Mental Representation (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Mental Representation (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): "Mental Representation
First published Thu Mar 30, 2000; substantive revision Mon Jul 21, 2008

The notion of a 'mental representation' is, arguably, in the first instance a theoretical construct of cognitive science. As such, it is a basic concept of the Computational Theory of Mind, according to which cognitive states and processes are constituted by the occurrence, transformation and storage (in the mind/brain) of information-bearing structures (representations) of one kind or another.

However, on the assumption that a representation is an object with semantic properties (content, reference, truth-conditions, truth-value, etc.), a mental representation may be more broadly construed as a mental object with semantic properties. As such, mental representations (and the states and processes that involve them) need not be understood only in computational terms. On this broader construal, mental representation is a philosophical topic with roots in antiquity and a rich history and literature predating the recent 'cognitive revolution,' and which continues to be of interest in pure philosophy. Though most contemporary philosophers of mind acknowledge the relevance and importance of cognitive science, they vary in their degree of engagement with its literature, methods and results; and there remain, for many, issues concerning the representational properties of the mind that can be addressed independently of the computational hypothesis.

Though the term ‘Representational Theory of Mind’ is sometimes used almost interchangeably with ‘Computational Theory of Mind’, I will use it here to refer to any theory that postulates the existence of semantically evaluable mental objects, including philosophy's stock in trade mentalia — thoughts, concepts, percepts, ideas, impressions, notions, rules, schemas, images, phantasms, etc. — as well as the various sorts of 'subpersonal' representations postulated by cognitive science. Representational theories may thus be contrasted with theories, such as those of Baker (1995), Collins (1987), Dennett (1987), Gibson (1966, 1979), Reid (1764/1997), Stich (1983) and Thau (2002), which deny the existence of such things.

* 1. The Representational Theory of Mind
* 2. Propositional Attitudes
* 3. Conceptual and Nonconceptual Representation
* 4. Representationalism and Phenomenalism
* 5. Imagery
* 6. Content Determination
* 7. Internalism and Externalism
* 8. The Computational Theory of Mind
* 9. Thought and Language
* Bibliography
* Other Internet Resources
* Related Entries

1. The Representational Theory of Mind

The Representational Theory of Mind (RTM) (which goes back at least to Aristotle) takes as its starting point commonsense mental states, such as thoughts, beliefs, desires, perceptions and imagings. Such states are said to have 'intentionality' — they are about or refer to things, and may be evaluated with respect to properties like consistency, truth, appropriateness and accuracy. (For example, the thought that cousins are not related is inconsistent, the belief that Elvis is dead is true, the desire to eat the moon is inappropriate, a visual experience of a ripe strawberry as red is accurate, an imaging of George W. Bush with dreadlocks is inaccurate.)

RTM defines such intentional mental states as relations to mental representations, and explains the intentionality of the former in terms of the semantic properties of the latter. For example, to believe that Elvis is dead is to be appropriately related to a mental representation whose propositional content is that Elvis is dead. (The desire that Elvis be dead, the fear that he is dead, the regret that he is dead, etc., involve different relations to the same mental representation.) To perceive a strawberry is to have a sensory experience of some kind which is appropriately related to (e.g., caused by) the strawberry.

RTM also understands mental processes such as thinking, reasoning and imagining as sequences of intentional mental states. For example, to imagine the moon rising over a mountain is, inter alia, to entertain a series of mental images of the moon (and a mountain). To infer a proposition q from the propositions p and if p then q is (inter alia) to have a sequence of thoughts of the form p, if p then q, q.

Contemporary philosophers of mind have typically supposed (or at least hoped) that the mind can be naturalized — i.e., that all mental facts have explanations in the terms of natural science. This assumption is shared within cognitive science, which attempts to provide accounts of mental states and processes in terms (ultimately) of features of the brain and central nervous system. In the course of doing so, the various sub-disciplines of cognitive science (including cognitive and computational psychology and cognitive and computational neuroscience) postulate a number of different kinds of structures and processes, many of which are not directly implicated by mental states and processes as commonsensically conceived. There remains, however, a shared commitment to the idea that mental states and processes are to be explained in terms of mental representations.

In philosophy, recent debates about mental representation have centered around the existence of propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires, etc.) and the determination of their contents (how they come to be about what they are about), and the existence of phenomenal properties and their relation to the content of thought and perceptual experience. Within cognitive science itself, the philosophically relevant debates have been focused on the computational architecture of the brain and central nervous system, and the compatibility of scientific and commonsense accounts of mentality.
2. Propositional Attitudes

Intentional Realists such as Dretske (e.g., 1988) and Fodor (e.g., 1987) note that the generalizations we apply in everyday life in predicting and explaining each other's behavior (often collectively referred to as 'folk psychology') are both remarkably successful and indispensable. What a person believes, doubts, desires, fears, etc. is a highly reliable indicator of what that person will do; and we have no other way of making sense of each other's behavior than by ascribing such states and applying the relevant generalizations. We are thus committed to the basic truth of commonsense psychology and, hence, to the existence of the states its generalizations refer to. (Some realists, such as Fodor, also hold that commonsense psychology will be vindicated by cognitive science, given that propositional attitudes can be construed as computational relations to mental representations.)

Intentional Eliminativists, such as Churchland, (perhaps) Dennett and (at one time) Stich argue that no such things as propositional attitudes (and their constituent representational states) are implicated by the successful explanation and prediction of our mental lives and behavior. Churchland denies that the generalizations of commonsense propositional-attitude psychology are true. He (1981) argues that folk psychology is a theory of the mind with a long history of failure and decline, and that it resists incorporation into the framework of modern scientific theories (including cognitive psychology). As such, it is comparable to alchemy and phlogiston theory, and ought to suffer a comparable fate. Commonsense psychology is false, and the states (and representations) it postulates simply don't exist. (It should be noted that Churchland is not an eliminativist about mental representation tout court. See, e.g., Churchland 1989.)

Dennett (1987a) grants that the generalizations of commonsense psychology are true and indispensable, but denies that this is sufficient reason to believe in the entities they appear to refer to. He argues that to give an intentional explanation of a system's behavior is merely to adopt the 'intentional stance' toward it. If the strategy of assigning contentful states to a system and predicting and explaining its behavior (on the assumption that it is rational — i.e., that it behaves as it should, given the propositional attitudes it should have in its environment) is successful, then the system is intentional, and the propositional-attitude generalizations we apply to it are true. But there is nothing more to having a propositional attitude than this. (See Dennett 1987a: 29.)

Though he has been taken to be thus claiming that intentional explanations should be construed instrumentally, Dennett (1991) insists that he is a 'moderate' realist about propositional attitudes, since he believes that the patterns in the behavior and behavioral dispositions of a system on the basis of which we (truly) attribute intentional states to it are objectively real. In the event that there are two or more explanatorily adequate but substantially different systems of intentional ascriptions to an individual, however, Dennett claims there is no fact of the matter about what the individual believes (1987b, 1991). This does suggest an irrealism at least with respect to the sorts of things Fodor and Dretske take beliefs to be; though it is not the view that there is simply nothing in the world that makes intentional explanations true.

(Davidson 1973, 1974 and Lewis 1974 also defend the view that what it is to have a propositional attitude is just to be interpretable in a particular way. It is, however, not entirely clear whether they intend their views to imply irrealism about propositional attitudes.)

Stich (1983) argues that cognitive psychology does not (or, in any case, should not) taxonomize mental states by their semantic properties at all, since attribution of psychological states by content is sensitive to factors that render it problematic in the context of a scientific psychology. Cognitive psychology seeks causal explanations of behavior and cognition, and the causal powers of a mental state are determined by its intrinsic 'structural' or 'syntactic' properties. The semantic properties of a mental state, however, are determined by its extrinsic properties — e.g., its history, environmental or intramental relations. Hence, such properties cannot figure in causal-scientific explanations of behavior. (Fodor 1994 and Dretske 1988 are realist attempts to come to grips with some of these problems.) Stich proposes a syntactic theory of the mind, on which the semantic properties of mental states play no explanatory role. (Stich has changed his views on a number of these issues. See Stich 1996.)
3. Conceptual and Non-Conceptual Representation

It is a traditional assumption among realists about mental representations that representational states come in two basic varieties (cf. Boghossian 1995). There are those, such as thoughts, which are composed of concepts and have no phenomenal ('what-it's-like') features ('qualia'), and those, such as sensations, which have phenomenal features but no conceptual constituents. (Nonconceptual content is usually defined as a kind of content that states of a creature lacking concepts might nonetheless enjoy.[1]) On this taxonomy, mental states can represent either in a way analogous to expressions of natural languages or in a way analogous to drawings, paintings, maps or photographs. Perceptual states such as seeing that something is blue, are sometimes thought of as hybrid states, consisting of, for example, a non-conceptual sensory experience and a belief, or some more integrated compound of conceptual and nonconceptual elements. (There is an extensive literature on the representational content of perceptual experience. See the entry 'The Contents of Perception.')

Disagreement over nonconceptual representation concerns the existence and nature of phenomenal properties and the role they play in determining the content of sensory experience. Dennett (1988), for example, denies that there are such things as qualia at all (as they are standardly construed); while Brandom (2002), McDowell (1994), Rey (1991) and Sellars (1956) deny that they are needed to explain the content of sensory experience. Among those who accept that experiences have phenomenal content, some (Dretske, Lycan, Tye) argue that it is reducible to a kind of intentional content, while others (Block, Loar, Peacocke) argue that it is irreducible. (See the discussion in the next section.)

Some historical discussions of the representational properties of mind (e.g., Aristotle 1984, Locke 1689/1975, Hume 1739/1978) seem to assume that nonconceptual representations — percepts ('impressions'), images ('ideas') and the like — are the only kinds of mental representations, and that the mind represents the world in virtue of being in states that resemble things in it. On such a view, all representational states have their content in virtue of their phenomenal features. Powerful arguments, however, focusing on the lack of generality (Berkeley 1975), ambiguity (Wittgenstein 1953) and non-compositionality (Fodor 1981c) of sensory and imagistic representations, as well as their unsuitability to function as logical (Frege 1918/1997, Geach 1957) or mathematical (Frege 1884/1953) concepts, and the symmetry of resemblance (Goodman 1976), convinced philosophers that no theory of mind can get by with only nonconceptual representations construed in this way.

There has also been dissent from the traditional claim that conceptual representations (thoughts, beliefs) lack phenomenology. Chalmers (1996), Flanagan (1992), Goldman (1993), Horgan and Tienson (2002), Jackendoff (1987), Levine (1993, 1995, 2001), McGinn (1991a), Pitt (2004), Searle (1992), Siewert (1998) and Strawson (1994), claim that purely conceptual (conscious) representational states themselves have a (perhaps proprietary) phenomenology. If this claim is correct, the question of what role phenomenology plays in the determination of content rearises for conceptual representation; and the eliminativist ambitions of Sellars, Brandom, Rey, et al. would meet a new obstacle. (It would also raise prima face problems for reductivist representationalism (see the next section).)
4. Representationalism and Phenomenalism

Among realists about phenomenal properties, the central division is between representationalists (also called 'representationists' and 'intentionalists') — e.g., Dretske (1995), Harman (1990), Leeds (1993), Lycan (1987, 1996), Rey (1991), Thau (2002), Tye (1995, 2000) — and phenomenalists (also called 'phenomenists' and 'qualia freaks') — e.g., Block (1996, 2003), Chalmers (1996, 2004), Evans (1982), Loar (2003a, 2003b), Peacocke (1983, 1989, 1992, 2001), Raffman (1995), Shoemaker (1990). Representationalists claim that the phenomenal character of a mental state is reducible to a kind of intentional content. Phenomenalists claim that the phenomenal character of a mental state is not so reducible.

The representationalist thesis is often formulated as the claim that phenomenal properties are representational or intentional. However, this formulation is ambiguous between a reductive and a non-reductive claim (though the term ‘representationalism’ is most often used for the reductive claim). (See Chalmers 2004a.) On one hand, it could mean that the phenomenal content of an experience is a kind of intentional content (i.e., the properties it represents). On the other, it could mean that the (irreducible) phenomenal properties of an experience determine an intentional content. Representationalists such as Dretske, Lycan and Tye would assent to the former claim, whereas phenomenalists such as Block, Chalmers, Loar and Peacocke would assent to the latter. (Among phenomenalists, there is further disagreement about whether qualia are intrinsically representational (Loar) or not (Block, Peacocke).

Most (reductive) representationalists are motivated by the conviction that one or another naturalistic explanation of intentionality (see the next section) is, in broad outline, correct, and by the desire to complete the naturalization of the mental by applying such theories to the problem of phenomenality. (Needless to say, most phenomenalists (Chalmers is the major exception) are just as eager to naturalize the phenomenal — though not in the same way.)

The main argument for representationalism appeals to the transparency of experience (cf. Tye 2000: 45-51). The properties that characterize what it's like to have a perceptual experience are presented in experience as properties of objects perceived: in attending to an experience, one seems to 'see through it' to the objects and properties it is experiences of.[2] They are not presented as properties of the experience itself. If nonetheless they were properties of the experience, perception would be massively deceptive. But perception is not massively deceptive. According to the representationalist, the phenomenal character of an experience is due to its representing objective, non-experiential properties. (In veridical perception, these properties are locally instantiated; in illusion and hallucination, they are not.) On this view, introspection is indirect perception: one comes to know what phenomenal features one's experience has by coming to know what objective features it represents.

In order to account for the intuitive differences between conceptual and sensory representations, representationalists appeal to their structural or functional differences. Dretske (1995), for example, distinguishes experiences and thoughts on the basis of the origin and nature of their functions: an experience of a property P is a state of a system whose evolved function is to indicate the presence of P in the environment; a thought representing the property P, on the other hand, is a state of a system whose assigned (learned) function is to calibrate the output of the experiential system. Rey (1991) takes both thoughts and experiences to be relations to sentences in the language of thought, and distinguishes them on the basis of (the functional roles of) such sentences' constituent predicates. Lycan (1987, 1996) distinguishes them in terms of their functional-computational profiles. Tye (2000) distinguishes them in terms of their functional roles and the intrinsic structure of their vehicles: thoughts are representations in a language-like medium, whereas experiences are image-like representations consisting of 'symbol-filled arrays.' (Cf. the account of mental images in Tye 1991.)

