Getting to the Heart of the Concept CONCEPTParthemore, Joel E. (2007) Getting to the Heart of the Concept CONCEPT. In: 11th annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, 22-25 June 2007, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. Full text available as:
AbstractJerry Fodor has written, "the heart of a cognitive science is its theory of concepts." By modest extension, the heart of a science of consciousness is its theory of concepts as well. Most, or to some accounts all, of our conscious experience is conceptualized, to greater or lesser extent. Fodor believes that cognitive science has historically gotten its theory of concepts wrong. Consciousness studies have, arguably, taken their theory of concepts for granted. How one answers the question "what is a concept?" will have significant consequences for how one answers "what is consciousness?" This paper considers standard and less standard answers to the question, "what is a concept?": sub-propositional entities, constituents of mental states, constituents of mental representations, proxies in simulations, and, borrowing a page from autopoiesis theory, reliably recurring perturbations of the system caused by some internal or external stimulus. It gives extended consideration to the approach taken by the CYC project: its benefits and limitations; and it shows how two competing theories of concepts, Fodor's informational atomism and Prinz's proxytypes theory, are not as irreconcilable as they may at first appear. Finally, it addresses why consciousness researchers should take account of these discussions. Comments/DiscussionThe poster discusses one of the key points of my doctoral thesis, that any theory of concepts, to be complete, must take account of two, very different and apparently incommensurable perspectives on the structure and content of concepts, one of which is more amenable to Jerry Fodor's theory of concepts and one of which is more amenable to Jesse Prinz's proxytypes theory.
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