About this topic
Summary Debates on the ontology of concepts focus on what sorts of things they are. There are roughly three major positions on concept ontology. The first is that concepts are abstrata: non-psychological entities such as properties or Fregean senses. The second is that concepts are mental representations or some other type of psychological entities. The third is that concepts are abilities of some kind, such as the ability to recognize their instances.
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  1. The New Philosopher-Kings: Conceptual Engineering and Social Authority.Nick Smyth - manuscript
    Many philosophers have recently become interested in conceptual engineering, or the activity of producing better conceptual schemes in human populations. But few, if any, are asking the question: what would it mean for actual human agents to possess the social authority to modify a conceptual scheme in this way? This paper argues for a deontological approach to conceptual engineering, wherein we have to secure social authority qua engineers before attempting to modify social concepts. I show that the dominant, consequentialist conception (...)
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  2. Concepts and cognitive structures.Kevan Edwards - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
    The broad topic of this paper is the relationship between the theoretical notion of a concept and familiar types of cognitive structures (prototypes, exemplars, causal models, etc.) The discussion is organized around different ways that theorists about concepts can attempt to accommodate what has been dubbed the Heterogeneity Hypothesis (roughly: the claim that various types of structures with which concepts have been identified co-exist and form a heterogeneous class). The most general goal of the paper is to clarify the dialectical (...)
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  3. What Makes Normative Concepts Normative.Shawn Hernandez & N. G. Laskowski - forthcoming - Southwest Philosophy Review 37 (1).
    When asked which of our concepts are normative concepts, metaethicists would be quick to list such concepts as GOOD, OUGHT, and REASON. When asked why such concepts belong on the list, metaethicists would be much slower to respond. Matti Eklund is a notable exception. In his recent book, Choosing Normative Concepts, Eklund argues by elimination for “the Normative Role view” that normative concepts are normative in virtue of having a “normative role” or being “used normatively”. One view that Eklund aims (...)
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  4. Metaphysics of concepts: In defense of the abilitist approach.Ilya Bulov - 2023 - Theoria 89 (5):625-639.
    Abilitism is an approach to the metaphysics of concepts according to which each concept consists of a managing cognitive ability coordinating other abilities (cognitive and non-cognitive) and a set of subordinate abilities associated with this managing ability. As I argue here, if we accept the abilitist approach, we can efficiently solve such puzzles in the metaphysics of concepts as the partial possession problem, the concept pluralism problem, etc. However, there are some possible objections to abilitism, concerning the abilitist explanation of (...)
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  5. A Qualitative Approach to Conceptual Spaces: Prototypes as Qualitative Atoms.Javier Belastegui - 2022 - Erkenntnis 89:319-354.
    The aim of this paper is to propose a qualitative approach to the theory of conceptual spaces, in contrast to the usual metric framework. This requires qualitative notions of similarity, simple concepts, prototypes and conceptual categorisation. For this purpose, I will introduce three mathematical models for conceptual spaces. The first one is topological and has been proposed by Mormann. The other two are new and are based on atomistic orders and similarity relations. I will discuss how each of them deals (...)
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  6. Cognitive Ontology: Taxonomic Practices in the Mind-Brain Sciences.Muhammad Ali Khalidi - 2022 - New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
    The search for the “furniture of the mind” has acquired added impetus with the rise of new technologies to study the brain and identify its main structures and processes. Philosophers and scientists are increasingly concerned to understand the ways in which psychological functions relate to brain structures. Meanwhile, the taxonomic practices of cognitive scientists are coming under increased scrutiny, as researchers ask which of them identify the real kinds of cognition and which are mere vestiges of folk psychology. Muhammad Ali (...)
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  7. Bridging mainstream and formal ontology: A causality-based upper ontology in Dietrich of Freiberg.Luis M. Augusto - 2021 - Journal of Knowledge Structures and Systems 2 (2):35.
    Ontologies are some of the most central constructs in today's large plethora of knowledge technologies, namely in the context of the semantic web. As their coinage indicates, they are direct heirs to the ontological investigations in the long Western philosophical tradition, but it is not easy to make bridges between them. Contemporary ontological commitments often take causality as a central aspect for the ur-segregation of entities, especially in scientific upper ontologies; theories of causality and philosophical ontological investigations often go hand-in-hand, (...)
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  8. Belief Fragments and Mental Files.Michael Murez - 2021 - In Cristina Borgoni, Dirk Kindermann & Andrea Onofri (eds.), The Fragmented Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 251-278.