Phenomenalists tend to make use of the same sorts of features (function, intrinsic structure) in explaining some of the intuitive differences between thoughts and experiences; but they do not suppose that such features exhaust the differences between phenomenal and non-phenomenal representations. For the phenomenalist, it is the phenomenal properties of experiences — qualia themselves — that constitute the fundamental difference between experience and thought. Peacocke (1992), for example, develops the notion of a perceptual 'scenario' (an assignment of phenomenal properties to coordinates of a three-dimensional egocentric space), whose content is 'correct' (a semantic property) if in the corresponding 'scene' (the portion of the external world represented by the scenario) properties are distributed as their phenomenal analogues are in the scenario.

Another sort of representation appealed to by some phenomenalists (e.g., Chalmers (2003), Block (2003)) is what Chalmers calls a 'pure phenomenal concept.' A phenomenal concept in general is a concept whose denotation is a phenomenal property, and it may be discurive (‘the color of ripe bananas‘), demonstrative (‘this color’; Loar 1996)), or even more direct. On Chalmers's view, a pure phenomenal concept is (something like) a conceptual/phenomenal hybrid consisting of a phenomenological 'sample' (an image or an occurrent sensation) integrated with (or functioning as) a conceptual component. Phenomenal concepts are postulated to account for the apparent fact (among others) that, as McGinn (1991b) puts it, 'you cannot form [introspective] concepts of conscious properties unless you yourself instantiate those properties.' One cannot have a phenomenal concept of a phenomenal property P, and, hence, phenomenal beliefs about P, without having experience of P, because P itself is (in some way) constitutive of the concept of P. (Cf. Jackson 1982, 1986 and Nagel 1974.) (Chalmers (2004b) puts pure phenomenal concepts to use in defending the Knowledge Argument against physicalism.)
5. Imagery

Though imagery has played an important role in the history of philosophy of mind, the important contemporary literature on it is primarily psychological. (McGinn 2004 is a notable recent exception.) In a series of psychological experiments done in the 1970s (summarized in Kosslyn 1980 and Shepard and Cooper 1982), subjects' response time in tasks involving mental manipulation and examination of presented figures was found to vary in proportion to the spatial properties (size, orientation, etc.) of the figures presented. The question of how these experimental results are to be explained kindled a lively debate on the nature of imagery and imagination.

Kosslyn (1980) claims that the results suggest that the tasks were accomplished via the examination and manipulation of mental representations that themselves have spatial properties — i.e., pictorial representations, or images. Others, principally Pylyshyn (1979, 1981a, 1981b, 2003), argue that the empirical facts can be explained in terms exclusively of discursive, or propositional representations and cognitive processes defined over them. (Pylyshyn takes such representations to be sentences in a language of thought.)

The idea that pictorial representations are literally pictures in the head is not taken seriously by proponents of the pictorial view of imagery (see, e.g., Kosslyn and Pomerantz 1977). The claim is, rather, that mental images represent in a way that is relevantly like the way pictures represent. (Attention has been focused on visual imagery — hence the designation ‘pictorial’; though of course there may be imagery in other modalities — auditory, olfactory, etc. — as well.)

The distinction between pictorial and discursive representation can be characterized in terms of the distinction between analog and digital representation (Goodman 1976). This distinction has itself been variously understood (Fodor & Pylyshyn 1981, Goodman 1976, Haugeland 1981, Lewis 1971, McGinn 1989), though a widely accepted construal is that analog representation is continuous (i.e., in virtue of continuously variable properties of the representation), while digital representation is discrete (i.e., in virtue of properties a representation either has or doesn't have) (Dretske 1981). (An analog/digital distinction may also be made with respect to cognitive processes. (Block 1983.)) On this understanding of the analog/digital distinction, imagistic representations, which represent in virtue of properties that may vary continuously (such as being more or less bright, loud, vivid, etc.), would be analog, while conceptual representations, whose properties do not vary continuously (a thought cannot be more or less about Elvis: either it is or it is not) would be digital.

It might be supposed that the pictorial/discursive distinction is best made in terms of the phenomenal/nonphenomenal distinction, but it is not obvious that this is the case. For one thing, there may be nonphenomenal properties of representations that vary continuously. Moreover, there are ways of understanding pictorial representation that presuppose neither phenomenality nor analogicity. According to Kosslyn (1980, 1982, 1983), a mental representation is 'quasi-pictorial' when every part of the representation corresponds to a part of the object represented, and relative distances between parts of the object represented are preserved among the parts of the representation. But distances between parts of a representation can be defined functionally rather than spatially — for example, in terms of the number of discrete computational steps required to combine stored information about them. (Cf. Rey 1981.)

Tye (1991) proposes a view of images on which they are hybrid representations, consisting both of pictorial and discursive elements. On Tye's account, images are '(labeled) interpreted symbol-filled arrays.' The symbols represent discursively, while their arrangement in arrays has representational significance (the location of each 'cell' in the array represents a specific viewer-centered 2-D location on the surface of the imagined object).
6. Content Determination

The contents of mental representations are typically taken to be abstract objects (properties, relations, propositions, sets, etc.). A pressing question, especially for the naturalist, is how mental representations come to have their contents. Here the issue is not how to naturalize content (abstract objects can't be naturalized), but, rather, how to provide a naturalistic account of the content-determining relations between mental representations and the abstract objects they express. There are two basic types of contemporary naturalistic theories of content-determination, causal-informational and functional.[3]

Causal-informational theories (Dretske 1981, 1988, 1995) hold that the content of a mental representation is grounded in the information it carries about what does (Devitt 1996) or would (Fodor 1987, 1990a) cause it to occur.[4] There is, however, widespread agreement that causal-informational relations are not sufficient to determine the content of mental representations. Such relations are common, but representation is not. Tree trunks, smoke, thermostats and ringing telephones carry information about what they are causally related to, but they do not represent (in the relevant sense) what they carry information about. Further, a representation can be caused by something it does not represent, and can represent something that has not caused it.

The main attempts to specify what makes a causal-informational state a mental representation are Asymmetric Dependency Theories (e.g., Fodor 1987, 1990a, 1994) and Teleological Theories (Fodor 1990b, Millikan 1984, Papineau 1987, Dretske 1988, 1995). The Asymmetric Dependency Theory distinguishes merely informational relations from representational relations on the basis of their higher-order relations to each other: informational relations depend upon representational relations, but not vice-versa. For example, if tokens of a mental state type are reliably caused by horses, cows-on-dark-nights, zebras-in-the-mist and Great Danes, then they carry information about horses, etc. If, however, such tokens are caused by cows-on-dark-nights, etc. because they were caused by horses, but not vice versa, then they represent horses (or the property horse).

According to Teleological Theories, representational relations are those a representation-producing mechanism has the selected (by evolution or learning) function of establishing. For example, zebra-caused horse-representations do not mean zebra, because the mechanism by which such tokens are produced has the selected function of indicating horses, not zebras. The horse-representation-producing mechanism that responds to zebras is malfunctioning.

Functional theories (Block 1986, Harman 1973), hold that the content of a mental representation is grounded in its (causal, computational, inferential) relations to other mental representations. They differ on whether relata should include all other mental representations or only some of them, and on whether to include external states of affairs. The view that the content of a mental representation is determined by its inferential/computational relations with all other representations is holism; the view it is determined by relations to only some other mental states is localism (or molecularism). (The view that the content of a mental state depends on none of its relations to other mental states is atomism.) Functional theories that recognize no content-determining external relata have been called solipsistic (Harman 1987). Some theorists posit distinct roles for internal and external connections, the former determining semantic properties analogous to sense, the latter determining semantic properties analogous to reference (McGinn 1982, Sterelny 1989).

(Reductive) representationalists (Dretske, Lycan, Tye) usually take one or another of these theories to provide an explanation of the (non-conceptual) content of experiential states. They thus tend to be externalists (see the next section) about phenomenological as well as conceptual content. Phenomenalists and non-reductive representationalists (Block, Chalmers, Loar, Peacocke, Siewert), on the other hand, take it that the representational content of such states is (at least in part) determined by their intrinsic phenomenal properties. Further, those who advocate a phenomenology-based approach to conceptual content (Horgan and Tienson, Loar, Pitt, Searle, Siewert) also seem to be committed to internalist individuation of the content (if not the reference) of such states.
7. Internalism and Externalism

Generally, those who, like informational theorists, think relations to one's (natural or social) environment are (at least partially) determinative of the content of mental representations are externalists, or anti-individualists (e.g., Burge 1979, 1986b, McGinn 1977), whereas those who, like some proponents of functional theories, think representational content is determined by an individual's intrinsic properties alone, are internalists (or individualists; cf. Putnam 1975, Fodor 1981b).[5]

This issue is widely taken to be of central importance, since psychological explanation, whether commonsense or scientific, is supposed to be both causal and content-based. (Beliefs and desires cause the behaviors they do because they have the contents they do. For example, the desire that one have a beer and the beliefs that there is beer in the refrigerator and that the refrigerator is in the kitchen may explain one's getting up and going to the kitchen.) If, however, a mental representation's having a particular content is due to factors extrinsic to it, it is unclear how its having that content could determine its causal powers, which, arguably, must be intrinsic (see Stich 1983, Fodor 1982, 1987, 1994). Some who accept the standard arguments for externalism have argued that internal factors determine a component of the content of a mental representation. They say that mental representations have both 'narrow' content (determined by intrinsic factors) and 'wide' or 'broad' content (determined by narrow content plus extrinsic factors). (This distinction may be applied to the sub-personal representations of cognitive science as well as to those of commonsense psychology. See von Eckardt 1993: 189.)

Narrow content has been variously construed. Putnam (1975), Fodor (1982: 114; 1994: 39ff), and Block (1986: 627ff), for example, seem to understand it as something like de dicto content (i.e., Fregean sense, or perhaps character, à la Kaplan 1989). On this construal, narrow content is context-independent and directly expressible. Fodor (1987) and Block (1986), however, have also characterized narrow content as radically inexpressible. On this construal, narrow content is a kind of proto-content, or content-determinant, and can be specified only indirectly, via specifications of context/wide-content pairings. On both construals, narrow contents are characterized as functions from context to (wide) content. The narrow content of a representation is determined by properties intrinsic to it or its possessor, such as its syntactic structure or its intramental computational or inferential role.

Burge (1986b) has argued that causation-based worries about externalist individuation of psychological content, and the introduction of the narrow notion, are misguided. Fodor (1994, 1998) has more recently urged that a scientific psychology might not need narrow content in order to supply naturalistic (causal) explanations of human cognition and action, since the sorts of cases they were introduced to handle, viz., Twin-Earth cases and Frege cases, are either nomologically impossible or dismissible as exceptions to non-strict psychological laws.

On the most common versions of externalism, though intentional contents are externally determined, mental representations themselves, and the states they partly constitute, remain 'in the head.' More radical versions are possible. One might maintain that since thoughts are individuated by their contents, and some thought contents are partially constituted by objects external to the mind, then some thoughts are partly constituted by objects external to the mind. On such a view, a singular thought — i.e., a thought about a particular object — literally contains the object it is about. It is 'object-involving.' Such a thought (and the mind that thinks it) thus extend beyond the boundaries of the skull. (This appears to be the view articulated in McDowell 1986, on which there is 'interpenetration' between the mind and the world.)

Clark and Chalmers (1998) and Clark (2001, 2005) have argued that mental representations may exist entirely 'outside the head.' On their view, which they call 'active externalism,' cognitive processes (e.g., calculation) may be realized in external media (e.g., a calculator or pen and paper), and the 'coupled system' of the individual mind and the external workspace ought to count as a cognitive system — a mind —in its own right. Symbolic representations on external media would thus count as mental representations.
8. The Computational Theory of Mind

The leading contemporary version of the Representational Theory of Mind, the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM), claims that the brain is a kind of computer and that mental processes are computations. According to CTM, cognitive states are constituted by computational relations to mental representations of various kinds, and cognitive processes are sequences of such states.

CTM develops RTM by attempting to explain all psychological states and processes in terms of mental representation. In the course of constructing detailed empirical theories of human and animal cognition and developing models of cognitive processes implementable in artificial information processing systems, cognitive scientists have proposed a variety of types of mental representations. While some of these may be suited to be mental relata of commonsense psychological states, some — so-called 'subpersonal' or 'sub-doxastic' representations — are not. Though many philosophers believe that CTM can provide the best scientific explanations of cognition and behavior, there is disagreement over whether such explanations will vindicate the commonsense psychological explanations of prescientific RTM.

According to Stich's (1983) Syntactic Theory of Mind, for example, computational theories of psychological states should concern themselves only with the formal properties of the objects those states are relations to. Commitment to the explanatory relevance of content, however, is for most cognitive scientists fundamental (Fodor 1981a, Pylyshyn 1984, Von Eckardt 1993). That mental processes are computations, that computations are rule-governed sequences of semantically evaluable objects, and that the rules apply to the symbols in virtue of their content, are central tenets of mainstream cognitive science.

Explanations in cognitive science appeal to a many different kinds of mental representation, including, for example, the 'mental models' of Johnson-Laird 1983, the 'retinal arrays,' 'primal sketches' and '2½ -D sketches' of Marr 1982, the 'frames' of Minsky 1974, the 'sub-symbolic' structures of Smolensky 1989, the 'quasi-pictures'of Kosslyn 1980, and the 'interpreted symbol-filled arrays' of Tye 1991 — in addition to representations that may be appropriate to the explanation of commonsense psychological states. Computational explanations have been offered of, among other mental phenomena, belief (Fodor 1975, Field 1978), visual perception (Marr 1982, Osherson, et al. 1990), rationality (Newell and Simon 1972, Fodor 1975, Johnson-Laird and Wason 1977), language learning and use (Chomsky 1965, Pinker 1989), and musical comprehension (Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983).

A fundamental disagreement among proponents of CTM concerns the realization of personal-level representations (e.g., thoughts) and processes (e.g., inferences) in the brain. The central debate here is between proponents of Classical Architectures and proponents of Connectionist Architectures.

