James Hampton

In this chapter, a prototype theory is employed to investigate how generic concepts give rise to the sort of patterns one might expect from a “logical” account of the properties that are attributed to a prototype. Of particular interest is the fact that when one group of people is asked to judge “how true” one generic statement is (e.g., ‘Birds fly’), while another group judges “how true” a restricted version of that statement is (e.g., ‘Dull‐colored birds living in jungles fly’), the latter statement is often given a lower score than the former. The modifiers seem to have the effect of reducing the judged truth of this sort of generic statements. Why should this be? These results say important things about the “internal meaning” that people assign to generic statements on the basis of their combining concepts, and also say something about the “external,” truth‐conditions of generics.

To approach the many challenges involved in the notion of engineering concepts, it is important to have a clear idea of the starting point—the concepts that people use in their everyday lives, in conversations and in expressing beliefs, desires, intentions and so forth. The first Section of this chapter introduces evidence that I have accumulated over the last many years concerning the flexibility, context-dependence, and vagueness of such common concepts. The concept engineer needs to understand the structure of the “raw material” with which she is working.

Chapter 14, ‘Concepts in human adults’, focuses on concept usage by human adults, and is organized around the idea that there are both continuities and discontinuities between the concepts possessed by human adults on the one hand, and the concepts represented by nonhuman animals and human infants on the other. In continuity with the concepts of nonhuman animals and human infants, human adults represent individual folk concepts for everyday categories (e.g. dog, lunch, truck, chair) based on direct input from actual events. Day-to-day experiences with members from various categories allow adult humans to learn correlations of attributes and generalize to novel category instances based on similarity to abstracted prototypes and stored exemplars. This manner of learning and representing concepts based on experiential data should remind readers of the type of concept learning that was described in Chapters 3 and 4. It is also consistent with the concept-formation processes described for nonhuman animals and human infants in Chapters 8 through 12. It is in this respect that the concepts of human adults can be said to share an influential evolutionary and developmental past with nonhuman animals and human infants, respectively. However, in discontinuity with the concepts of human infants and nonhuman animals, Chapter 14 also describes how the concepts of human adults are verbal concepts. We have words for ‘dog’, ‘lunch’, ‘truck’, and ‘chair’, and as was conveyed in Chapter 6, there is in human children (beginning at around 12 months) and adults, a strong interdependence between language and concepts. In this sense, language can be likened to an additional input system (one supplementing direct experience) that allows for the cultural transmission of information through means such as informal and formal instruction from more experienced tutors, the reading of books, and the watching of films. It is this additional mode of concept acquisition, which encompasses the scholarship received from proper schooling and higher education, that can bring human adults to more abstract ways of representing concepts, including understanding of their deeper ontologies. The data reviewed in the chapter make the interesting point that although human adults seem to have both modes of concept construal (individual–folk and cultural–theoretical) available in their representational repertoires, it is the individual–folk mode that can often take precedence in tasks assessing adult concept usage. For example, in a study in which college students were told about a bird that had changed appearance to that of an insect through toxic contamination, a majority of participants judged that the creature’s category membership had in fact changed from bird to insect. In addition, there is the phenomenon of the illusion of explanatory depth in which people often think they know how things work at a deep level when in fact they do not know. That is, in keeping with the notion of psychological essentialism, human adults may believe that concepts have definitions, but when pressed, learn that either they do not have the definitions, or that they do not have conscious access to those definitions. Finally, there is the occurrence of the inverse- conjunction fallacy. In this case, if reasoning followed purely logical rules, then people who believe that some property is true of all members of a class, such as sofas, should also believe that the same property is true of all members of a subset of that class such as uncomfortable handmade sofas. However, as Chapter 14 observes, people are more likely to believe the more general statement than the more specific one. The findings suggest that there are important ways in which the verbal concepts possessed by adult humans do not respect the constraints of logic. This observation implies that although years of schooling may facilitate adult humans’ abilities to use abstract, formal powers of reasoning about concepts, there may be a more primitive, default mode of human adult concept representation (one held in common with nonhuman animals and human infants) that comes to the surface in a variety of tasks assessing concept usage.

The concepts to be considered in this chapter are those that occur in everyday common human thought and language – the “natural history” of concepts in use. While many may appear to be constituted by similarity relations, which make them suitable for modelling in conceptual spaces for example, other concepts in everyday use may be differently constituted. These concepts include abstract concepts, essentialist kinds, natural kinds, and logical or mathematical concepts. I discuss the different sources, uses and epistemological bases of these different forms of concept, and propose a three-level hierarchy of concepts based on their sources of validation.

The principle of compositionality is a statement about the semantics of expressions. It can also be framed slightly differently so that it becomes a principle about the content of complex concepts. This article explains this principle, and the reasons for deviating from it. It will review the psychological research on typicality effects and non-logical reasoning which suggest that explanations can be given for significant phenomena if concepts are understood as prototypes. The evidence suggests that the combination of prototypes follows a principle corresponding to something like PC' rather than PC. PC' states that the content of a complex concept is completely determined by the contents of its parts and their mode of combination, together with general knowledge. A prototype representation of the conjunctive concept is formed by aggregating one feature with another. Any instance is then judged to belong in the conjunction on the basis of its overall similarity to this composite representation.

