Concepts: foundational issues [Elektronische Ressource] / vorgelegt von Malte Dahlgrün

Malte Dahlgrün

Sujets

• Philosophie

Informations

• Publié par: eberhard_karls_universitat_tubingen
• Publié le: 01 janvier 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 13
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

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Concepts:
Foundational Issues








Inaugural-Dissertation
zur Erlangung des Grades eines
Doktors der Philosophie der

Fakultät für Philosophie und Geschichte
der Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen



vorgelegt
von

Malte Dahlgrün, M.A.
aus London (GB)

im Juli 2006











Hauptberichterstatter:
Prof. Dr. Albert Newen

Mitberichterstatter:
Prof. Dr. Manfred Frank

Zusatzberichterstatter:
Prof. Dr. Peter Schroeder-Heister

Zusatzberichterstatter:
Prof. Dr. Oliver R. Scholz (Münster)

Dekan:
Prof. Dr. Anton Schindling




Tag der mündlichen Prüfung:
19. Oktober 2006










Gedruckt mit Genehmigung der
Fakultät für Philosophie und Geschichte der
Universität Tübingen.





Contents



Preface ii
Abbreviations and notation vi

Part one:
1. A few basics 1
2. Refuting Fregean anti-mentalism
about thoughts and concepts 16

Part two:
3. Concepthood vs. nonconceptual
representing: Storage in memory 45
4. On the idea of concepts as
categorizing representations 60
5. The flexibility of conceptual states:
How concepts transcend hardwiredness 79

Part three:
6. Concept structure, prototype theory, and
compositional phrasal compounds 96
7. The red herring of recognitional concepts 129
8. The innocence of lexically confined
prototype theory 146

References 198


Preface


This doctoral dissertation has three parts. Part one, comprising chapters 1
and 2, addresses some basic commitments which must be presupposed in
theorizing about concepts. Most basically, they are constituents of thoughts,
and, like thoughts, they are mental representations. They are, in other words,
subpropositional mental representations. Chapter 1 tries to clarify the notion
of representing, after attempting to impress upon the reader that more rigour
is required of initial explications of the representation relation than we are
generally accustomed to. Chapter 2 dissects the arguments which I have
been able to make out in the work of the modern arch-abstractivist Frege
against the mental nature of thoughts and, by the same token, against the
mental nature of concepts. His arguments are shown to be confused or, in
the case of the argument addressed in the last section, at least to miss their
target, leaving the notion of concepts as mental representations untarnished.

Part two, comprising chapters 3 to 5, pursues the aim of closing in on the
concept posit in light of the widely shared understanding that concepts form
a more specific class than just any kind of subpropositional mental represen-
tations. I would regard this part as having succeeded if the reader not merely
saw merit in the criticisms advanced and in the positive line taken, but if she
also emerged from this part with a heightened sense of clarity concerning
the interrelations among a certain cluster of ideas which are customarily
connected to the property of being a concept.

Chapter 3 advocates storage in memory as the basic criterion of delimiting
concepts from nonconceptual mental representations. This criterion is clear-
cut and well-motivated, having an explanatorily principled basis if any crite-
rion has: Mental representations stored in memory, other than the mental
representations of sensory-perceptual events, can appropriately occur in the
absence of causal contact with their representata. In leading up to this crite-
rion, the chapter subjects to methodological critique the typical manner in
which philosophers justify their assumption of a conceptual/nonconceptual-
distinction.

Chapter 4 shifts our gaze to the familiar dictum that concepts are, in some
sense, mental representations under which we categorize things in the Preface iii 
world. Two versions of this idea of categorizing mental representations are
distinguished. One, metaphysical in kind, is the notion of multiple applica-
bility. The other, psychological in kind, is the notion of mental representa-
tions resulting from feature abstraction from perceptual representations, be-
ing correspondingly capable of classifying across different perceptual repre-
sentations. For different kinds of reasons, which are relatively straightfor-
ward, both of these ideas cannot be regarded as capturing concepthood as
such.

Chapter 5 continues on the positive side, reconnecting to an earlier intro-
duced idea by which concepts, in contrast to sensory-perceptual events, are
placed in the realm of so-called “high-level cognition”, an idea for which
storage in memory began to give a solid-looking basis. Concepts are not
only stored in memory, they are also capable of entering into cognitive
processes of a sort that is not “hardwired”. “Flexible” cognitive processes is
what I call them. I hope the subdistinctions and explanations which I pro-
vide make these complementary notions workably precise.

Part 3 of the dissertation moves on to hands-on contributions to current re-
search. In one way or another, all three of its chapters take as their points of
departure the familiar compositionality arguments against prototype theory,
which have been incessantly reiterated over a number of years by Fodor, un-
til recently the agenda-setting concept theorist in the philosophy of psychol-
ogy. Together, the chapters expose and correct a number of deep-reaching
confusions: in the basic, generally accepted, presuppositions of these argu-
ments (chapter 6), in the topography of concept-theoretical positions as-
sumed by Fodor and adopted by subsequent commentators (chapter 7), and
in his followup comments made in alleged support and supplementation of
these arguments (chapter 8). Most of these confusions have failed to be
identified in the surrounding discussion so far. Unfortunately, there are
many of them. If this sounds like a bold claim, I ask the reader to only con-
sider the plethora of errors, incoherences, red herrings, and gratuitous misat-
tributions by Fodor which are observed alone in chapter 8, or alone in chap-
ters 6 and 7.

Overviews of the points through which we progress within chapters 7 and 8
have been layed out in a way that I am reasonably content with in the open-
ing passages of these chapters, and there would be little point in repeating
them here. But the core of chapter 6 can be profitably summarized in one
argument, and in doing so below, chapter 8 is inevitably placed in context. I
close with an attempt to briefly describe what awaits us in chapter 7.
Preface iv 
The compositionality arguments—recapitulated within the text but assumed
to be familiar for now—are aimed at “prototype theory” in the most general
possible sense of this term, subsuming any position which identifies con-
cepts with probabilistic representational structures. Probabilistic representa-
tional structures are ones involving individually defeasible feature constitu-
ents, thereby usually thought to effect a gradability of degree of concept sat-
isfaction (which gives prototypes their name). Nowadays almost all psycho-
logical theories of concepts posit such kinds of structures. The composition-
ality arguments thus have broad potential import. Chapter 6 argues that it is
trivial that compositional phrasal compounds themselves do not have proto-
type-theoretical natures. Its main line of argument can be recapitulated as
follows.

The complex concepts which the compositionality arguments test for their
conformity with prototype theory are, by assumption, phrasal concepts: con-
cepts whose structures mirror phrasal expressions of actual language, and
whose contents are expressed by these. Also by assumption, it is phrasal
concepts posited in analogy with compositionally understood phrasal ex-
pressions which are thus considered. But the idea that prototype theory
might possibly stretch to these compositional phrasal compounds in the first
place, and that you might have to test for prototype assignability in order to
find out that they do not do so, is incoherent. For the compositional con-
stituents of phrasal structures are obviously not probabilistic feature con-
stituents. This, however, is precisely what they would have to be if proto-
type theory were to stretch to compositional phrasal compounds, given the
elementary fact that prototype theory is explicitly understood by everyone,
including Fodor, to postulate concepts which immediately supervene on
probabilistic structures (“bundles of feature representations”, if you will).

What this implies is not that prototype-theoretical structures are incapable of
combining compositionally. Rather, it simply shows that, in combining into
compositional phrasal compounds, probabilistic s