The classicists (e.g., Turing 1950, Fodor 1975, 2000, 2003, Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988, Marr 1982, Newell and Simon 1976) hold that mental representations are symbolic structures, which typically have semantically evaluable constituents, and that mental processes are rule-governed manipulations of them that are sensitive to their constituent structure. The connectionists (e.g., McCulloch & Pitts 1943, Rumelhart 1989, Rumelhart and McClelland 1986, Smolensky 1988) hold that mental representations are realized by patterns of activation in a network of simple processors ('nodes') and that mental processes consist of the spreading activation of such patterns. The nodes themselves are, typically, not taken to be semantically evaluable; nor do the patterns have semantically evaluable constituents. (Though there are versions of Connectionism — 'localist' versions — on which individual nodes are taken to have semantic properties (e.g., Ballard 1986, Ballard & Hayes 1984).) It is arguable, however, that localist theories are neither definitive nor representative of the connectionist program (Smolensky 1988, 1991, Chalmers 1993).)

Classicists are motivated (in part) by properties thought seems to share with language. Fodor's Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOTH) (Fodor 1975, 1987), according to which the system of mental symbols constituting the neural basis of thought is structured like a language, provides a well-worked-out version of the classical approach as applied to commonsense psychology. (Cf. also Marr 1982 for an application of classical approach in scientific psychology.) According to the LOTH, the potential infinity of complex representational mental states is generated from a finite stock of primitive representational states, in accordance with recursive formation rules. This combinatorial structure accounts for the properties of productivity and systematicity of the system of mental representations. As in the case of symbolic languages, including natural languages (though Fodor does not suppose either that the LOTH explains only linguistic capacities or that only verbal creatures have this sort of cognitive architecture), these properties of thought are explained by appeal to the content of the representational units and their combinability into contentful complexes. That is, the semantics of both language and thought is compositional: the content of a complex representation is determined by the contents of its constituents and their structural configuration.

Connectionists are motivated mainly by a consideration of the architecture of the brain, which apparently consists of layered networks of interconnected neurons. They argue that this sort of architecture is unsuited to carrying out classical serial computations. For one thing, processing in the brain is typically massively parallel. In addition, the elements whose manipulation drives computation in connectionist networks (principally, the connections between nodes) are neither semantically compositional nor semantically evaluable, as they are on the classical approach. This contrast with classical computationalism is often characterized by saying that representation is, with respect to computation, distributed as opposed to local: representation is local if it is computationally basic; and distributed if it is not. (Another way of putting this is to say that for classicists mental representations are computationally atomic, whereas for connectionists they are not.)

Moreover, connectionists argue that information processing as it occurs in connectionist networks more closely resembles some features of actual human cognitive functioning. For example, whereas on the classical view learning involves something like hypothesis formation and testing (Fodor 1981c), on the connectionist model it is a matter of evolving distribution of 'weights' (strengths) on the connections between nodes, and typically does not involve the formulation of hypotheses regarding the identity conditions for the objects of knowledge. The connectionist network is 'trained up' by repeated exposure to the objects it is to learn to distinguish; and, though networks typically require many more exposures to the objects than do humans, this seems to model at least one feature of this type of human learning quite well. (Cf. the sonar example in Churchland 1989.)

Further, degradation in the performance of such networks in response to damage is gradual, not sudden as in the case of a classical information processor, and hence more accurately models the loss of human cognitive function as it typically occurs in response to brain damage. It is also sometimes claimed that connectionist systems show the kind of flexibility in response to novel situations typical of human cognition — situations in which classical systems are relatively 'brittle' or 'fragile.'

Some philosophers have maintained that connectionism entails that there are no propositional attitudes. Ramsey, Stich and Garon (1990) have argued that if connectionist models of cognition are basically correct, then there are no discrete representational states as conceived in ordinary commonsense psychology and classical cognitive science. Others, however (e.g., Smolensky 1989), hold that certain types of higher-level patterns of activity in a neural network may be roughly identified with the representational states of commonsense psychology. Still others (e.g., Fodor & Pylyshyn 1988, Heil 1991, Horgan and Tienson 1996) argue that language-of-thought style representation is both necessary in general and realizable within connectionist architectures. (MacDonald & MacDonald 1995 collects the central contemporary papers in the classicist/connectionist debate, and provides useful introductory material as well. See also Von Eckardt 2005.)

Whereas Stich (1983) accepts that mental processes are computational, but denies that computations are sequences of mental representations, others accept the notion of mental representation, but deny that CTM provides the correct account of mental states and processes.

Van Gelder (1995) denies that psychological processes are computational. He argues that cognitive systems are dynamic, and that cognitive states are not relations to mental symbols, but quantifiable states of a complex system consisting of (in the case of human beings) a nervous system, a body and the environment in which they are embedded. Cognitive processes are not rule-governed sequences of discrete symbolic states, but continuous, evolving total states of dynamic systems determined by continuous, simultaneous and mutually determining states of the systems' components. Representation in a dynamic system is essentially information-theoretic, though the bearers of information are not symbols, but state variables or parameters. (See also Port and Van Gelder 1995; Clark 1997a, 1997b.)

Horst (1996), on the other hand, argues that though computational models may be useful in scientific psychology, they are of no help in achieving a philosophical understanding of the intentionality of commonsense mental states. CTM attempts to reduce the intentionality of such states to the intentionality of the mental symbols they are relations to. But, Horst claims, the relevant notion of symbolic content is essentially bound up with the notions of convention and intention. So CTM involves itself in a vicious circularity: the very properties that are supposed to be reduced are (tacitly) appealed to in the reduction.
9. Thought and Language

To say that a mental object has semantic properties is, paradigmatically, to say that it is about, or true or false of, an object or objects, or that it is true or false simpliciter. Suppose I think that ocelots take snuff. I am thinking about ocelots, and if what I think of them (that they take snuff) is true of them, then my thought is true. According to RTM such states are to be explained as relations between agents and mental representations. To think that ocelots take snuff is to token in some way a mental representation whose content is that ocelots take snuff. On this view, the semantic properties of mental states are the semantic properties of the representations they are relations to.

Linguistic acts seem to share such properties with mental states. Suppose I say that ocelots take snuff. I am talking about ocelots, and if what I say of them (that they take snuff) is true of them, then my utterance is true. Now, to say that ocelots take snuff is (in part) to utter a sentence that means that ocelots take snuff. Many philosophers have thought that the semantic properties of linguistic expressions are inherited from the intentional mental states they are conventionally used to express (Grice 1957, Fodor 1978, Schiffer1972/1988, Searle 1983). On this view, the semantic properties of linguistic expressions are the semantic properties of the representations that are the mental relata of the states they are conventionally used to express.

(Others, however, e.g., Davidson (1975, 1982) have suggested that the kind of thought human beings are capable of is not possible without language, so that the dependency might be reversed, or somehow mutual (see also Sellars 1956). (But see Martin 1987 for a defense of the claim that thought is possible without language. See also Chisholm and Sellars 1958.) Schiffer (1987) subsequently despaired of the success of what he calls 'Intention Based Semantics.')

It is also widely held that in addition to having such properties as reference, truth-conditions and truth — so-called extensional properties — expressions of natural languages also have intensional properties, in virtue of expressing properties or propositions — i.e., in virtue of having meanings or senses, where two expressions may have the same reference, truth-conditions or truth value, yet express different properties or propositions (Frege 1892/1997). If the semantic properties of natural-language expressions are inherited from the thoughts and concepts they express (or vice versa, or both), then an analogous distinction may be appropriate for mental representations.
Bibliography