Most explanations are either about events (why things happen), or about properties (why objects have the enduring characteristics that they do). Explanations of events have been studied extensively in philosophy and psychology, whereas the explanations of properties have received little or no attention in the literature. The present study is an exploration of the ways in which we explain various types of properties. Ten participants provided explanations of 45 properties by completing sentences of the form: “Xs have p because…” where p is a property of the concept X. When coded into three traditional kinds of explanation (i.e. causal, purposive, categorical), nearly half of the explanations did not fit into any of these categories and were classified as “other”. Different patterns of preference for explanations emerged across the various property types for each domain. A qualitative analysis of the other kind revealed that the most frequent form of explanation involved another property of the object, as in ‘Xs have property p because they have property q”. Explanations of properties showed a homeostatic character. Simply relating two properties of a concept seems sufficient as an explanation of a property.

Semantic memory tasks can focus on intensions (features and properties) or extensions (reference and categorization). The two aspects, intension and extension, should in principle be closely related. It is in virtue of possessing the intensional properties of a concept that an individual entity will be included in the extension of that concept. For example, any feathered creature that hatches from eggs and has two legs and a beak will be a bird, and any creature lacking any of these features will be something else. There is evidence for stable individual differences in each of these tasks, but these differences do not correspond across tasks. Two further studies show that, under certain conditions, the correspondence can be demonstrated. This chapter discusses reasons for the lack of connection in terms of different systems for conceptual understanding involving similarity versus theory-based conceptualization.

By highlighting relations between experimental and theoretical work, this volume explores new ways of addressing one of the central challenges in the study of language and cognition. The articles bring together work by leading scholars and younger researchers in psychology, linguistics and philosophy. An introductory chapter lays out the background on concept composition, a problem that is stimulating much new research in cognitive science. Researchers in this interdisciplinary domain aim to explain how meanings of complex expressions are derived from simple lexical concepts and to show how these meanings connect to concept representations. Traditionally, much of the work on concept composition has been carried out within separate disciplines, where cognitive psychologists have concentrated on concept representations, and linguists and philosophers have focused on the meaning and use of logical operators. This volume demonstrates an important change in this situation, where convergence points between these three disciplines in cognitive science are emerging and are leading to new findings and theoretical insights. This book is open access under a CC BY license.

Review of Fodor: Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong The cover of Fodor’s book proudly claims that this is his most irritating book in years, guaranteed to exasperate all those who read it. The book lives up to this promise. Although leavened by moments of wit and humour, Fodor misses no opportunity for the one-liner put-down, be it about lexical semantics, empiricism, cognitive neuropsychology or the psychology of cognitive development. He even writes a whole chapter on Prototypes without referring to Rosch except in a footnote, where her name is consistently mis-spelled for good measure. Those looking to see how his ideas relate to current work in psychology and linguistics on lexical concepts will be disappointed

The essentialist approach to word meaning has been used to undermine the fundamental assumptions of the cognitive psychology of concepts. Essentialism assumes that a word refers to a natural kind category in virtue of category members possessing essential properties. In support of this thesis, Kripke and Putnam deploy various intuitions concerning word use under circumstances in which discoveries about natural kinds are made. Although some studies employing counterfactual discoveries and related transformations appear to vindicate essentialism, we argue that the intuitions have not been investigated exhaustively. In particular, we argue that discoveries concerning the essential properties of whole categories (rather than simply of particular category members) are critical to the essentialist intuitions. The studies reported here examine such discovery contexts, and demonstrate that words and concepts are not used in accordance with essentialism. The results are, however, consistent with "representational change" views of concepts, which are broadly Fregean in their motivation. We conclude that since essentialism is not vindicated by ordinary word use, it fails to undermine the cognitive psychology of concepts.

Recent research on moral dynamics shows that an individual's ethical mind-set moderates the impact of an initial ethical or unethical act on the likelihood of behaving ethically on a subsequent occasion. More specifically, an outcome-based mind-set facilitates Moral Balancing, whereas a rule-based mind-set facilitates Moral Consistency. The objective was to look at the evolution of moral choice across a series of scenarios, that is, to explore if these moral patterns are maintained over time. The results of three studies showed that Moral Balancing is not..

A recent study has established that thinkers reliably engage in epistemic appraisals of concepts of natural categories. Here, five studies are reported which investigated the effects of different manipulations of category learning context on appraisal of the concepts learnt. It was predicted that dimensions of concept appraisal could be affected by manipulating either procedural factors or declarative factors. While known effects of these manipulations on metacognitive judgements such as category learning judgements and confidence at test were replicated, procedural factors had no reliable effects on the dimensions of concept appraisal. Effects of declarative manipulations on some forms of concept appraisal were observed.