    Belief fragments and mental files are based on the same idea: that information in people’s minds is compartmentalized rather than lumped all together. Philosophers mostly use the two notions differently, though the exact relationship between fragments and files has yet to be examined in detail. This chapter has three main goals. The first is to argue that fragments and files, properly understood, play distinct yet complementary explanatory roles; the second is to defend a model of belief that includes them both; (...)
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  9. Concept Diagrams and the Context Principle.Jens Lemanski - 2020 - In Language, Logic, and Mathematics in Schopenhauer. Basel, Schweiz: Birkhäuser. pp. 47-73.
    What is the primacy of logic? Concepts, judgments, or inferences? Whereas representationalists traditionally argue for a primacy of the conceptual, rationalists, referring to the context principle and the use theory of meaning, consider judgments and inferences to be primary. This dispute also seems to be applicable to logic diagrams: Whereas “Euler-type diagrams” are actually only for judgments and inferences, “concept diagrams” represent ontologies by using concepts. With reference to Schopenhauer, the paper develops a position called “rational representationalism.” According to this (...)
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  10. Acerca de la naturaleza del “yo” narrativo en Dennett.Malena Leon - 2020 - Griot : Revista de Filosofia 20 (2):109-128.
    Dennett elabora una concepción del “yo” entendido como un centro de gravedad narrativo. Uno de los obstáculos principales para valorar esta propuesta radica en que resulta dificultoso entender cuál es la naturaleza del concepto dennettiano de “yo”: concretamente, cuáles son los compromisos ontológicos y epistemológicos que cabe atribuir al fenómeno en cuestión. En este artículo defendemos que el mejor modo de realizar una reconstrucción interpretativa de su noción de “yo” es apelando a la distinción elaborada por Reichenbach entre tres clases (...)
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  11. Unifying Three Notions of Concepts.Edward N. Zalta - 2019 - Theoria 87 (1):13-30.
    In this presentation, I first outline three different notions of concepts: one derives from Leibniz, while the other two derive from Frege. The Leibnizian notion is the subject of his “calculus of concepts” (which is really an algebra). One notion of concept from Frege is what we would call a “property”, so that when Frege says “x falls under the concept F”, we would say “x instantiates F” or “x exemplifies F”. The other notion of concept from Frege is that (...)
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  12. Begriffe und Eigenschaften – Versuche eines Pragmatisten.David Hommen - 2018 - In David Hommen & Dennis Sölch (eds.), Philosophische Sprache zwischen Tradition und Innovation. Berlin: Peter Lang. pp. 291–320.
    There are striking similarities in the ways philosophers use to speak about concepts and properties. For example, it is commonly said that concepts and properties are ‘predicated’ of things – which, in turn, are said to ‘exemplify’ those concepts or properties. Concepts as well as properties are assumed to have ‘instances’ and ‘extensions’ and to be the semantical values of adjectives like ‘red,’ ‘round,’ and so on. Even metaphysically, concepts and properties seem to have much in common. Thus, both have (...)
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  13. Representing Concepts by Weighted Formulas.Daniele Porello & Claudio Masolo - 2018 - In Stefano Borgo, Pascal Hitzler & Oliver Kutz (eds.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems - Proceedings of the 10th International Conference, {FOIS} 2018, Cape Town, South Africa, 19-21 September 2018. IOS Press. pp. 55--68.
    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. (...)
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  14. Ciclo de vida de un concepto en el marco de la cognición ad hoc.José V. Hernández-Conde - 2017 - Theoria. An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science 32 (3):271.
    Recently, Casasanto and Lupyan (2015) have asserted that there are no context-independent concepts: all concepts are constructed ad hoc when they are instantiated. My aim is to show that the ad hoc cognition framework can be characterized by a similarity-based theory of concepts, and that two different notions of concept should be distinguished —which may be identified with two distinct stages of their life cycle (storage and instantiation). This approach brings together virtues from opposing views: (a) invariantist: stored concepts are (...)
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  15. The Cell and Protoplasm as Container, Object, and Substance, 1835–1861.Daniel Liu - 2017 - Journal of the History of Biology 50 (4):889-925.
    (Recipient of the 2020 Everett Mendelsohn Prize.) This article revisits the development of the protoplasm concept as it originally arose from critiques of the cell theory, and examines how the term “protoplasm” transformed from a botanical term of art in the 1840s to the so-called “living substance” and “the physical basis of life” two decades later. I show that there were two major shifts in biological materialism that needed to occur before protoplasm theory could be elevated to have equal status (...)