* Almog, J., Perry, J. and Wettstein, H., eds. (1989), Themes from Kaplan, New York: Oxford University Press.
* Aristotle, (1984), De Anima, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Baker, L. R. (1995), Explaining Attitudes: A Practical Approach to the Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* Ballard, D.H. (1986), 'Cortical Connections and Parallel Processing: Structure and Function,' The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 9: 67-120.
* Ballard, D.H and Hayes, P.J. (1984), 'Parallel Logical Inference,' Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Rochester, NY.
* Beaney, M. ed., (1997), The Frege Reader, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
* Berkeley, G. (1975), Principles of Human Knowledge, in M.R. Ayers, ed., Berkeley: Philosophical Writings, London: Dent.
* Block, N. ed., (1981), Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 2, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
* Block, N. ed., (1982), Imagery, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Block, N. (1983), 'Mental Pictures and Cognitive Science,' Philosophical Review 93: 499-542.
* Block, N. (1986), 'Advertisement for a Semantics for Psychology,' in P.A. French, T.E. Uehling and H.K. Wettstein, eds., Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. X, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 615-678.
* Block, N. (1996), 'Mental Paint and Mental Latex,' in E. Villanueva, ed., Philosophical Issues, 7: Perception: 19-49.
* Block, N. (2003), 'Mental Paint,' in M. Hahn and B. Ramberg, eds., Reflections and Replies: Essays on the Philosophy of Tyler Burge, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Boghossian, P. A. (1995), 'Content,' in J. Kim and E. Sosa, eds., A Companion to Metaphysics, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.: 94-96.
* Brandom, R. (2002), 'Non-inferential Knowledge, Perceptual Experience, and Secondary Qualities: Placing McDowell's Empiricism,' in N.H. Smith, ed., Reading McDowell: On Mind and World, London: Routledge.
* Burge, T. (1979), 'Individualism and the Mental,' in P.A. French, T.E. Uehling and H.K.Wettstein, eds., Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. IV, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 73-121.
* Burge, T. (1986a), 'Individualism and Psychology,' Philosophical Review 95: 3-45.
* Burge, T. (1986b), 'Intellectual Norms and Foundations of Mind,' The Journal of Philosophy 83: 697-720.
* Chalmers, D. (1993), 'Connectionism and Compositionality: Why Fodor and Pylyshyn Were Wrong,' Philosophical Psychology 6: 305-319.
* Chalmers, D. (1996), The Conscious Mind, New York: Oxford University Press.
* Chalmers, D. (2003), 'The Content and Epistemology of Phenomenal Belief,' in Q. Smith & A. Jokic, eds., Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 220-272.
* Chalmers, D. (2004a), 'The Representational Character of Experience,' in B. Leiter, ed., The Future for Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 153-181.
* Chalmers, D. (2004b), 'Phenomenal Concepts and the Knowledge Argument,' in P. Ludlow, Y. Nagasawa and D. Stoljar, eds., There's Something About Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson's Knowledge Argument, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Chisholm, R. and Sellars, W. (1958), 'The Chisholm-Sellars Correspondence on Intentionality,' in H. Feigl, M. Scriven and G. Maxwell, eds., Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. II, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 529-539.
* Chomsky, N. (1965), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Churchland, P.M. (1981), 'Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes,' Journal of Philosophy 78: 67-90.
* Churchland, P.M. (1989), 'On the Nature of Theories: A Neurocomputational Perspective,' in W. Savage, ed., Scientific Theories: Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 14, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 59-101.
* Clark, A. (1997a), 'The Dynamical Challenge,' Cognitive Science 21: 461-481.
* Clark, A. (1997b), Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
* Clark, A. (2001), 'Reasons, Robots and the Extended Mind,' Mind and Language 16: 121-145.
* Clark, A. (2005), 'Intrinsic Content, Active Memory, and the Extended Mind,' Analysis 65: 1-11.
* Clark, A., and Chalmers, D. (1998), 'The Extended Mind,' Analysis 58: 7-19.
* Collins, A. (1987), The Nature of Mental Things, Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press.
* Crane, T. (1995), The Mechanical Mind, London: Penguin Books Ltd.
* Davidson, D. (1973), 'Radical Interpretation,' Dialectica 27: 313-328.
* Davidson, D. (1974), 'Belief and the Basis of Meaning,' Synthese 27: 309-323.
* Davidson, D. (1975), 'Thought and Talk,' in S. Guttenplan, ed., Mind and Language, Oxford: Clarendon Press: 7-23.
* Davidson, D. (1982), 'Rational Animals,' Dialectica 4: 317-327.
* Dennett, D. (1969), Content and Consciousness, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
* Dennett, D. (1981), 'The Nature of Images and the Introspective Trap,' pages 132-141 of Dennett 1969, reprinted in Block 1981: 128-134.
* Dennett, D. (1987), The Intentional Stance, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Dennett, D. (1987a), 'True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why it Works,' in Dennett 1987: 13-35.
* Dennett, D. (1987b), 'Reflections: Real Patterns, Deeper Facts, and Empty Questions,' in Dennett 1987: 37-42.
* Dennett, D. (1988), 'Quining Qualia,' in A.J. Marcel and E. Bisiach, eds., Consciousness in Contemporary Science, Oxford: Clarendon Press: 42-77.
* Dennett, D. (1991), 'Real Patterns,' The Journal of Philosophy 87: 27-51.
* Devitt, M. (1996), Coming to Our Senses: A Naturalistic Program for Semantic Localism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* Dretske, F. (1969), Seeing and Knowing, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
* Dretske, F. (1981), Knowledge and the Flow of Information, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Dretske, F. (1988), Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Dretske, F. (1995), Naturalizing the Mind, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Dretske, F. (1998), 'Minds, Machines, and Money: What Really Explains Behavior,' in J. Bransen and S. Cuypers, eds., Human Action, Deliberation and Causation, Philosophical Studies Series 77, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Reprinted in Dretske 2000.
* Dretske, F. (2000), Perception, Knowledge and Belief, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* Evans, G. (1982), The Varieties of Reference, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Field, H. (1978), 'Mental representation,' Erkenntnis 13: 9-61.
* Flanagan, O. (1992), Consciousness Reconsidered, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Fodor, J.A. (1975), The Language of Thought, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
* Fodor, J.A. (1978), 'Propositional Attitudes,' The Monist 61: 501-523.
* Fodor, J.A. (1981), Representations, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Fodor, J.A. (1981a), 'Introduction,' in Fodor 1981: 1-31.
* Fodor, J.A. (1981b), 'Methodological Solipsism Considered as a Research Strategy in Cognitive Psychology,' in Fodor 1981: 225-253.
* Fodor, J.A. (1981c), 'The Present Status of the Innateness Controversy,' in Fodor 1981: 257-316.
* Fodor, J.A. (1982), 'Cognitive Science and the Twin-Earth Problem,' Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 23: 98-118.
* Fodor, J.A. (1987), Psychosemantics, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Fodor, J.A. (1990a), A Theory of Content and Other Essays, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Fodor, J.A. (1990b), 'Psychosemantics or: Where Do Truth Conditions Come From?' in W.G. Lycan, ed., Mind and Cognition: A Reader, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers: 312-337.
* Fodor, J.A. (1994), The Elm and the Expert, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Fodor, J.A. (1998), Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Fodor, J.A. (2000), The Mind Doesn't Work that Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Fodor, J.A. (2003), Hume Variations, New York: Oxford University Press.
* Fodor, J.A. and Pylyshyn, Z. (1981), 'How Direct is Visual Perception?: Some Reflections on Gibson's ‘Ecological Approach’,' Cognition 9: 207-246.
* Fodor, J.A. and Pylyshyn, Z. (1988), 'Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis,' Cognition 28: 3-71.
* Frege, G. (1884), The Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. J.L. Austin, New York: Philosophical Library (1954).
* Frege, G. (1892), 'On Sinn and Bedeutung', in Beany 1997: 151-171.
* Frege, G. (1918), 'Thought', in Beany 1997: 325-345.
* Geach, P. (1957), Mental Acts: Their Content and Their Objects, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
* Gibson, J.J. (1966), The senses considered as perceptual systems, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
* Gibson, J.J. (1979), The ecological approach to visual perception, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
* Goldman, A. (1993), 'The Psychology of Folk Psychology,' Behavioral and Brian Sciences 16: 15-28.
* Goodman, N. (1976), Languages of Art (2nd ed.), Indianapolis: Hackett.
* Grice, H.P. (1957), 'Meaning,' Philosophical Review, 66: 377-388; reprinted in Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press (1989): 213-223.
* Gunther, Y.H. (ed.) (2003), Essays on Nonconceptual Content, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Harman, G. (1973), Thought, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
* Harman, G. 1987, '(Non-Solipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics,' in E. Lepore, ed., New Directions in Semantics, London: Academic Press: 55-81.
* Harman, G. 1990, 'The Intrinsic Quality of Experience,' in J. Tomberlin, ed., Philosophical Perspectives 4: Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind, Atascadero: Ridgeview Publishing Company: 31-52.
* Harnish, R. (2002), Minds, Brains, Computers, Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers Inc.
* Haugeland, J. (1981), 'Analog and analog,' Philosophical Topics 12: 213-226.
* Heil, J. (1991), 'Being Indiscrete,' in J. Greenwood, ed., The Future of Folk Psychology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 120-134.
* Horgan, T. and Tienson, J. (1996), Connectionism and the Philosophy of Psychology, Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.
* Horgan, T. and Tienson, J. (2002), 'The Intentionality of Phenomenology and the Phenomenology of Intentionality,' in D.J. Chalmers, ed., Philosophy of Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Horst, S. (1996), Symbols, Computation, and Intentionality, Berkeley: University of California Press.
* Hume, D. (1739), A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigg, rev. P.H. Nidditch, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1978).
* Jackendoff, R. (1987), Computation and Cognition, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Jackson, F. (1982), 'Epiphenomenal Qualia,' Philosophical Quarterly 32: 127-136.
* Jackson, F. (1986), 'What Mary Didn't Know,' Journal of Philosophy 83: 291-295.
* Johnson-Laird, P.N. and Wason, P.C. (1977), Thinking: Readings in Cognitive Science, Cambridge University Press.
* Johnson-Laird, P.N. (1983), Mental Models, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
* Kaplan, D. (1989), 'Demonstratives,' in Almog, Perry and Wettstein 1989: 481-614.
* Kosslyn, S.M. (1980), Image and Mind, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
* Kosslyn, S.M. (1982), 'The Medium and the Message in Mental Imagery,' in Block 1982: 207-246.
* Kosslyn, S. (1983), Ghosts in the Mind's Machine, New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
* Kosslyn, S.M. and Pomerantz, J.R. (1977), 'Imagery, Propositions, and the Form of Internal Representations,' Cognitive Psychology 9: 52-76.
* Leeds, S. (1993), 'Qualia, Awareness, Sellars,' Noûs XXVII: 303-329.
* Lerdahl, F. and Jackendoff, R. (1983), A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Levine, J. (1993), 'On Leaving Out What It's Like,' in M. Davies and G. Humphreys, eds., Consciousness, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers: 121-136.
* Levine, J. (1995), 'On What It Is Like to Grasp a Concept,' in E. Villanueva, ed., Philosophical Issues 6: Content , Atascadero: Ridgeview Publishing Company: 38-43.
* Levine, J. (2001), Purple Haze, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Lewis, D. (1971), 'Analog and Digital,' Noûs 5: 321-328.
* Lewis, D. (1974), 'Radical Interpretation,' Synthese 27: 331-344.
* Loar, B. (1981), Mind and Meaning, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* Loar, B. (1996), 'Phenomenal States' (Revised Version), in N. Block, O. Flanagan and G. Güzeldere, eds., The Nature of Consciousness, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press: 597-616.
* Loar, B. (2003a), 'Transparent Experience and the Availability of Qualia,' in Q. Smith and A. Jokic, eds., Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford: Clarendon Press: 77-96.
* Loar, B. (2003b), 'Phenomenal Intentionality as the Basis of Mental Content,' in M. Hahn and B. Ramberg, eds., Reflections and Replies: Essays on the Philosophy of Tyler Burge, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Locke, J. (1689), An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P.H. Nidditch, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1975).
* Lycan, W.G. (1987), Consciousness, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Lycan, W.G. (1986), Consciousness and Experience, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* MacDonald, C. and MacDonald, G. (1995), Connectionism: Debates on Psychological Explanation, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
* Marr, D. (1982), Vision, New York: W.H. Freeman and Company.
* Martin, C.B. (1987), 'Proto-Language,' Australasian Journal of Philosophy 65: 277-289.
* McCulloch, W.S. and Pitts, W. (1943), 'A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,' Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5: 115-33.
* McDowell, J. (1986), 'Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space,' in P. Pettit and J. McDowell, eds., Subject, Thought, and Context, Oxford: Clarendon Press: 137-168.
* McDowell, J. (1994), Mind and World, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
* McGinn, C. (1977), 'Charity, Interpretation, and Belief,' Journal of Philosophy 74: 521-535.
* McGinn, C. (1982), 'The Structure of Content,' in A. Woodfield, ed., Thought and Content, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 207-258.
* McGinn, C. (1989), Mental Content, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
* McGinn, C. (1991), The Problem of Consciousness, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
* McGinn, C. (1991a), 'Content and Consciousness,' in McGinn 1991: 23-43.
* McGinn, C. (1991b), 'Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?' in McGinn 1991: 1-22.
* McGinn, C. (2004), Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
* Millikan, R. (1984), Language, Thought and other Biological Categories, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Minsky, M. (1974), 'A Framework for Representing Knowledge,' MIT-AI Laboratory Memo 306 June. (A shorter version appears in J. Haugeland, ed., Mind Design II, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press (1997).)
* Nagel, T. (1974), 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' Philosophical Review 83: 435-450.
* Newell, A. and Simon, H.A. (1972), Human Problem Solving, New York: Prentice-Hall.
* Newell, A. and Simon, H.A. (1976), 'Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search,' Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 19: 113-126.
* Osherson, D.N., Kosslyn, S.M. and Hollerbach, J.M. (1990), Visual Cognition and Action: An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Vol. 2, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Papineau, D. (1987), Reality and Representation, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
* Peacocke, C. (1983), Sense and Content, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
* Peacocke, C. (1989), 'Perceptual Content,' in Almog, Perry and Wettstein 1989: 297-329.
* Peacocke, C. (1992), 'Scenarios, Concepts and Perception,' in T. Crane, ed., The Contents of Experience, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 105-35.
* Peacocke, C. (2001), 'Does Perception Have a Nonconceptual Content?' Journal of Philosophy 99: 239-264.
* Pinker, S. (1989), Learnability and Cognition, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Pitt, D. (2004), 'The Phenomenology of Cognition, Or, What Is it Like to Think That P?' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 69: 1-36.
* Port, R., and Van Gelder, T. (1995), Mind as Motion: Explorations in the Dynamics of Cognition, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Putnam, H. (1975), 'The Meaning of ‘Meaning’,' in Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 215-71.
* Pylyshyn, Z. (1979), 'The Rate of ‘Mental Rotation’ of Images: A Test of a Holistic Analogue Hypothesis,' Memory and Cognition, 7: 19-28.
* Pylyshyn, Z. (1981a), 'Imagery and Artificial Intelligence,' in Block 1981: 170-194.
* Pylyshyn, Z. (1981b), 'The Imagery Debate: Analog Media versus Tacit Knowledge,' Psychological Review 88: 16-45.
* Pylyshyn, Z. (1984), Computation and Cognition, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Pylyshyn, Z. (2003), Seeing and Visualizing: It's Not What You Think, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Raffman, D. (1995), 'The Persistence of Phenomenology,' in T. Metzinger, ed., Conscious Experience, Paderborn: Schönigh/Imprint Academic: 293-308.
* Ramsey, W., Stich, S. and Garon, J. (1990), 'Connectionism, Eliminativism and the Future of Folk Psychology,' Philosophical Perspectives 4: 499-533.
* Reid, T. (1764), An Inquiry into the Human Mind, D.R. Brooks, ed., Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (1997).
* Rey, G. (1981), 'Introduction: What Are Mental Images?' in Block 1981: 117-127.
* Rey, G. (1991), 'Sensations in a Language of Thought,' in E. Villaneuva, ed., Philosophical Issues 1: Consciousness, Atascadero: Ridgeview Publishing Company: 73-112.
* Rumelhart, D.E. (1989), 'The Architecture of the Mind: A Connectionist Approach,' in M.I. Posner, ed., Foundations of Cognitive Science, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press: 133-159.
* Rumelhart, D.E. and McCelland, J.L. (1986). Parallel Distributed Processing, Vol. I, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Schiffer, S. (1987), Remnants of Meaning, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Schiffer, S. (1972), 'Introduction to the Paperback Edition,' in Meaning, Oxford: Clarendon Press (1972/1988): xi-xxix.
* Searle, J.R. (1980), 'Minds, Brains, and Programs,' Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3: 417-424.
* Searle, J.R. (1983), Intentionality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* Searle, J.R. (1984) Minds, Brains, and Science, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
* Searle, J.R. (1992), The Rediscovery of the Mind, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Sellars, W. (1956), 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,' in K. Gunderson, ed., Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. I, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 253-329.
* Shepard, R.N. and Cooper, L. (1982), Mental Images and their Transformations, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Shoemaker, S. (1990), 'Qualities and Qualia: What's in the Mind?' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50: 109-31.
* Smolensky, P. (1988), 'On the Proper Treatment of Connectionism,' Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 11: 1-74.
* Siewert, C. (1998), The Significance of Consciousness, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
* Smolensky, P. (1989), 'Connectionist Modeling: Neural Computation/Mental Connections,' in L. Nadel, L.A. Cooper, P. Culicover and R.M. Harnish, eds., Neural Connections, Mental Computation Cambridge, Mass.:The MIT Press: 49-67.
* Smolensky, P. (1991), 'Connectionism and the Language of Thought,' in B. Loewer and G. Rey, eds., Meaning in Mind: Fodor and His Critics, Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd.: 201-227.
* Sterelny, K. (1989), 'Fodor's Nativism,' Philosophical Studies 55: 119-141.
* Stich, S. (1983), From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Stich, S. (1996), Deconstructing the Mind, New York: Oxford University Press.
* Strawson, G. (1994), Mental Reality, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Thau, M. (2002), Consciousness and Cognition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Turing, A. (1950), 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence,' Mind 59: 433-60.
* Tye, M. (1991), The Imagery Debate, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Tye, M. (1995), Ten Problems of Consciousness, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Tye, M. (2000), Consciousness, Color, and Content, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Van Gelder, T. (1995), 'What Might Cognition Be, if not Computation?', Journal of Philosophy XCI: 345-381.
* Von Eckardt, B. (1993), What Is Cognitive Science?, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
* Von Eckardt, B. (2005), 'Connectionism and the Propositional Attitudes,' in C.E. Erneling and D.M. Johnson, eds., The Mind as a Scientific Object: Between Brain and Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Wittgenstein, L. (1953), Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Other Internet Resources

* A Field Guide to the Philosophy of Mind, General editors, Marcho Nani and Massimo Marraffa.
* Cogprints, Cognitive Sciences Eprint Archive, University of Southampton.
* Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind, Editor, Chris Eliasmith, Washington University in St. Louis.
* DON'T PANIC: Tye's Intentionalist Theory of Consciousness, by Alex Byrne, from A Field Guide to the Philosophy of Mind.

Related Entries

artificial intelligence | cognitive science | concepts | connectionism | consciousness: and intentionality | consciousness: representational theories of | folk psychology: as mental simulation | information: semantic conceptions of | intentionality | language of thought hypothesis | logic and artificial intelligence | materialism: eliminative | mental content: causal theories of | mental content: externalism about | mental content: narrow | mental content: nonconceptual | mental content: teleological theories of | mental imagery | mental representation: in medieval philosophy | mind: computational theory of | neuroscience, philosophy of | perception: the contents of | perception: the problem of | qualia | reference
Acknowledgments

Thanks to Brad Armour-Garb, Mark Balaguer, Dave Chalmers, Jim Garson, John Heil, Jeff Poland, Bill Robinson, Galen Strawson, Adam Vinueza and (especially) Barbara Von Eckardt for comments on earlier versions of this entry."

Concepts (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Concepts (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): "Concepts
First published Mon Nov 7, 2005; substantive revision Wed Feb 22, 2006

Concepts, pretheoretically, are the constituents of thoughts. But the pre-theoretic notion only goes so far as an entry point into philosophical theories of concepts. This is partly because concept has become a term of art among philosophers and partly because of the diversity of projects and concerns that tend to get lumped under this one heading. Adding to the confusion is the fact that disputes about concepts often reflect deeply opposing approaches to the study of the mind, language, and even to philosophy itself. Bearing all of this in mind, this entry is organized around five significant issues that are focal points for many theories of concepts. Not every theory of concepts takes a stand on each of the five, but viewed collectively these issues show why the theory of concepts has been such a rich and lively topic in recent years. The five issues are: (1) the ontology of concepts, (2) the structure of concepts, (3) empiricism and nativism about concepts, (4) concepts and natural language, and (5) concepts and conceptual analysis.

