marked as ‘inferior others’. However, conceptual work on this notion is sorely missing. In our conceptual proposal, we use the notion of ‘moral emotions’ as a starting point: typically referred to as “other-condemning” moral emotions (Haidt), psychologists have loosely conceptualised anger, contempt and disgust as a set of negative emotions that have distinct elicitors and involve affective responses to sanction moral misconduct
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of ‘others’. Though this conglomerate of different other-condemning emotions might describe emotions of ressentiment, we argue that the phenomenon itself is a more complex sentiment. Therefore, we apply Withy’s concept of ‘disclosive posture’ to account for the different psychological processes underlying ressentiment. Disclosing refers to a specific openness to the world, which in the case of ressentiment implies a specific awareness of and sensibility for instances of inequality, grudge, or disfavour. Ressentiment thus becomes a perceptual tool in morally relevant everyday situations. The term ‘posture’ refers to a habitualised, embodied comportment or action tendency that leads to the adoption of a negative attitude and stance towards others. Drawing on Withy, we discuss ressentiment’s similarities (and differences) to the closely related concept of hatred (Szanto, Vendrell Ferran) to embed the analysis of ressentiment in a broader social framework. (
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Implementing conceptual engineering: lessons from social movements.
Carme Isern-Mas
forthcoming
Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy
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Communication strategies to shape public opinion can be applied to the philosophical program of conceptual engineering. I propose to look for answers to the implementation challenge for conceptual engineering on similar challenges that arise in other contexts, such as that of social movements. I claim that conceptual engineering is successfully practiced in other areas with direct consequences on the political landscape, and that we can apply to philosophy what we might learn from those successful practices. With that end in mind,
...
I explain the psychological approach to conceptual engineering. I present what has been called “the implementation challenge”, which is the problem that emerges from the possibility of control over the content of our concepts. The challenge consists in that if there is not such a control, conceptual engineering is not implementable. Then, I review some of the reactions that have been given to that challenge, and I defend the feasibility of conceptual engineering appealing to the collective action frames that social movements endorse as an instance of a successful kind of conceptual engineering and derive some strategies that might be of use for conceptual engineering in philosophy. Finally, I reply to some anticipated objections to my proposal. (
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The meaning of ‘reasonable’: Evidence from a corpus-linguistic study.
Lucien Baumgartner
Markus Kneer
2025
In Kevin Tobia,
The Cambridge handbook of experimental jurisprudence
. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
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The reasonable person standard is key to both Criminal Law and Torts. What does and does not count as reasonable behavior and decision-making is frequently deter- mined by lay jurors. Hence, laypeople’s understanding of the term must be considered, especially whether they use it predominately in an evaluative fashion. In this corpus study based on supervised machine learning models, we investigate whether laypeople use the expression ‘reasonable’ mainly as a descriptive, an evaluative, or merely a value-associated term. We find that
...
‘reasonable’ is predicted to be an evaluative term in the majority of cases. This supports prescriptive accounts, and challenges descriptive and hybrid accounts of the term—at least given the way we operationalize the latter. Interestingly, other expressions often used interchangeably in jury instructions (e.g. ‘careful,’ ‘ordinary,’ ‘prudent,’ etc), however, are predicted to be descriptive. This indicates a discrepancy between the intended use of the term ‘reasonable’ and the understanding lay jurors might bring into the court room. (
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The Dworkin–Williams Debate: Liberty, Conceptual Integrity, and Tragic Conflict in Politics.
Matthieu Queloz
2024
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
109 (1):3-29.
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Bernard Williams articulated his later political philosophy notably in response to Ronald Dworkin, who, striving for coherence or integrity among our political concepts, sought to immunize the concepts of liberty and equality against conflict. Williams, doubtful that we either could or should eliminate the conflict, resisted the pursuit of conceptual integrity. Here, I reconstruct this Dworkin–Williams debate with an eye to drawing out ideas of ongoing philosophical and political importance. The debate not only exemplifies Williams's political realism and its connection
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to his critique of the morality system. It also illustrates the virtues and hazards of contemporary efforts to ameliorate or engineer our concepts; it indicates what political philosophy might look to in appraising political concepts; it adverts to the different needs these concepts have to meet if they are to sustain a politics of pluralism, deal with polarization, and secure the consent of those who end up on the losing side of political decisions; and it presents us with two starkly contrasting conceptions of politics itself, of the place of political values within it, and of our prospects of reducing the uncomfortably conflictual character of those values through philosophy. (
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Debunking Concepts.
Matthieu Queloz
2023
Midwest Studies in Philosophy
47 (1):195-225.
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Genealogies of belief have dominated recent philosophical discussions of genealogical debunking at the expense of genealogies of concepts, which has in turn focused attention on genealogical debunking in an epistemological key. As I argue in this paper, however, this double focus encourages an overly narrow understanding of genealogical debunking. First, not all genealogical debunking can be reduced to the debunking of beliefs—concepts can be debunked without debunking any particular belief, just as beliefs can be debunked without debunking the concepts in
...
terms of which they are articulated. Second, not all genealogical debunking is epistemological debunking. Focusing on concepts rather than beliefs brings distinct forms of genealogical debunking to the fore that cannot be comprehensively captured in terms of epistemological debunking. We thus need a broader understanding of genealogical debunking, which encompasses not just epistemological debunking, but also what I shall refer to as metaphysical debunking and ethical debunking. (
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