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  16. Intentionality as Partial Identity.Christopher M. P. Tomaszewski - 2017 - Southwest Philosophy Review 33 (1):15-23.
    One of the greatest challenges facing materialist theories of the human mind is the problem of intentionality. As many non-materialists of various stripes have pointed out, it is very difficult to say, if the human mind is a purely material thing, how this material thing can be about or represent another thing wholly distinct from itself. However, for their part, these same non-materialists have relied heavily or exclusively on this intuition that one material thing cannot be about another. In this (...)
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  17. Knowledge Structures and the Nature of Concepts.David Hommen & Tanja Osswald - 2016 - In David Hommen, Christoph Kann & Tanja Oswald (eds.), Concepts and Categorization. Systematic and Historical Perspectives. Münster: mentis.
    It has become commonplace in the theory of concepts to distinguish between questions about the structure and questions about the ontology of concepts. Structural questions concern the way concepts are composed of, or otherwise related to, other concepts (or non-conceptual constituents), while ontological questions concern the metaphysical nature of concepts: how concepts exist (if they exist); what kind of entities they are. A tacit assumption in discussions about the structure and ontology of concepts seems to be that structural and ontological (...)
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  18. Two Constraints on a Theory of Concepts.Andrea Onofri - 2016 - Dialectica 70 (1):3-27.
    Two general principles have played a crucial role in the recent debate on concepts. On the one hand, we want to allow different subjects to have the same concepts, thus accounting for concept publicity: concepts are ‘the sort of thing that people can, and do, share’. On the other hand, a subject who finds herself in a so-called ‘Frege case’ appears to have different concepts for the same object: for instance, Lois Lane has two distinct concepts SUPERMAN and CLARK KENT (...)
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  19. Neural plasticity and concepts ontogeny.Alessio Plebe & Marco Mazzone - 2016 - Synthese 193 (12):3889-3929.
    Neural plasticity has been invoked as a powerful argument against nativism. However, there is a line of argument, which is well exemplified by Pinker and more recently by Laurence and Margolis The conceptual mind: new directions in the study of concepts, MIT, Cambridge, 2015) with respect to concept nativism, according to which even extreme cases of plasticity show important innate constraints, so that one should rather speak of “constrained plasticity”. According to this view, cortical areas are not really equipotential, they (...)
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  20. Content, Concepts, Concept Possession.Eva Schmidt - 2015 - In Modest Nonconceptualism: Epistemology, Phenomenology, and Content. Cham: Springer.
    In this chapter, I clarify the notions of mental content and of concept. I present competing views on these notions and indicate my own position. I introduce content in terms of correctness conditions and distinguish several kinds of propositions, as well as non-propositional scenario content, with which perceptual content might be identified. I relate this discussion to a wide-spread commitment in philosophy of perception to respect the subject’s perceptual perspective in ascriptions of perceptual content. Then I compare views of concepts (...)
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  21. Rationalizing Self-Interpretation.Laura Schroeter & Francois Schroeter - 2015 - In Chris Daly (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophical Methods. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 419–447.
    A characteristic form of philosophical inquiry seeks to answer ‘what is x?’ questions. In this paper, we ask how philosophers do and should adjudicate debates about the correct answer to such questions. We argue that philosophers do and should rely on a distinctive type of pragmatic and meta-representational reasoning – a form of rationalizing self-interpretation – in answering ‘what is x?’ questions. We start by placing our methodological discussion within a broader theoretical framework. We posit a necessary connection between epistemic (...)
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  22. Normative Concepts: A Connectedness Model.Laura Schroeter - 2014 - Philosophers' Imprint 14.
    This paper proposes a new relational account of concepts and shows how it is particularly well suited to characterizing normative concepts. The key advantage of our ‘connectedness’ model is that it explains how subjects can share the same normative concepts despite radical divergences in the descriptive or motivational commitments they associate with them. The connectedness model builds social and historical facts into the foundations of concept identity. This aspect of the model, we suggest, reshapes normative epistemology and provides new resources (...)
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  23. Sense, Mentalese, and Ontology.Jacob Beck - 2013 - ProtoSociology 30:29-48.