* 1. The ontology of concepts
o 1.1. Concepts as mental representations
o 1.2 Concepts as abilities
o 1.3 Concepts as Fregean senses
o 1.4 Is the issue terminological?
* 2. The structure of concepts
o 2.1 The classical theory
o 2.2 The prototype theory
o 2.3 The theory theory
o 2.4 Conceptual atomism
o 2.5 Pluralism about structure
* 3. Empiricism and nativism about concepts
o 3.1 Renewed interest in the empiricism/nativism dispute
o 3.2 Empiricism about concepts
o 3.3 Nativism about concepts
* 4. Concepts and natural language
o 4.1 Can there be concepts without language?
o 4.2 The priority between language and concepts
o 4.3 Linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity
* 5. Concepts and conceptual analysis
o 5.1 Attractions of conceptual analysis
o 5.2 Objections to conceptual analysis
* Bibliography
* Other Internet Resources
* Related Entries

1. The ontology of concepts

We begin with the issue of the ontological status of a concept. The three main options are to identify concepts with mental representations, with abilities, and with Fregean senses.
1.1. Concepts as mental representations

The first of these views maintains that concepts are psychological entities, taking as its starting point the representational theory of the mind (RTM). According to RTM, thinking occurs in an internal system of representation. Beliefs and desires and other propositional attitudes enter into mental processes as internal symbols. For example, Sue might believe that Dave is taller than Cathy, and also believe that Cathy is taller than Ben, and together these may cause Sue to believe that Dave is taller than Ben. Her beliefs would be constituted by mental representations that are about Dave, Cathy and Ben and their relative heights. What makes these beliefs, as opposed to desires or other psychological states, is that the symbols have the characteristic causal-functional role of beliefs. (RTM is usually presented as taking beliefs and other propositional attitudes to be relations between an agent and a mental representation (e.g., Fodor 1987). But given that the relation in question is a matter of having a representation with a particular type of functional role tokened in one's mind, it is simpler to say that occurrent beliefs just are mental representations with a characteristic type of functional role.)

Many advocates of RTM take the mental representations involved in beliefs and other propositional attitudes to have internal structure. Accordingly, the representations that figure in Sue's beliefs would be composed of more basic representations. For theorists who adopt the mental representation view of concepts, concepts are identified with these more basic representations.

Early advocates of RTM (e.g., Locke (1690/1975) and Hume (1739/1978)) called these more basic representations ideas, and took them to be mental images. But modern versions of RTM assume that much thought is not grounded in mental images. The classic contemporary treatment maintains, instead, that the internal system of representation has a language-like syntax and a compositional semantics. According to this view, much of thought is grounded in word-like mental representations. This view is often referred to as the language of thought hypothesis (Fodor 1975). However, the analogy with language isn't perfect; obviously, the internal symbol system must lack many of the properties associated with a natural language. Nonetheless, like a natural language, the internal system's formulae are taken to have subject/predicate form and include logical devices, such as quantifiers and variables. In addition, the content of a complex symbol is supposed to be a function of its syntactic structure and the contents of its constituents. Returning to Sue's beliefs, the supposition is that they are composed of such symbols as DAVE, CATHY and TALLER and that her beliefs represent what they do in virtue of the contents of these symbols and how they are arranged .

The mental representation view of concepts is the default position in cognitive science (Pinker 1994) and enjoys widespread support in the philosophy of mind, particularly among philosophers who view their work as being aligned with research in cognitive science (e.g., Carruthers, 2000, Fodor 2003, Harman 1987, Laurence & Margolis 1999). Supporters of this view argue for it on explanatory grounds. They maintain that concepts and structured mental representations play a crucial role in accounting for the productivity of thought (i.e., the fact that human beings can entertain an unbounded number of thoughts) and in accounting for how mental processes can be both rational and implemented in the brain (Fodor 1987; see also the entry language of thought hypothesis).

Critics of this view argue that it is possible to have propositional attitudes without having the relevant mental representations tokened in one's head. Daniel Dennett (1977), for example, argues that most people believe zebras don't wear overcoats in the wild—and a million other similar facts—even though they have never stopped to consider such matters. Dennett also notes that computing systems can lack representations corresponding to the explanations we cite in characterizing and predicting their behavior. For example, it may make perfect sense to say of a chess-playing computer that it thinks that it is good to get one's queen out early, even though we know from how the computer is programmed that it has no representation with that very content (see Dennett 1978, 1987 for these and related criticisms and Fodor 1987 for a response).

Other critics claim that RTM is too closely associated with commonsense psychology, which they argue should be abandoned as a stagnant and degenerate research program (Churchland 1981; see Horgan & Woodward 1985 for a reply), or that developments in computational modeling offer alternatives, particularly to the language of thought version of RTM (e.g., see Port & Gelder 1995 on dynamic systems, and Elman et al. 1996 on connectionism; see Fodor & Pylyshyn 1988, Marcus 2001 for critical discussion of theories that hope to avoid combinatorial structure.)
1.2 Concepts as abilities

According to the abilities view, it's wrong to maintain that concepts are mental particulars—concepts are neither mental images nor word-like entities in a language of thought. Rather, concepts are abilities that are peculiar to cognitive agents (e.g., Brandom 1994, Dummett 1993, Millikan 2000). The concept CAT, for example, might amount to the ability to discriminate cats from non-cats and to draw certain inferences about cats.

While the abilities view is maintained by a diverse group of philosophers, the most prominent reason for adopting the view is a deep skepticism about the existence and utility of mental representations, skepticism that traces back Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953/1958). One of the most influential arguments along these lines claims that mental representations are explanatorily idle because they reintroduce the very sorts of problems they are supposed to explain. For example, Michael Dummett cautions against trying to explain knowledge of a first language on the model of knowledge of a second language. In the case of a second language, it is reasonable to suppose that understanding the language involves translating its words and sentences into words and sentences of one's first language. But according to Dummett, one can't go on to translate words and sentences of one's first language into a prior mental language. “[T]here is really no sense to speaking of a concept's coming into someone's mind. All we can think of is some image coming to mind which we take as in some way representing the concept, and this gets us no further forward, since we still have to ask in what his associating that concept with that image consists” (Dummett 1993, p. 98). In other words, the mental representation itself is just another item whose significance bears explaining. Either we are involved in a vicious regress, having to invoke yet another layer of representation (and so on indefinitely) or we might as well stop with the external language and explain its significance directly. (For critical discussion of this type of regress argument, see Fodor 1975, Crane 1995, Laurence & Margolis 1997).

Not surprisingly, critics of the abilities view argue in the other direction. They note difficulties that the abilities view inherits by its rejection of mental representations. One is that the view is ill-equipped to explain the productivity of thought; another is that it can say little about mental processes. And if proponents of the abilities view remain neutral about the existence of mental representations, they open themselves to the criticism that explication of these abilities is best given in terms of underlying mental representations and processes (see Fodor 1968 and Chomsky 1980 for general discussion of the anti-intellectualist tradition in the philosophy of mind).
1.3 Concepts as Fregean senses

The view that concepts are Fregean senses identifies concepts with abstract objects, as opposed to mental objects and mental states (e.g., Peacocke 1992, Zalta 2001). Concepts are said to be the constituents of propositions. For proponents of this view, concepts mediate between thought and language, on the one hand, and referents, on the other. An expression without a referent (“Pegasus”) needn't lack a meaning, since it still has a sense. Similarly, the same referent can be associated with different expressions (e.g., “Eric Blair” and “George Orwell”) because they convey different senses. Senses are more discriminating than referents. Each sense has a unique perspective on its referent—a unique mode of presentation. Differences in cognitive content trace back to differences in modes of presentation. It's for this reason that the thought that George Orwell is Eric Blair lacks the triviality of the thought that George Orwell is George Orwell. Philosophers who take concepts to be senses particularly emphasize this feature of senses. Christopher Peacocke, for example, locates the subject matter of a theory of concepts as follows: “Concepts C and D are distinct if and only if there are two complete propositional contents that differ at most in that one contains C substituted in one or more places for D, and one of which is potentially informative while the other is not” (Peacocke 1992, p. 2). In other words, C and D embody differing modes of presentation. (See the entry Frege for discussion of the sense/reference distinction and for more on the explanatory functions associated with senses. To avoid terminological confusion, we should note that Frege himself did not use the term 'concept' for senses, but rather for the referents of predicates. Similarly, it is worth noting that Frege uses the term 'thought' to stand for propositions, so for Frege 'thoughts' are not psychological states at all.)

The view that concepts are Fregean senses, like the abilities view, is generally held by philosophers who are opposed to identifying concepts with mental representations. Peacocke himself doesn't go so far as to argue that mental representations are explanatorily idle, but he does think that mental representations are too fine-grained for philosophical purposes. “It is possible for one and the same concept to receive different mental representations in different individuals” (Peacocke 1992, p. 3). He is also concerned that identifying concepts with mental representations rules out the possibility of there being concepts that human beings have never entertained, or couldn't ever entertain.

If we accept that a thinker's possession of a concept must be realized by some subpersonal state involving a mental representation, why not say simply that the concept is the mental representation? Just this proposal is made by Margolis and Laurence (1999, 77). Mental representations that are concepts could even be typed by the corresponding possession condition of the sort I favour. This seems to me an entirely legitimate notion of a kind of mental representation; but it is not quite the notion of a concept. It can, for instance, be true that there are concepts human beings may never acquire, because of their intellectual limitations, or because the sun will expand to eradicate human life before humans reach a stage at which they can acquire these concepts. ‘There are concepts that will never be acquired’ cannot mean or imply ‘There are mental representations which are not mental representations in anyone's mind’. If concepts are individuated by their possession conditions, on the other hand, there is no problem about the existence of concepts that will never be acquired. They are simply concepts whose possession conditions will never be satisfied by any thinkers. (Peacocke, 2005, p. 169).

Advocates of the mental representation view would respond to these arguments by invoking the type/token distinction with respect to mental representations. According to the mental representation view, concepts that haven't been acquired are just representations of a type that have never been tokened (for related discussion, see Laurence & Margolis 1999).

Critics of the sense-based view have questioned the utility of appealing to such abstract objects (Quine 1960). One difficulty stems from the fact that senses, as abstract entities, stand outside of the causal realm. The question then is how we can access these objects. Advocates of the Fregean sense view describe our access to senses by means of the metaphor of “grasping”—we are said to grasp the sense of an expression. But grasping here is just a metaphor for a cognitive relation that needs to be explicated. Moreover, though senses are hypothesized as providing different modes of presentation for referents, it is not clear why senses themselves do not generate the mode of presentation problem (Fodor 1998). Since they are external to our minds, just as referents typically are, it isn't clear why we can't stand in different epistemic relations towards them just as we can to referents. In the same way that we can have different modes of presentation for a number (the only even prime, the sum of one and one, Tim's favorite number, etc.), we ought to be able to have different modes of presentation for a given sense.
1.4 Is the issue terminological?

Stepping back from the details of these three views, there is no reason, in principle, why the different views of concepts couldn't be combined in various ways. For instance, one might maintain that concepts are mental representations that are typed in terms of the Fregean senses they express. For this reason alone, it's fair to wonder whether the dispute about ontology is a substantive dispute. Perhaps there is only a terminological issue about which things ought to be granted the label “concepts”. If so, why not just call mental representations “concepts1”, the relevant abilities “concepts2”, senses “concepts3”, and leave it at that?

However, the participants in the dispute don't generally view it as a terminological one. Perhaps this is because they associate their own theories of concepts with large-scale commitments about the way that philosophers should approach the study of mind and language. Undoubtedly, from Dummett's perspective, philosophers who embrace the mental representation view also embrace RTM, and RTM, as he sees it, is fundamentally misguided. Likewise, from Fodor's perspective, RTM is critical to the study of the mind, so an approach like Dummett's, which disallows RTM, places inappropriate a priori constraints on the study of the mind.

These differences in perspective remain present once a more fine-grained terminology is adopted. For example, it would still be a matter of dispute whether there are mental representations and whether they can do the sorts of explanatory work that proponents of RTM require of them or whether these explanatory roles provide the most important or coherent cluster of roles associated with the term “concept”. Previously, these issues would have found expression by posing the question of whether concepts are mental representations. However, if we adopt the proposed new terminology, much the same set of issues would arise concerning the nature and existence of the various more fine-grained categories—concepts1, concepts2, and concepts3.
2. The structure of concepts

Just as thoughts are composed of more basic, word-sized concepts, so these word-sized concepts—known as lexical concepts—are generally thought to be composed of even more basic concepts. In this section, we look at different proposals about the structure of lexical concepts (see Margolis & Laurence 1999 for different approaches to the issue of conceptual structure).
2.1 The classical theory

In one way or another, all theories regarding the structure of concepts are developments of, or reactions to, the classical theory of concepts. According to the classical theory, a lexical concept C has definitional structure in that it is composed of simpler concepts that express necessary and sufficient conditions for falling under C. The stock example is the concept BACHELOR, which is traditionally said to have the constituents UNMARRIED and MAN. If the example is taken at face value, the idea is that something falls under BACHELOR if it is an unmarried man and only if it is an unmarried man. According to the classical theory, lexical concepts generally will exhibit this same sort of definitional structure. This includes such philosophically interesting concepts as TRUTH, GOODNESS, FREEDOM, and JUSTICE.

Before turning to other theories of conceptual structure, it's worth pausing to see what's so appealing about classical or definitional structure. Much of its appeal comes from the way it offers unified treatments of concept acquisition, categorization, and reference determination. In each case, the crucial work is being done by the very same components. Concept acquisition can be understood as a process in which new complex concepts are created by assembling their definitional constituents. Categorization can be understood as a psychological process in which a complex concept is matched to a target item by checking to see if each and every one of its definitional constituents applies to the target. And reference determination, we've already seen, is a matter of whether the definitional constituents do apply to the target.

These considerations alone would be enough to show why the classical theory has been held in such high regard. But the classical theory receives further motivation through its connection with a philosophical method that goes back to antiquity and that continues to exert its influence over contemporary thought. This is the method of conceptual analysis. Paradigmatic conceptual analyses offer definitions of concepts that are to be tested against potential counterexamples that are identified via thought experiments. Conceptual analysis is supposed to be a distinctively a priori activity that many take to be the essence of philosophy. To the extent that paradigmatic conceptual analyses are available and successful, this will convey support for the classical theory. Conversely, if the definitions aren't there to be discovered, this would seem to put in jeopardy a venerable view of what philosophy is and how philosophical investigations ought to proceed (see section 5 below).

