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The heterogeneity of knowledge representation and the elimination of concept

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2010

Edouard Machery
Edouard Machery
Affiliation:
Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA 15260. [email protected]/~machery/
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Abstract

In this response, I begin by defending and clarifying the notion of concept proposed in Doing without Concepts (Machery 2009) against the alternatives proposed by several commentators. I then discuss whether psychologists and philosophers who theorize about concepts are talking about distinct phenomena or about different aspects of the same phenomenon, as argued in some commentaries. Next, I criticize the idea that the cognitive-scientific findings about induction, categorization, concept combination, and so on, could be explained by positing a single kind of concept, and I insist that many categories (substances, types of events, etc.) are represented by distinct coreferential concepts that belong to very different kinds of concept. This is followed by an assessment of the hybrid theories of concepts offered by commentators, according to which categories, substances, and types of events are represented by hybrid concepts made of several parts. Finally, I defend the proposal that it may be useful to eliminate concept from the theoretical vocabulary of psychology.

Type
Authors' Response
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 33 , Issue 2-3 , June 2010 , pp. 231 - 244
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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