Doing without Concepts pot

[...]... judgments about the referents of these concepts Theories of concepts attempt to describe the knowledge stored in concepts, the format of concepts, the cognitive processes that use concepts, the acquisition of concepts, and the localization of concepts in the brain By doing so, they can explain the properties of people’s higher cognitive competences Chapter 2 describes what concepts are taken to be in philosophy... performances The same is true for hypotheses about the kind of knowledge stored in concepts The moral is this: testing hypotheses about the format of concepts or about what kind of knowledge is stored in concepts without developing hypotheses about the nature of the cognitive processes using these concepts is methodologically inappropriate Psychologists ought to study concepts and cognitive processes... theories of concepts have purported to identify the general properties of concepts 1.3.2 What Are the Scientifically Relevant Properties of Concepts? What are psychologists’ generalizations about? In other words, what are the scientifically relevant properties of concepts? Theories of concepts focus on five properties of concepts: (1) the kind of knowledge stored in concepts, (2) the format of concepts, ... terms, without any preconception about the goals that psychologists attempt to 3 4 Doing without Concepts meet I argue that progress in the psychology of concepts and in the budding neuropsychology of concepts is conditional on psychologists and neuropsychologists eliminating the notion of concept from their theoretical vocabulary This eliminativist proposal is the fifth and last tenet of the hypothesis... Carey has focused on children’s and adults’ concepts of biological entities, including concepts of animals, plants, and biological events such as death or growth.15 The focus here is on the properties that characterize a specific class of concepts the concepts of biological entities Theories of concepts focus neither on specific concepts nor on specific classes of concepts They usually aim at characterizing... all concepts (the Received View), I propose that the class of concepts divides into kinds that have little in common The Heterogeneity Hypothesis is also contrasted with theories of concepts that are superficially similar—namely, hybrid theories of concepts in order to prevent their conflation Introduction 5 Chapter 4 describes the theoretical entities that have been proposed by the main views of concepts. .. this is strong evidence for the conceptual promiscuity of concepts 1.3 What Is a Psychological Theory of Concepts? Since the 1970s, psychologists have proposed several theories of concepts particularly prototype theories, exemplar theories, theory theories, and neo-empiricist theories (chapter 4) To a large extent, these theories Doing without Concepts 18 give different answers to the same set of questions... 279 220 Doing without Concepts This page intentionally left blank Introduction Once at the center of philosophy, the philosophy of concepts has now been marginalized, maybe because for a few years now, it has been stalled The contrast with the psychology of concepts is stark Psychologists working on categorization, induction, and reasoning have continued developing and refining their theories of concepts, ... USA, June 2003 Contents Introduction 3 1 Concepts in Psychology 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 7 “Concept” in Psychology 7 Evidence for the Existence of Concepts 14 What Is a Psychological Theory of Concepts? 17 Alternative Characterizations of the Notion of Concept Conclusion 29 2 Concepts in Philosophy 21 31 2.1 “Concept” in Philosophy 32 2.2 Concepts in Philosophy versus Concepts in Psychology 34 2.3 How Are... have many properties in common (see chapter 4) 4 Acquisition: Theories of concepts have often, though not always, included hypotheses concerning how concepts are acquired.19 There are various ways to study the acquisition of concepts Developmental psychologists focus on how children acquire their stock of concepts The acquisition of concepts by children has also been studied by school psychologists, who .