The classical theory has come under considerable pressure in the last thirty years or so, not just in philosophy but in psychology and other fields as well. For psychologists, the main problem has been that the classical theory has difficulty explaining a robust set of empirical findings. At the center of this work is the discovery that certain categories are taken to be more representative or typical and that typicality scores correlate with a wide variety of psychological data (for reviews, see Smith & Medin 1981, Murphy 2002). For instance, apples are judged to be more typical than plums with respect to the category of fruit, and correspondingly apples are judged to have more features in common with fruit. There are many other findings of this kind. One other is that more typical items are categorized more efficiently. For example, subjects are quicker to judge that apples are a kind of fruit than to judge that plums are. The problem isn't that the classical theory is inconsistent with results like these but that it does nothing to explain them.

In philosophy, the classical theory has been subjected to a number of criticisms but perhaps the most fundamental is that attempts to specify definitions for concepts have a poor track record. Quite simply, there are too few examples of successful definitional analyses, and certainly none that are uncontroversial (Wittgenstein 1953/1958, Fodor 1981). The huge literature on the analysis of knowledge is representative of the state of things. Since Edmund Gettier (1963) first challenged the traditional definition of KNOWLEDGE (as JUSTIFIED TRUE BELIEF), there has been widespread agreement among philosophers that the traditional definition is incorrect or at least incomplete (e.g., Dancy 1985). But no one can seem to agree on what the correct definition is. Despite the enormous amount of effort that has gone into the matter, and the dozens of papers written on the issue, we are still lacking a satisfactory and complete definition. It could be that the problem is that definitions are hard to come by. But another possibility—one that many philosophers are now taking seriously—is that our concepts lack definitional structure.
2.2 The prototype theory

What other type of structure could they have? A non-classical alternative that emerged in the 1970s is the prototype theory. According to this theory, a lexical concept C doesn't have definitional structure but has probabilistic structure in that something falls under C just in case it satisfies a sufficient number of properties encoded by C's constituents. The prototype theory has its philosophical roots in Wittgenstein's (1953/1958) famous remark that the things covered by a term often share a family resemblance, and it has its psychological roots in Eleanor Rosch's experimental treatment of much the same idea (Rosch & Mervis 1975, Rosch 1978). The prototype theory is especially at home in dealing with the typicality effects that were left unexplained by the classical theory. One standard strategy is to maintain that, on the prototype theory, categorization is to be understood as a similarity comparison process, where similarity is computed as a function of the number of constituents that two concepts hold in common. On this model, the reason apples are judged to be more typical than plums is that the concept APPLE shares more of its constituents with FRUIT. Likewise, this is why apples are judged to be a kind of fruit faster than plums are.

The prototype theory does well in accounting for a variety of psychological phenomena and it helps to explain why definitions may be so hard to produce. But the prototype theory has its own problems and limitations. One is that its treatment of categorization works best for quick and unreflective judgments. Yet when it comes to more reflective judgments, people go beyond the outcome of a similarity comparison. If asked whether a dog that is surgically altered to look like a raccoon is a dog or a raccoon, the answer for most of us, and even for children, is that it is remains a dog (see Keil 1989, Gelman 2003 for discussion). Another criticism that has been raised against taking concepts to have prototype structure concerns compositionality. When a patently complex concept has a prototype structure, it often has emergent properties, ones that don't derive from the prototypes of its constituents (e.g., PET FISH encodes properties such as brightly colored, which have no basis in the prototype structure for either PET or FISH). Further, many patently complex concepts don't even have a prototype structure (e.g., CHAIRS THAT WERE PURCHASED ON A WEDNESDAY) (Fodor & Lepore 1994, Fodor 1998).

One solution to these problems is to hold that a prototype constitutes just part of the structure of a concept. In addition, concepts have conceptual cores, which specify the information relevant to more considered judgments and which underwrite compositional processes. Of course, this just raises the question of what sort of structure conceptual cores have. One common suggestion is that conceptual cores have classical structure (Osherson & Smith 1981, Landau1982). This won't do, however, since it just raises once again most of the problems associated with the classical theory (Laurence & Margolis 1999).
2.3 The theory theory

Another and currently more popular suggestion is that cores are best understood in terms of the theory theory of concepts. This is the view that concepts stand in relation to one another in the same way as the terms of a scientific theory and that categorization is a process that strongly resembles scientific theorizing (see, e.g., Carey 1985, Gopnik & Meltzoff 1997, Keil 1989). It's generally assumed, as well, that the terms of a scientific theory are interdefined so that a theoretical term's content is determined by its unique role in the theory in which it occurs.

The theory theory is especially well-suited to explaining the sorts of reflective categorization judgments that proved to be difficult for the prototype theory. For example, theory theorists maintain that children override perceptual similarity in assessing the situation where the dog is made to look like a raccoon, claiming that even children are in possession of a rudimentary biological theory. This theory, an early form of folk biology, tells them that being a dog isn't just a matter of looking like a dog. More important is having the appropriate hidden properties of dogs—the dog essence (see Medin & Atran 1999 on folkbiology). Another advantage of the theory theory is that is supposed to help to explain important aspects of conceptual development. Conceptual change in childhood is said to follow the same pattern as theory change in science.

One problem that has been raised against the theory theory is that it has difficulty in allowing for different people to possess the same concepts (or even for the same person to have the same concept over time). The reason is that the theory theory is holistic. A concept's content is determined by its role in a theory, not by its being composed of just a handful of constituents. Since beliefs that enter people's mental theories are likely to be different from one another (and are likely to change), there may be no principled basis for comparison (Fodor & Lepore 1992). Another problem with the theory theory concerns the analogy to theory change in science. The analogy suggests that children undergo radical conceptual reorganization in development, but many of the central case studies have proved to be controversial on empirical grounds, with evidence that the relevant concepts are implicated in core knowledge systems that are enriched in development but not fundamentally altered (see Spelke 1994 on core knowledge).
2.4 Conceptual atomism

A radical alternative to all of the theories we've mentioned so far is conceptual atomism, the view that lexical concepts have no semantic structure (Fodor 1998, Millikan 2000). According to conceptual atomism, the content of a concept isn't determined by its relation to other concepts but by its relation to the world.

Conceptual atomism follows in the anti-descriptivist tradition that traces back to Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, and others working in the philosophy of language (see Kripke 1972/80, Putnam 1975, Devitt 1981). Kripke, for example, argues that proper names function like mere tags in that they have no descriptive content (Kripke 1972/80). On a description theory one might suppose that “Gödel” means something like the discoverer of the incompleteness of arithmetic. But Kripke points out we could discover that Schmitt really discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic and that Gödel could have killed Schmitt and passed the work off as his own. The point is that if the description theory were correct, we would be referring to Schmitt when we say “Gödel”. But intuitively, that's not the case at all. In the imagined scenario, the sentence “Gödel discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic” is saying something false about Gödel, not something trivially true about Schmitt. Kripke's alternative account of names is that they achieve their reference by standing in a causal relation to their referents. Conceptual atomism employs a similar strategy while extending the model to all sorts of concepts, not just ones for proper names.
2.5 Pluralism about structure

At present, the nature of conceptual structure remains unsettled. Perhaps part of the problem is that more attention needs to be given to the question of what explanatory work conceptual structure is supposed to do and the possibility that there are different types of structure associated with different explanatory functions. We've seen that conceptual structure is invoked to explain, among other things, typicality effects, reflective categorization, cognitive development, reference determination, and compositionality. But there is no reason to assume that a single type of structure can explain all of these things. As a result, there is no reason why philosophers shouldn't maintain that concepts have different types of structure. For example, notice that atomism is largely motivated by anti-descriptivism. In effect, the atomist maintains that considerable psychological variability is consistent with concepts entering into the same mind-world causal relations, and that it's the latter that determines a concept's reference. But just because the mechanisms of reference determination permit considerable psychological variability doesn't mean that there aren't, in fact, significant patterns for psychologists to uncover. On the contrary, the evidence for typicality effects is impressive by any measure. For this reason, it isn't unreasonable to claim that concepts do have prototype structure even if that structure has nothing to do with the determination of a concept's referent. Similar considerations suggest that concepts may have theory-structure and perhaps other types of structure as well (see Laurence & Margolis 1999 on different types of conceptual structure). Moreover, different types of concepts may well have correspondingly different types of structure—the human conceptual system is, after all, incredibly diverse.
3. Empiricism and nativism about concepts

One of the oldest questions about concepts concerns whether there are any innate concepts and, if so, how much of the conceptual system is innate. Empiricists maintain that there are few if any innate concepts and that most cognitive capacities are acquired on the basis of a few relatively simple general-purpose cognitive mechanisms. Nativists, on the other hand, maintain that there may be many innate concepts and that the mind has a great deal of innate differentiation into complex domain-specific subsystems.
3.1 Renewed interest in the empiricism/nativism dispute

In recent years, the debate over innate concepts has been reinvigorated as advances in cognitive science have provided philosophers with new tools for revisiting and refining the traditional dispute (see, e.g., Pinker 1994, Elman et al. 1996, Carruthers, Laurence, & Stich 2005). Philosophers have greatly benefited from empirical studies in such diverse fields as developmental psychology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive anthropology, neuroscience, linguistics, and ethology. Part of the philosophical interest of this work is that, while the scientists themselves take sides on the empiricist-nativist dispute, their theories and data are often open to interpretation.

As an example, one of the earliest lines of investigation that appeared to support traditional nativist conceptions of the mind was the study of language (Pinker 1994). Noam Chomsky and his followers argued that language acquisition succeeds even though children are only exposed to severely limited evidence about the structure of their language (Chomsky 1967, 1975, 1988; see also Laurence & Margolis 2001). Given the way that the final state (e.g., knowledge of English) outstrips the data that are available to children, we can only postulate that the human mind brings to language acquisition a complex set of language-specific dispositions. For Chomsky, these dispositions are grounded in a set of innate principles that constrain all possible human natural languages, viz., universal grammar (see Baker 2001 on universal grammar).

Not surprisingly, many philosophers have questioned Chomsky's position. The ensuing debate has helped to sharpen the crucial arguments and the extent to which nativist models should continue to command their central place in linguistic theory. (On the empiricist side, see Cowie (1999), Prinz (2002), and Devitt (in press); on the nativist side, see Laurence & Margolis (2001) and Crain & Pietroski (2001)); see also the entry innatism: linguistic). For instance, one of Fiona Cowie's criticisms of Chomsky's poverty of the stimulus argument is that any induction establishes a conclusion that outstrips the available data; hence, going beyond the data in the case of language acquisition doesn't argue for innate language-specific dispositions—or else there would have to be a specific innate disposition for every induction we make (for an earlier version of this argument, see Putnam 1967, Goodman 1969). Both Laurence & Margolis and Crain & Pietroski respond by teasing out the various ways in which the problem of language acquisition goes beyond general problems about induction.
3.2 Empiricism about concepts

Traditionally, empiricists have argued that all concepts derive from sensations. Concepts were understood to be formed from copies of sensory representations and assembled in accordance with a set of general-purpose learning rules, e.g., Hume's principles of association (Hume 1739/1978). On this view, the content of any concept must be analyzable in terms of its perceptual basis. Any purported concept that fails this test embodies a confusion. Thus David Hume ends his Enquiry with the famous remark:

When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. (1748/1975, p. 165)

A similar doctrine was maintained by the logical positivists in the early Twentieth Century, though the positivists couched the view in linguistic terms (Ayer 1959). Their principle of verification required for a sentence or statement to be meaningful that it have empirical consequences, and, on some formulations of the principle, that the meaning of a sentence is the empirical procedure for confirming it (see the entry Vienna Circle). Sentences that have no empirical consequences were deemed to be meaningless. Since a good deal of philosophy purports to express propositions that transcend all possible experience, the positivists were happy to say that these philosophical doctrines are entirely devoid of content and are composed of sentences that aren't merely false but are literally gibberish.

Despite the current unpopularity of verificationism (though see Dummett 1993, Wright 1989, and Dennett 1991), a growing number of philosophers are attracted to modified forms of empiricism, forms that primarily emphasize psychological relations between the conceptual system and perceptual and motor states, not semantic relations. An example is Lawrence Shapiro's defense of the claim that the type of body that an organism has profoundly affects its cognitive operations as well as the way that the organism is likely to conceptualize the world (Shapiro 2004). Shapiro's claim is directed against philosophical theories that willfully ignore contingent facts about human bodies as if a human mind could inhere in wildly different body types. Drawing on a number of empirical research programs, Shapiro cites examples that appear to support what he calls the embodied mind thesis, viz., that “minds profoundly reflect the bodies in which they are contained” (Shapiro 2004, p. 167).

Jesse Prinz (2002) also defends a modified form of empiricism. Prinz claims that “all (human) concepts are copies or combinations of copies of perceptual representations” (Prinz 2002, p. 108). Though the reference to copies is a nod to Hume, Prinz certainly doesn't buy into Hume's verificationism. In fact, Prinz adopts a causal theory of content of the kind that is usually associated with atomistic theories of concepts (e.g., Fodor 1998); thus Prinz's theory of intentional content doesn't require a concept to inherit the specifically perceptual content of its constituents. Nonetheless, Prinz thinks that every concept derives from perceptual representations. Perhaps the best way to understand the claim is that the mental representations that are activated when someone thinks about something—no matter what the thought—are representations that originate in neural circuits with perceptual or motor functions and that the mental process is affected by that origin. Suppose, for example, that one is thinking about a hammer. Then she is either activating representations that inhere in visual circuits, or representations involved in circuits that control hand shape, etc., and her thought is affected in some way by the primary function of these circuits. Following Lawrence Barsalou (1999; see also Barsalou 2003), Prinz characterizes concept possession as a kind of simulation “tantamount to entering a perceptual state of the kind one would be in if one were to experience the thing it represents” (Prinz 2002, p. 150).