    Modes of presentation are often posited to accommodate Frege’s puzzle. Philosophers differ, however, in whether they follow Frege in identifying modes of presentation with Fregean senses, or instead take them to be formally individuated symbols of “Mentalese”. Building on Fodor, Margolis and Laurence defend the latter view by arguing that the mind-independence of Fregean senses renders them ontologically suspect in a way that Mentalese symbols are not. This paper shows how Fregeans can withstand this objection. Along the way, a clearer (...)
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  24. Natural Kinds and Concept Eliminativism.Samuli Pöyhönen - 2013 - In Vassilios Karakostas & Dennis Dieks (eds.), EPSA11 Perspectives and Foundational Problems in Philosophy of Science. Cham: Springer. pp. 167--179.
    Recently in the philosophy of psychology it has been suggested that several putative phenomena such as emotions, memory, or concepts are not genuine natural kinds and should therefore be eliminated from the vocabulary of scientific psychology. In this paper I examine the perhaps most well known case of scientific eliminativism, Edouard Machery’s concept eliminativism. I argue that the split-lump-eliminate scheme of con- ceptual change underlying Machery’s eliminativist proposal assumes a simplistic view of the functioning of scientific concepts. Conceiving of scientific (...)
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  25. Are Concepts Creatures of Darkness?Laura Schroeter - 2013 - Analytic Philosophy 54 (2):277-292.
    In Our Knowledge of the Internal World, Robert Stalnaker presents a sophisticated new defense of a radically externalist and contextualist approach to mental content. Stalnaker holds that unstructured propositions—sets of possible worlds—can provide a complete account of mental content, including Fregean cognitive significance phenomena. So there is no theoretical job for concepts to fulfill. Stalnaker sees concepts as ‘creatures of darkness’ that encourage theoretical confusion. Concepts are a vestige of the mistaken internalist picture of the mind: internal states that are (...)
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  26. Why Believe in Demonstrative Concepts?David Pereplyotchik - 2012 - Consciousness and Cognition 21 (2):636-638.
    I examine two arguments for the existence of demonstrative concepts—one due to Chuard (2006) and another due to Brewer (1999). I point out some important difficulties in each. I hope to show that much more work must be done to legitimize positing demonstrative concepts.
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  27. Higher-Level concepts and their heterogeneous implementations: A polemical review of Edouard Machery's Doing Without Concepts.Kevan Edwards - 2011 - Philosophical Psychology 24 (1):119-133.
    This paper offers a critical review of Edouard Machery's Doing Without Concepts, with a particular emphasis on an approach to concept individuation that is consistent with many of Machery's arguments but has the potential to avoid his eliminativist conclusion. The approach agrees with Machery's claims to the effect that prototypes, exemplars, theories (and so on) form a heterogeneous class, but construes these theoretical entities as implementing a unified, albeit coarse-grained, notion of a concept.
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  28. A cognitivist approach to concepts.Hans Johann Https://Orcidorg909X Glock - 2011 - .
    Th is article explores a cognitivist approach to concepts. Such an approach steers a middle course between the Scylla of subjectivism and the Charybdis of objectivism. While concepts are not mental particulars, they have an ineliminable cognitive dimension. Th e article explores several versions of cognitivism, focusing in particular on Künne’s Neo-Fregean proposal that concepts are modes of presentation. It also tackles a challenge facing all cognitivist accounts, namely the ‘proposition problem’: how can the cognitive dimension of concepts be reconciled (...)
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  29. (3 other versions)Concepts.Eric Margolis & Stephen Laurence - 2011 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    This entry provides an overview of theories of concepts that is organized around five philosophical issues: (1) the ontology of concepts, (2) the structure of concepts, (3) empiricism and nativism about concepts, (4) concepts and natural language, and (5) concepts and conceptual analysis.
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  30. Le véritable retour des définitions.Pierre Poirier & Guillaume Beaulac - 2011 - Dialogue 50 (1):153-164.
    In our critical review of Doing without Concepts, we argue that although the heterogeneity hypothesis (according to which exemplars, prototypes and theories are natural kinds that should replace ‘concept’) may end fruitless debates in the psychology of concepts, Edouard Machery did not anticipate one consequence of his suggestion: Definitions now acquire a new status as another one of the bodies of information replacing ‘concept’. In order to support our hypothesis, we invoke dual-process models to suggest that prototypes, exemplars and theories (...)
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  31. (1 other version)Concepts, abilities, and propositions.Hans-Johann Glock - 2010 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 81 (1):115-134.
