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Typicality and Composition a Lity: the Logic of Combining Vague ConceptsIn Markus Werning, Wolfram Hinzen & Edouard Machery (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality, Oxford University Press. 2012.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 …Read more
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17Concepts in human adultsIn Denis Mareschal, Paul Quinn & Stephen E. G. Lea (eds.), The Making of Human Concepts, Oxford University Press. pp. 14. 2010.
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30On the psychological basis for rigid designationIn Ashwin Ram & Kurt Eiselt (eds.), Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: August 13 to 16, 1994, Georgia Institute of Technology, Erlbaum. pp. 56--65. 1994.
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24Explanations of comparative facts: A shift in focusIn N. A. Taatgen & H. van Rijn (eds.), Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, . 2009.
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20The modifier effect: Default inheritance in complex noun phrasesIn N. A. Taatgen & H. van Rijn (eds.), Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, . pp. 303--308. 2009.
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29Ways of explaining propertiesIn B. C. Love, K. McRae & V. M. Sloutsky (eds.), Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society., Cognitive Science Society. pp. 143--148. 2008.
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22Emergent attributes in combined conceptsIn T. B. Ward, S. M. Smith & J. Vaid (eds.), Creative Thought: An Investigation of Conceptual Structures and Processes, American Psychological Association. pp. 83--110. 1997.
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259Conjunctions of social categories considered from different points of viewAnthropology and Philosophy 10 31-57. 2011.
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Investigating Differences in People's Concept RepresentationsIn Teresa Marques & Åsa Wikforss (eds.), Shifting Concepts: The Philosophy and Psychology of Conceptual Variability, Oxford University Press. 2020.
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18Categories and Concepts: Theoretical Views and Inductive Data Analysis (edited book)Academic Press. 1993.A book aimed at advanced undergraduates and graduates in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, linguistics, applied mathematics and data analysis.
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9Compositionality and Concepts in Linguistics and Psychology (edited book)Imprint: Springer. 2017.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 exp…Read more
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39Concept talk cannot be avoidedBehavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2-3): 212-213. 2010.Distinct systems for representing concepts as prototypes, exemplars, and theories are closely integrated in the mind, and the notion of concept is required as a framework for exploring this integration. Eliminating the term from our theories will hinder rather than promote scientific progress
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65Conceptual Combination: Extension and Intension. Commentary on Aerts, Gabora, and SozzoTopics in Cognitive Science 6 (1): 53-57. 2014.Aerts et al. provide a valuable model to capture the interactive nature of conceptual combination in conjunctions and disjunctions. The commentary provides a brief review of the interpretation of these interactions that has been offered in the literature, and argues for a closer link between the more traditional account in terms of concept intensions, and the parameters that emerge from the fitting of the Quantum Probability model
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31Patterns and evolution of moral behaviour: moral dynamics in everyday lifeThinking and Reasoning 22 (1): 31-56. 2016.ABSTRACTRecent 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 …Read more
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369The effect of relationship status on communicating emotions through touchCognition and Emotion 25 (2): 295-306. 2011.No abstract
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15Is Concept Appraisal Modulated by Procedural or Declarative Manipulations?Frontiers in Psychology 13. 2022.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 categor…Read more
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74Concept AppraisalCognitive Science 45 (5). 2021.This paper reports the first empirical investigation of the hypothesis that epistemic appraisals form part of the structure of concepts. To date, studies of concepts have focused on the way concepts encode properties of objects and the way those features are used in categorization and in other cognitive tasks. Philosophical considerations show the importance of also considering how a thinker assesses the epistemic value of beliefs and other cognitive resources and, in particular, concepts. We de…Read more
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28Progress and current challenges with the quantum similarity modelFrontiers in Psychology 6. 2015.
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14Within-category induction is the projection of a generic property from a class to a subtype of that class. The modifier effect refers to the discovery reported by Connolly et al., that the subtype statement tends to be judged less likely to be true than the original unmodified sentence. The effect was replicated and shown to be moderated by the typicality of the modifier. Likelihood judgements were also found to correlate between modified and unmodified versions of sentences. Experiment 2 elicit…Read more
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31If people believe that some property is true of all members of a class such as sofas, then they should also believe that the same property is true of all members of a conjunctively defined subset of that class such as uncomfortable handmade sofas. A series of experiments demonstrated a failure to observe this constraint, leading to what is termed the inverse conjunction fallacy. Not only did people often express a belief in the more general statement but not in the more specific, but also when t…Read more
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27The modifier effect is the reduction in perceived likelihood of a generic property sentence, when the head noun is modified. We investigated the prediction that the modifier effect would be stronger for mutable than for central properties, without finding evidence for this predicted interaction over the course of five experiments. However Experiment 6, which provided a brief context for the modified concepts to lend them greater credibility, did reveal the predicted interaction. It is argued tha…Read more
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11The inherence heuristic is inherent in humansBehavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (5): 490-491. 2014.The inherence heuristic is too broad as a theoretical notion. The authors are at risk of applying their own heuristic in supporting itself. Nonetheless the article provides useful insight into the ways in which people overestimate the coherence and completeness of their understanding of the world.
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68Typicality, Graded Membership, and VaguenessCognitive Science 31 (3): 355-384. 2007.This paper addresses theoretical problems arising from the vagueness of language terms, and intuitions of the vagueness of the concepts to which they refer. It is argued that the central intuitions of prototype theory are sufficient to account for both typicality phenomena and psychological intuitions about degrees of membership in vaguely defined classes. The first section explains the importance of the relation between degrees of membership and typicality (or goodness of example) in conceptual…Read more
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64Staying in touch: Externalism needs descriptionsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (1): 74-74. 1998.Externalism cannot work as a theory of concepts without explaining how we reidentify substances as being of the same kind. Yet this process implies just the level of descriptive content to which externalism seeks to deny a role in conceptual content.