One challenge to this view of cognition is its implication for abstract concepts. It's one thing to say that the concept HAMMER involves the activation of circuits related to hand shape; it's quite another to identify significant modal-specific representations underlying such concepts as TRUTH, DEMOCRACY, ENTROPY, and NINETEEN(Adams & Campbell 1999, Brewer 1999). Logical concepts are also a challenge. Prinz suggests as a perceptual basis for the concept of disjunction that it is based on feelings of hesitation. However, his more considered view seems to be that logical concepts are best understood as operations, not representations. The resulting theory is one in which thoughts lack logical form. The trouble is that this makes it difficult to see how to distinguish logically equivalent thoughts. A related problem is that, since composition for Prinz does not yield structurally complex representations, there seems to be nothing to distinguish the type of contents associated with judgements (propositional contents) from those associated lists or even single concepts (for related discussion Fodor & Pylyshyn 1988).
3.3 Nativism about concepts

Perhaps the most influential discussion of concepts in relation to the nativism/empiricism debate is Jerry Fodor's (1975, 1981) argument for the claim that virtually all lexical concepts are innate. Fodor (1975) argued that there are theoretical problems with all models of concept learning in that all such models treat concept learning as hypothesis testing. The problem is that the correct hypothesis invariably employs the very concept to be learned and hence the concept has to be available to a learner prior to the learning taking place. In his (1981) Fodor developed this argument by allowing that complex concepts (and only complex concepts) can be learned in that they can be assembled from their constituents during the learning process. He went on to argue that lexical concepts lack semantic structure and consequently that virtually all lexical concepts must be innate—a position known as radical concept nativism. This view has been criticized by numerous philosophers (Samet 1986, Sterelney 1989, Cowie 1999, Laurence & Margolis 2002) yet the logic underlying Fodor's argument continues to influence cognitive scientists who more or less universally reject Fodor's conclusion, but struggle to understand how the mind is able to develop a richer representational system on the basis of a more impoverished one (Niyogi & Snedeker forthcoming).

One further issue concerning innate concepts is whether the very idea of innateness makes sense. A common point among those who are skeptical of the notion is the observation that all traits are dependent upon interactions between genes and the environment and that there is no way of fully untangling the two (Elman et al. 1996, Griffiths 2002; see also Marcus 2004). Nonetheless, there are clear differences between models of the mind with empiricist leanings and models of the mind with nativist leanings, and the notion of innateness may be thought to earn its usefulness by marking these differences. (See Samuels 2002 for discussion of different proposals of what innateness is.)
4. Concepts and natural language

We turn now to the issue of how concepts and thoughts relate to language.
4.1 Can there be concepts without language?

Some philosophers maintain that possession of natural language is necessary for having any concepts (Brandom 1994, Davidson 1975, Dummett 1993) and that the tight connection between the two can be established on a priori grounds. In a well known passage, Donald Davidson summarizes his position as follows:

We have the idea of belief only from the role of belief in the interpretation of language, for as a private attitude it is not intelligible except as an adjustment to the public norm provided by language. It follows that a creature must be a member of a speech community if it is to have the concept of belief. And given the dependence of other attitudes on belief, we can say more generally that only a creature that can interpret speech can have the concept of a thought.

Can a creature have a belief it does not have the concept of belief? It seems to me it cannot, and for this reason. Someone cannot have a belief unless he understands the possibility of being mistaken, and this requires grasping the contrast between truth and error—true belief and false belief. But this contrast, I have argued, can emerge only in the context of interpretation, which alone forces us to the idea of an objective, public truth. (Davidson 1975, p. 170).

The argument links having beliefs and concepts with having the concept of belief. Since Davidson thinks that non-linguistic creatures can't have the concept of belief, they can't have other concepts as well. Why the concept of belief is needed to have other concepts is somewhat obscure in Davidson's writings (Carruthers 1992). And whether language is necessary for this particular concept is not obvious. In fact, there is an ongoing research program in cognitive science that addresses this very issue. A variety of non-linguistic tasks have been given to animals and infants to determine the extent to which they are able to attribute mental states to others (see Tomasello, Call, & Hare 2003 for work on chimpanzees and Onishi & Baillargeon 2005 for work on infants; see also Bloom & German 2000). These and related studies provide strong evidence that at least some aspects of theory of mind are nonlinguistic.

Davidson offers a pair of supplementary arguments that may elucidate why he is hesitant to turn the issue over to the cognitive scientists. He gives the example of a man engaging in a non-linguistic task where the man indicates his answer by making a choice, for example, selecting an apple over a pear. Davidson comments that until the man actually says what he has in mind, there will always be a question about the conceptualization guiding his choice. “Repeated tests may make some readings of his actions more plausible than others, but the problem will remain how to determine when he judges two objects of choice to be identical” (1975, p. 163). The second argument points to the difficulties of settling upon a specification of what a non-linguistic creature is thinking. “The dog, we say, knows that its master is home. But does it know that Mr. Smith (who is the master) is home? We have no real idea how to settle, or make sense of, these questions” (1975, p, 163). It's not clear how seriously Davidson himself takes these arguments. Many philosophers have been unconvinced. Notice that both arguments turn on an underdetermination claim—e.g., that the interpretation of the man's action is underdetermined by the non-linguistic evidence. But much the same thing is true even if we add what the man says (or to be more precise, if we add what the man utters). The linguistic evidence doesn't guarantee a correct interpretation any more than the non-linguistic evidence does.

Davidson appears to be employing a very high standard for attributing concepts to animals. In effect, he is asking for proof that our attributions are correct. In contrast, most philosophers who are happy to attribute concepts to animals do so because of a wealth of data that are explained only by appeal to an internal system of representation (e.g., Bermudez 2003; for overviews within cognitive science, see Bekoff, Allen, & Burghardt 2002, Gallistel 1990, Hauser 2000). For example, many species of birds cache food for later retrieval. Their very survival depends upon their ability to successfully recover, in some cases, more than 10,000 different caches in a single season. Researchers studying one species of caching birds have shown that not only do the birds represent the location of the food, but they integrate this information with information about the quality of the food, its perishability, and whether their caching was observed by other birds. Evidence here comes from demonstrations of selective retrieval and recaching of food items under experimentally controlled conditions. Birds will retrieve more perishable items first. When highly valued food items become highly perishable, they shift strategies to retrieve a higher percentage of less perishable food items. And birds that have themselves stolen food from other birds will selectively recache stored food when they are observed caching it (see Clayton, Bussey, & Dickinson 2003, Emery, Dally, & Clayton 2004). Experimental data of this kind provide evidence for particular concepts in birds (of food types, locations, and so on) as well as surprisingly sophisticated cognitive operations defined in terms of them.

There is a great deal of controversy among philosophers about the implications of this type of research. Proponents of RTM are, of course, entirely happy with the idea that the scientific theories of what birds are doing can be taken at face value. Other philosophers maintain that if the scientific theories say that birds are computing an algorithm for determining a caching strategy, then this can only be read as a façon de parler. Still others will grant that animals have representations but go on to claim that these representation are of a lesser status, not to be confused with concepts (Brandom 1994, 2000, McDowell 1994).

This raises an interesting question about whether there is a motivated and principled difference between concepts in humans and mere representations in animals. Philosophers who maintain that there is such a difference often cite the role of concepts in reasoning. For example, Robert Brandom claims that representations in animals do little more than act as reliable mechanisms of discrimination. These representations are supposed to be like thermometers, responding to specific environmental features yet without entering into appropriate inferential processes. However, it's not clear what counts as an appropriate inferential process, and certainly there is room for differing opinions on this point. Moreover, whatever reasoning amounts to, comparative psychology is replete with examples that suggest that animals are capable of far more than reliable detection. Animals may not be as smart as humans, but that doesn't mean they are as dumb as thermometers (see Hurley & Nudds 2006 on reasoning in animals).
4.2 The priority between language and concepts

Even if it's agreed that it is possible to have concepts in the absence of language, there is a dispute about how the two are related. Some maintain that concepts are prior to and independent of natural language, and that natural language is just a means for conveying thought (Fodor 1975, Pinker 1994). Others maintain that at least some types of thinking (and hence some concepts) occur in the internal system of representation constituting our natural language competence (Carruthers 1996, 2002, Spelke 2003).

The arguments for deciding between these two positions involve a mixture of theoretical and empirical considerations. Proponents of the first view have claimed that language is ambiguous in ways that thought presumably is not. For example, the natural language sentence everyone loves someone could be interpreted to mean that everyone loves someone or other, or to mean that everyone loves one and the same person (Pinker 1994). Proponents of the first view have also argued that since language itself has to be learned, thought is prior to language (Fodor 1975; Pinker 1994). A third and similar consideration is that people seem to be able formulate novel concepts which are left to be named later; the concept comes first, the name second (Pinker 1994).

Proponents of the alternative view—that some thinking occurs in language—have pointed to the phenomenology of thought. It certainly seems as if we are thinking in language when we “hear” ourselves silently talking to ourselves (Carruthers 1996). There is also intriguing data that success on certain tasks (e.g., spatial reorientation that relies on combining landmark information with geometrical information) is selectively impaired when the linguistic system is engaged but not when comparable attention is given to non-linguistic distractors. The suggestion is that solving these tasks requires thinking in one's natural language and that some of the crucial concepts must be couched linguistically (Hermer-Vazquez, Spelke, & Katsnelson 2001; Shusterman & Spelke 2005; Carruthers 2002).
4.3 Linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity

Finally, one further issue that bears mentioning is the status of various claims regarding linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity. Linguistic determinism is the doctrine that the language a person speaks causes her to conceptualize the world in certain ways while delimiting the boundaries of her conceptual system; as a result, people who speak very different languages are likely to conceptualize the world in correspondingly different ways. Linguistic relativity is the weaker doctrine that the language one speaks influences how one thinks.

Linguistic determinism is historically associated with the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (Whorf 1956). Whorf was especially interested in the languages of the indigenous people of America. He famously argued that the Hopi both speak and think about time in ways that are incongruent with European languages and thought. Rather than viewing time as a continuum that flows evenly throughout the universe and that can be broken up into countable events occurring in the past, present, and future, the Hopi are supposed to focus on change as a process. Their conceptual system is also supposed to differ from ours in that it embodies a distinction between things that are or have been accessible to perception versus things that are not, where the latter category includes things in the future as well as mythical and mental constructs.

The claim that the Hopi lack our concept of time has not stood up to scrutiny. Whorf used clumsy translations of Hopi speech that concealed the extent to which they talk about time (references to yesterday, tomorrow, days of the week, lunar phases, etc.). More interestingly, Whorf provided no direct evidence of how the Hopi think. Instead, he used the circular reasoning that they don't think about time as we do because they don't talk about time as we do. In fact, the Hopi use numerous familiar devices for time keeping, such as calendar strings and sun dials, and their sensitivity to time is evident a wide variety of cultural practices (Malotki 1983).

Linguistic determinism isn't an especially promising doctrine and has few adherents these days, but linguistic relativity is the subject of a spirited debate (see Gumperz & Levinson 1996, Bowerman & Levinson 2001, and Gentner & Goldin-Meadow (2003)). Some recent examples of particular interest include whether language influences how we conceptualize space (non-linguistic spatial reasoning) (e.g., Munnich & Landau 2003; Levinson 2003), motion (non-linguistic reasoning about motion) (e.g., Papafragou, Massey, & Gleitman 2002), and sex (the impact of grammatical gender) (e.g., Boroditsky, Schmidt, & Phillips 2003)
5. Concepts and conceptual analysis

Some of the deepest divides in contemporary philosophy concern the limits of empirical inquiry, the status of conceptual analysis, and the nature of philosophy itself (see, e.g., Chalmers 1996, Jackson 1998, Block & Stalnaker 1999, DePaul & Ramsey 1998). And concepts are right at the center of these disputes. For many, philosophy is essentially the a priori analysis of concepts, which can and should be done without leaving the proverbial armchair. We've already seen that in the paradigm case, an analysis embodies a definition; it specifies a set of conditions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for the application of the concept. When all goes well, the intuitions are supposed to match the correct analysis perfectly (though generally speaking it's understood that there may be a tradeoff, where most intuitions have to match an analysis but where an otherwise successful analysis may lead to the discrediting of a few intuitions).
5.1 Attractions of conceptual analysis

Conceptual analysis is attractive to philosophers for a number of reasons. One is that it makes sense of a good deal of philosophical practice—what George Bealer (1998) calls the standard justificatory procedure. Philosophers are always constructing thought experiments and eliciting intuitions. If this practice makes sense, then there has to be an understanding of what philosophy is that would vindicate its utility. Conceptual analysis is supposed to provide just what's needed here. Intuitions can be said to be of value to philosophy precisely because they help us to get clearer about our concepts, especially concepts of intrinsic philosophical interest (JUSTICE, KNOWLEDGE, etc.).

A related attraction is that conceptual analysis explains why philosophy can be an a priori discipline, as many suppose it is. If philosophy is primarily about concepts and concepts can be investigated from the armchair, then the a priori character of philosophy is secured (Jackson 1998).

A third attraction of conceptual analysis is that conceptual analysis has been argued to be a necessary precursor for answering questions about ontological reduction, that is, the sort of reduction that takes place when it's argued that genes are DNA segments, that sensations are brain states, and so on (Chalmers 1996, Jackson 1998). According to one way of filling this view out, one has to begin with an a priori analysis of the higher-level concept, particularly an analysis that makes explicit its causal relations. One can then appeal to empirical findings regarding the things that actually have those causal relations. For example, neuroscience may reveal that such-and-such brain state has the casual relations that analysis reveals to be constitutive of our concept of pain. In the course of doing this, neuroscience is supposed to be showing us what pain is (Lewis 1966, Armstrong 1968). But neuroscience is only in a position to do this against the background of the philosophical work that goes into articulating the concept. (For detailed treatments of this view of reduction, see Chalmers 1996 and Jackson 1998—though it should be noted that Chalmers argues that PAIN, and other concepts of conscious mental states, cannot be analyzed solely in terms of their causal relations and concludes from this that consciousness itself is irreducible.) This work has generated a great deal of debate (e.g., Block & Stalnaker 1999, Yablo 2000, Papineau 2002).

Finally, a fourth attraction is that conceptual analysis may offer normative guidance (Goldman 1986). For instance, epistemologists face the question of whether our inferential practices are justified and, if so, what justifies them. One standard answer is that they can be justified if they conform to our intuitions about what counts as a justified inference (Goldman 1986). In other words, an analysis of our concept of justification is supposed to be all that is needed in order to establish that a set of inference rules is justified. So if it ever turned out that different groups of people employed qualitatively different sets of inferential principles, we could establish the epistemically preferable one by showing that it does a better job of conforming to our concept of justification.
5.2 Objections to conceptual analysis

Many philosophers who are opposed to conceptual analysis identify their approach as being naturalistic (e.g., Papineau 1993, Devitt 1996, Kornblith 2002; see also the entry naturalism). A common theme of this work is that philosophy is supposed to be continuous with science and that philosophical theories are to be defended on largely explanatory grounds, not on the basis of a priori arguments that appeal to intuition. Accordingly, perceived difficulties with conceptual analysis provide arguments for naturalism.