    This article investigates whether the concept of a concept can be given a fairly uniform explanation through a 'cognitivist' account, one that accepts that concepts exist independently of individual subjects, yet nonetheless invokes mental achievements and capacities. I consider various variants of such an account, which identify a concept, respectively, with a certain kind of abilitiy, rule and way of thinking. All of them are confronted with what I call the 'proposition problem', namely that unlike these explananda concepts are standardly (...)
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  32. Concepts, Brains, and Behaviour.Anthony Kenny - 2010 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 81 (1):105-113.
    Concepts are best understood as a particular kind of human ability: a person who has mastered the use of a word for F in some language possesses the concept of F. Abilities are individuated by their possessors and their exercises, though they are not to be identified with either. Typically abilities are associated with vehicles, that is to say underlying actualities which account for their exercises. The mind is the human ability to form concepts, and its principal vehicle is the (...)
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  33. Noema and thinkability: An essay on Husserl's theory of intentionality.Łukasz Kosowski - 2010 - Ontos.
    The years of study on Husserl’s theory of intentionality have led to a number of non-equivalent interpretations. The present work attempts to investigate the most prominent of these by presenting both their advantages and difficulties. However, its key point is specifically the analysis of Husserl’s theory. This is made in several stages that are concerned with the relation between noesis and noema: whether it is one-to-one or many-to-one, the kind of transcendency and dependency between them, and whether noema supervenes on (...)
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  34. Concepts are a functional kind. Comment on Machery's Doing Without Concepts.Elisabetta Lalumera - 2010 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2-3):217-18.
    This commentary focuses on Machery's eliminativist claim, that ought to be eliminated from the theoretical vocabulary of psychology because it fails to denote a natural kind. I argue for the more traditional view that concepts are a functional kind, which provides the simplest account of the empirical evidence discussed by Machery.
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  35. New Perspectives on Concepts.Julia Langkau & Christian Nimtz (eds.) - 2010 - BRILL.
    Much recent work on concepts has been inspired by and developed within the bounds of the representational theory of the mind often taken for granted by philosophers of mind, cognitive scientists, and psychologists alike. The contributions to this volume take a more encompassing perspective on the issue of concepts. Rather than modelling details of our representational architecture in line with the dominant paradigm, they explore three traditional issues concerning concepts. Is mastery of a language necessary for thought? Do concepts reduce (...)
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  36. (1 other version)Concepts: where subjectivism goes wrong.Hans Johann Https://Orcidorg909X Glock - 2009 - .
    The debate about concepts has always been shaped by a contrast between subjectivism, which treats them as phenomena in the mind or head of individuals, and objectivism, which insists that they exist independently of individual minds. The most prominent contemporary version of subjectivism is Fodor's RTM. The Fregean charge against subjectivism is that it cannot do justice to the fact that different individuals can share the same concepts. Proponents of RTM have accepted shareability as a ‘non-negotiable constraint’. At the same (...)
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  37. (1 other version)Concepts: Where subjectivism goes wrong.Hans-Johann Glock - 2009 - Philosophy 84 (1):5-29.
    The debate about concepts has always been shaped by a contrast between subjectivism, which treats them as phenomena in the mind or head of individuals, and objectivism, which insists that they exist independently of individual minds. The most prominent contemporary version of subjectivism is Fodor's RTM. The Fregean charge against subjectivism is that it cannot do justice to the fact that different individuals can share the same concepts. Proponents of RTM have accepted shareability as a 'non-negotiable constraint'. At the same (...)
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  38. Concetti: capacità o rappresentazioni?E. Lalumera - 2008 - Epistemologia 31 (1):75-96.
  39. Why be an anti-individualist?Laura Schroeter - 2008 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (1):105-141.
    Anti-individualists claim that concepts are individuated with an eye to purely external facts about a subject's environment about which she may be ignorant or mistaken. This paper offers a novel reason for thinking that anti-individualistic concepts are an ineliminable part of commonsense psychology. Our commitment to anti-individualism, I argue, is ultimately grounded in a rational epistemic agent's commitment to refining her own representational practices in the light of new and surprising information about her environment. Since anti-individualism is an implicit part (...)
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  40. The ontology of concepts: Abstract objects or mental representations?Eric Margolis & Stephen Laurence - 2007 - Noûs 41 (4):561-593.
    What is a concept? Philosophers have given many different answers to this question, reflecting a wide variety of approaches to the study of mind and language. Nonetheless, at the most general level, there are two dominant frameworks in contemporary philosophy. One proposes that concepts are mental representations, while the other proposes that they are abstract objects. This paper looks at the differences between these two approaches, the prospects for combining them, and the issues that are involved in the dispute. We (...)
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  41. Illusion of transparency.Laura Schroeter - 2007 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 85 (4):597 – 618.
    It's generally agreed that, for a certain a class of cases, a rational subject cannot be wrong in treating two elements of thought as co-referential. Even anti-individualists like Tyler Burge agree that empirical error is impossible in such cases. I argue that this immunity to empirical error is illusory and sketch a new anti-individualist approach to concepts that doesn't require such immunity.
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  42. On Peacocke's theory of concepts.Asuncion Alvarez - 2006 - In Ezio Di Nucci & Conor McHugh (eds.), Content, Consciousness, and Perception: Essays in Contemporary Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge Scholars Press.
    How are we to understand the notion of concept, the very concept of concept itself? One natural way, it seems to me, is to take Fregean sense as a model, and imposing similar constraints on a theory of concepts. This approach has the advantage, among others, of allowing for a distinction to be made between publicly shared, objective concepts, on the one hand, and private, subjective mental representations on the other - a distinction which, I believe, is desirable for various (...)
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  43. Concepts and properties.Dennis Earl - 2006 - Metaphysica 7 (1):67-85.
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  44. Words as concepts.Andrea Bianchi - 2005 - In Juan José Acero & Paolo Leonardi (eds.), Facets of Concepts. Padova: pp. 83-108.
  45. (1 other version)Mental Concepts as Natural Kind Concepts.Diana I. Pérez - 2004 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 30 (sup1):201-225.
    The aim of this paper is to explore the hypothesis that mental concepts are natural kind concepts. By ‘mental concepts’ I mean the ordinary words belonging to our everyday languages (English, Spanish, and so on) that we use in order to describe our mental life. The plan of the paper is as follows. In the first part, I shall present the hypothesis: firstly, I shall present a theory about the meaning of natural kind concepts following Putnam's 1975 proposal, with some (...)
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  46. Are concepts mental representations or abstracta?John Sutton - 2004 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (1):89-108.
    I argue that thoughts and concepts are mental representations rather than abstracta. I propose that the most important difference between the two views is that the mentalist believes that there are concept and thought tokens as well as types; this reveals that the dispute is not terminological but ontological. I proceed to offer an argument for mentalism. The key step is to establish that concepts and thoughts have lexical as well as semantic properties. I then show that this entails that (...)
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  47. (1 other version)Fregean senses, modes of presentation, and concepts.Edward N. Zalta - 2001 - Philosophical Perspectives 15:335-359.
    of my axiomatic theory of abstract objects.<sup>1</sup> The theory asserts the ex- istence not only of ordinary properties, relations, and propositions, but also of abstract individuals and abstract properties and relations. The.
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  48. A (leibnizian) theory of concepts.Edward N. Zalta - 2000 - History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis 3 (1):137-183.
    In this paper, the author develops a theory of concepts and shows that it captures many of the ideas about concepts that Leibniz expressed in his work. Concepts are first analyzed in terms of a precise background theory of abstract objects, and once concept summation and concept containment are defined, the axioms and theorems of Leibniz's calculus of concepts (in his logical papers) are derived. This analysis of concepts is then seamlessly connected with Leibniz's modal metaphysics of complete individual concepts. (...)
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  49. Concepts and Cognitive Science.Stephen Laurence & Eric Margolis - 1999 - In Eric Margolis & Stephen Laurence (eds.), Concepts: Core Readings. MIT Press. pp. 3-81.
    Given the fundamental role that concepts play in theories of cognition, philosophers and cognitive scientists have a common interest in concepts. Nonetheless, there is a great deal of controversy regarding what kinds of things concepts are, how they are structured, and how they are acquired. This chapter offers a detailed high-level overview and critical evaluation of the main theories of concepts and their motivations. Taking into account the various challenges that each theory faces, the chapter also presents a novel approach (...)
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  50. The pleonasticity of talk about concepts.Alex Barber - 1998 - Philosophical Studies 89 (1):53-86.
    The paper aims to disarm arguments, prevalent in diverse philosophical contexts, that deny the legitimacy of attributions of propositional attitudes on the grounds that the putative subject lacks one or more of the requite concepts. Its strategy is to offer and defend an extremely minimal account on concept possession. The agenda of the paper broadens into a defence of the thesis that concepts are a linguistic epiphenomenon: talk about them emerges as the result of certain contingently available and pleonastic ways (...)
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