One such argument centers around the failures of the classical theory of concepts. Earlier, in Section 2, we noted that paradigmatic conceptual analyses require concepts to have classical structure, an assumption that is increasingly difficult to maintain. For this reason, a number of philosophers have expressed skepticism about the viability of conceptual analysis as a philosophical method (e.g., Ramsey 1998, Stich 1992). Others, however, have called into question the connection between conceptual analysis and definitions (Chalmers & Jackson 2001).

Another objection to conceptual analysis is that the intuitions that philosophers routinely rely upon may not be shared. Anyone who teaches philosophy certainly knows that half the time students have the “wrong intuitions”. But who are we to say that they are wrong? And given that people disagree about their intuitions, these can hardly be treated as objective data (Cummins 1998).

Things become even more interesting if we branch out to other cultures. In a preliminary study of East Asian vs. Western intuitions, Jonathan Weinberg, Shaun Nichols, & Stephen Stich (2001) found that East Asians often have the “wrong intuitions” regarding variations on classic philosophical thought experiments, including Gettier-type thought experiments. At the very least, this work suggests that philosophers should be cautious about moving from their own intuitions to claims about the proper analysis of a concept.

What's more, the cultural diversity that the work in Weinberg et al. points to raises a troubling question for philosophers who want to establish normative claims on the basis of analyses of concepts, such as the concept of justification. Suppose, for example, that East Asian culture offers a different concept of justification than the one that is embedded in Western commonsense thought (assuming for sake of argument that there is a single concept of justification in each culture). In addition, suppose that East Asians employ different inferential practices than our own and that their practices do a fair job of conforming to their concept of justification and that ours do a fair job of conforming to our own. On what basis, then, are we to compare and evaluate these differing practices? Does it really make sense to say that ours are superior on the ground that they conform better to our concept of justification? Wouldn't this just be a form of epistemic prejudice? After all, the question arises whether, given the two concepts of justification, ours is the one that ought to be used for performing normative epistemic evaluations (Stich 1990).

Much is at stake in the debate between conceptual analysts and naturalists, and it is likely to be a central topic in the theory of concepts for the foreseeable future.
Bibliography

* Adams, F. & Campbell, K. (1999). Modality and Abstract Concepts. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 610.
* Armstrong, D. (1968). A Materialist Theory of Mind. London: Routledge.
* Ayer, A.J. (1959). Logical Positivism. New York: The Free Press.
* Baker, M. (2001). The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar. New York: Basic Books.
* Barsalou, L. (1999). Perceptual Symbol Systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 577-609.
* Barsalou, L., Simmons, W., Barbey, A., & Wilson, C. (2003). Grounding Conceptual Knowledge in Modality-Specific Systems. Trends in Cognitive Science, 7.2, 84-89.
* Bealer, G. (1998). Intuition and the Autonomy of Philosophy. In M. DePaul & W. Ramsey (eds.) Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 201-239.
* Bekoff, M., Allen, C., & Burghardt, G. (2002). The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
* Bermudez, J. (2003). Thinking Without Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Block, N. & Stalnaker, R. (1999). Conceptual Analysis and the Explanatory Gap. Philosophical Review, 108.1, 1-46.
* Bonjour, L. (1998). In Defense of Pure Reason: A Rationalist Account of A Priori Justification. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L., & Phillips, W. (2003). Sex, Syntax, and Semantics. In D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (eds.). Language in Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp 61-79.
* Bowerman, M. & Levinson, S. (2001). Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* Brandom, R. (2000). Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
* Brandom, R. (1994). Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
* Brewer, W. (1999). Perceptual Symbols: The Power and Limitations of a Theory of Dynamic Imagery and Structured Frames. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 611-12.
* Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual Change in Childhood. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
* Carruthers, P. (1992). The Animals Issue: Moral Theory in Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* Carruthers, P. (1996). Language, Thought, and Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* Carruthers, P. (2000). Phenomenal Consciousness: A Naturalistic Theory. New York: Cambridge University Press.
* Carruthers, P. (2002). The Cognitive Functions of Language. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 25, 657-74.
* Carruthers, P., Laurence, S., & Stich, S. (2005). The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Chalmers, D. & Jackson, F. (2001). Conceptual Analysis and Reductive Explanation. Philosophical Review, 110, 315-61.
* Chomsky, N. (1967). Recent Contributions to the Theory of Innate Ideas. Synthese, 17, 2-11. Reprinted in S. Stich (ed.) Innate Ideas. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 121-31.
* Chomsky, N. (1975). Reflections on Language. New York: Pantheon.
* Chomsky, N. (1980). Rules and Represenations. New York: Columbia University Press
* Chomsky, N. (1988). Language and the Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
* Churchland, P. (1981). Eliminative Materialism and Propositional Attitudes. Journal of Philosophy, 78.2, 67-90.
* Clayton, N., Bussey, T., & Dickinson, A. (2003). Can Animals Recall the Past and Plan for the Future? Nature Reviews: Neuroscience, 4, 685-91
* Cowie, F. (1999). What's Within: Nativism Reconsidered. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Crain, S. & Pietroski, P. (2001). Nature, Nurture, and Universal Grammar. Linguistics and Philosophy, 24, 139–186.
* Crane, T. (1995). The Mechanical Mind. New York: Penguin.
* Cummins, R. (1998). Reflection on Reflective Equilibrium. In M. DePaul & W. Ramsey (eds.) Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 113-27.
* Dancy, J. (1985).Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology. Oxford: Blackwell.
* Davidson, D. (1975). Thought and Talk. In his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Dennett, D. (1977). A Cure for the Common Code. Reprinted in D. Dennett (1978) Brainstorms, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
* Dennett, D. (1978). Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
* Dennett, D. (1987). The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
* Dennett, D. (1991). Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
* DePaul, M. & Ramsey, W. (1998). Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
* Devitt, M. (1981). Designation. New York: Columbia University Press.
* Devitt, M. (1996). Coming to Our Senses: A Naturalistic Program for Semantic Localism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* Devitt, M. (in press). Ignorance of Language. New York: Oxford University Press.
* Dummett, M. (1993). Seas of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Elman, J., Bates, E., Johnson, M., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Parisi, D., and Plunkett, K. (1996). Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
* Emery, N., Dally, J., & Clayton, N. (2004). Western Scrub-Jays (Aphelocoma Californica) Use Cognitive Strategies to Protect Their Caches from Thieving Conspecifics. Animal Cognition, 7, 37-43.
* Fodor, J. (1968). The Appeal to Tacit Knowledge. Journal of Philosophy, 65.20, 627-640.
* Fodor, J. (1975). The Language of Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
* Fodor, J. (1981). The Present Status of the Innateness Controversy. In his Representations: Philosophical Essays on the Foundations of Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
* Fodor, J. (1987). Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
* Fodor, J. (1998). Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong. New York: Oxford University Press.
* Fodor, J. (2003). Hume Variations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Fodor, J. & Lepore, E. (1992). Holism: A Shopper's Guide. Oxford: Blackwell.
* Fodor, J. & Lepore, E. (1996). The Red Herring and the Pet Fish: Why Concepts Still Can't Be Prototypes. Cognition, 58, 253-270.
* Fodor, J. & Pylyshyn, Z. (1988). Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis. Cognition, 28, 3-71.
* Gallistel, C.R. (1990). The Organization of Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
* Gelman, S. (2003). The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Gentner, D. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2003). Language in Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
* Gettier, E. (1963). Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? Analysis, 23, 121-123.
* Goldman, A. (1986). Epistemology and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
* Goodman, N. (1969). The Emporer's New Ideas. In S. Hook (ed.), 1969, Language and Philosophy, New York: NYU Press, pp. 138-42.
* Gopnik, A., & Meltzoff, A. (1997). Words, Thoughts, and Theories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
* Griffiths, P. (2002). What Is Innateness? Monist, 85.1, pp. 70-85.
* Gumperz, J. & Levinson, S. (1996) Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* Hauser, M. (2000). Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think. New York: Penguin.
* Hermer-Vazquez, L., Spelke, E., & Katsnelson, A. (2001). Sources of Flexibility in Human Cognition: Dual-Task Studies of Space and Language. Cognitive Psychology, 39, 3–36.
* Horgan, T. & Woodward, J. (1985). Folk Psychology is Here to Stay. Philosophical Review, 94.2, 197-226.
* Hume, D. (1739/1978). A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Hume, D. (1748/1975). Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Hurley, S. & Nudds, M. (2006) Rational Animals? Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Jackson, F. (1998). From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defense of Conceptual Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Keil, F. (1989). Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
* Kornblith, H. (2002). Knowledge and Its Place in Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Kripke, S. (1972/1980). Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
* Landau, B. (1982). Will the Real Grandmother Please Stand Up? The Psychological Reality of Dual Meaning Representations. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 11.1, 47-62.
* Laurence, S. & Margolis, E. (1997). Regress Arguments Against the Language of Thought. Analysis, 57, 60-66.
* Laurence, S. & Margolis, E. (1999). Concepts and Cognitive Science. In E. Margolis & S. Laurence (eds.)Concepts: Core Readings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 3-81.
* Laurence, S. & Margolis, E. (2001). The Poverty of the Stimulus Argument. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 52, 217-76.
* Laurence, S. & Margolis, E. (2002). Radical Concept Nativism. Cognition, 86, 25-55.
* Levinson, S. (2003). Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* Lewis, D. (1966). An Argument for the Identity Theory. Journal of Philosophy, 63.1, 17-25.
* Locke, J. (1690/1975). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. New York: Oxford University Press.
* Malotki, E. (1983). Hopi Time: A Linguistic Analysis of Temporal Concepts in the Hopi Language. Berlin: Mouton.
* Marcus, G. (2001). The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
* Marcus, G. (2004). The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought. New York: Basic Books.
* Margolis, E. & Laurence, S. (1999). Concepts: Core Readings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
* McDowell, J. (1994). Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
* Medin, D. & Atran, S. (1999). Folkbiology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
* Millikan, R. (2000). On Clear and Confused Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* Munnich, E. & Landau, B. (2003). The Effects of Spatial Language on Spatial Representation: Setting Some Boundaries. In D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (2003). Language in Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp 113-55.
* Murphy, G. (2002). The Big Book of Concepts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
* Niyogi, S. & Snedeker, J. (forthcoming). The Puzzle of Concept Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
* Onishi, K. & Baillargeon, R. (2005). Do 15-Month-Old Infants Understand False Beliefs? Science, 308, 255-8.
* Osherson, D., & Smith, E. (1981). On the Adequacy of Prototype Theory as a Theory of Concepts. Cognition, 9, 35-58.
* Papineau, D. (1993). Philosophical Naturalism. Oxford: Blackwell.
* Papineau, D. (2002). Thinking About Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Peacocke, C. (1992). A Study of Concepts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
* Peacocke, C. (2005). Rationale and Maxims in the Study of Concepts. Noûs, 39.1, 167-78.
* Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind. London: Penguin.
* Port, R. & van Gelder, T. (1995). Mind as Motion: Explorations in the Dynamics of Cognition. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press
* Prinz, J. (2002). Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.
* Putnam, H. (1967). The 'Innateness Hypothesis' and Explanatory Models in Linguistics. Synthese, 17, 12-22. Reprinted in H. Putnam, Philosophical Papers, vol 2, pp. 107-16.
* Quine, W.V.O. (1960). Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
* Ramsey, W. (1998). Prototypes and Conceptual Analysis. In M. DePaul & W. Ramsey (eds.) Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 161-77.
* Rosch, E. (1978). Principles of Categorization. In E. Rosch & B. Lloyd (eds.), Cognition and Categorization. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 27-48.
* Rosch, E., & Mervis, C. (1975). Family Resemblances: Studies in the Internal Structure of Categories. Cognitive Psychology, 7, 573-605.
* Samet, J. (1986). Troubles with Fodor's Nativism. In P. French, T. Uehling, & H. Wettstein (eds.), Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. X: Studies in the Philosophy of Mind. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
* Samuels, R. (2002). Nativism in Cognitive Science. Mind & Language, 17.3, 233-65.
* Shapiro, L. (2004). The Mind Incarnate. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Shusterman, A. & Spelke, E. (2005). Language and the Development of Spatial Reasoning. In P. Carruthers, S. Laurence, & S. Stich (eds.) The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 89-106.
* Smith, E., & Medin, D. (1981). Categories and Concepts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
* Spelke, E. (2003). What Makes Us Smart? Core Knowledge and Natural Language. In D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (2003). Language in Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp 277-311.
* Spelke, E. (1994). Initial Knowledge: Six Suggestions. Cognition, 50, pp. 431-445.
* Sterelny, K. (1989). Fodor's Nativism. Philosophical Studies, 55, 119-141.
* Stich, S. (1990). The Fragmentation of Reason. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
* Stich, S. (1992). What Is a Theory of Mental Representation?” Mind, 101.402, 243-61.
* Tomasello, M., Call, J., & Hare, B. (2003). Chimpanzees Understand Psychological States—The Question is Which Ones and To What Extent. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7.4, 153-156.
* Weinberg, J., Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2001). Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions. Philosophical Topics, 29, 1 & 2, 429-460.
* Whorf, B. (1956). Language, Thought, and Reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
* Wittgenstein, L. (1953/1958). Philosophical Investigations. 3rd edition. Anscombe (Tr.). Oxford: Blackwell.
* Wright, C. (1989). The Verification Principle: Another Puncture—Another Patch. Mind, 98, 611-622.
* Yablo, S. (2000). Textbook Kripkeanism and the Open Texture of Concepts. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 81, 98-122.
* Zalta, E. (2001). Fregean Senses, Modes of Presentation, and Concepts. Philosophical Perspectives, 15, Metaphysics, pp. 335-59.

Other Internet Resources

* Bibliography on Concepts, Section 2.6, Contemporary Philosophy of Mind: An Annotated Bibliography, by David Chalmers (Australian National University)

* Online Papers on Concepts, in Online Papers on Concsciousness, Part 2: Other Philosophy of Mind, by David Chalmers (Australian National University)

Related Entries

belief | Frege, Gottlob | innateness: and language | language of thought hypothesis | mental content: nonconceptual | mental representation | naturalism | Vienna Circle"