Representations reclaimed

2011

Confronting the Obstacles and Paradoxes Inherent in Pursuing a Scientific Understanding of the Building Blocks of Human Thought This thesis confronts a fundamental shortcoming in cognitive science research: a failure to be explicit about the theory of concepts underlying cognitive science research and a resulting failure to justify that theory philosophically or otherwise. It demonstrates how most contemporary debates over theories of concepts divide over whether concepts are best understood as (mental) representations or as non-representational abilities. It concludes that there can be no single correct ontology, and that both perspectives are logically necessary. It details three critical distinctions that are frequently neglected: between concepts as we possess and employ them non-reflectively, and concepts as we reflect upon them; between the private (subjective) and public (inter-subjective) aspects of concepts; and between concepts as approached from a realist versus anti-realist perspective. Metaphysical starting points fundamentally shape conclusions. The main contribution of this thesis is a pragmatic, meticulously detailed, and distinctive account of concepts in terms of their essential nature, core properties, and context of application. This is done within the framework of Peter Gärdenfors' conceptual spaces theory of concepts, which is offered as a bridging account, best able to tie existing theories together into one framework. A set of extensions to conceptual spaces theory, called the unified conceptual space theory, are offered as a means of pushing Gärdenfors' theory in a more algorithmically amenable and empirically testable direction. The unified conceptual space theory describes how all of an agent's many different conceptual spaces, as described by Gärdenfors, are mapped together into one unified space of spaces, and how an analogous process happens at the societal level. The unified conceptual space theory is put to work offering a distinctive account of the co-emergence of concepts and experience out of a circularly causal process. Finally, an experimental application of the theory is presented, in the form of a simple computer program. Preface The bulk of chapters Six and Seven has been published in modified form in (Parthemore and Morse, 2010). That paper was produced as an integral part of the present thesis research. The content of these chapters is solely my own. Portions of chapters One and Five are part of another (single-author) paper that is being published as Parthemore (2011). v

Philosophical Psychology, 2008

This article describes what the earliest concepts are like and presents a theory of the spatial primitives from which they are formed. The earliest concepts tend to be global, like animal and container, and it is hypothesized that they consist of simplified redescriptions of innately salient spatial information. These redescriptions become associated with sensory and other bodily experiences that are not themselves redescribed, but that enrich conceptual thought. The initial conceptual base becomes expanded through subdivision, sometimes aided by language that points up these divisions or suggests new spatial analyses, and by the analogical extension of spatially derived concepts to nonspatial domains. This formulation is contrasted with Fodor's (1998) metaphysical theory of concept formation.

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

How are the meanings of words, events, and objects represented and organized in the brain? This question, perhaps more than any other in the field, probes some of the deepest and most foundational puzzles regarding the structure of the mind and brain. Accordingly, it has spawned a field of inquiry that is diverse and multidisciplinary, has led to the discovery of numerous empirical phenomena, and has spurred the development of a wide range of theoretical positions. This special issue brings together the most recent theoretical developments from the leaders in the field, representing a range of viewpoints on issues of fundamental significance to a theory of meaning representation. Here we introduce the special issue by way of pulling out some key themes that cut across the contributions that form this issue and situating those themes in the broader literature. The core issues around which research on conceptual representation can be organized are representational format, representational content, the organization of concepts in the brain, and the processing dynamics that govern interactions between the conceptual system and sensorimotor representations. We highlight areas in which consensus has formed; for those areas in which opinion is divided, we seek to clarify the relation of theory and evidence and to set in relief the bridging assumptions that undergird current discussions.

This is a draft of a paper that later appeared in the book, The Composition of Anthropology edited by Morton Nielsen and Nigel Rapport. It responds to the question - how are anthropological texts written?

Explaining the mental. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge …, 2007

In this article, I argue that: the idea that within the mind there exists a collection of more or less homogenous structures of some kind, corresponding to our commonsense notion of “concept”, is likely upon investigation to prove wrong. In the literature in the field, the term concept is used to denote kinds of mental representation that prima facie seem very different. The research on concepts is generally considered to be a successful example of the interdisciplinary approach of cognitive science. However, when we try to single out which results have been achieved, we realise that the main (perhaps the only) ascertained fact is the inadequacy of the classical approach to categorisation. The failure of the classical approach has not involved the emergence of a clear alternative point of view. Many psychological data hardly seem compatible with the hypothesis of a uniform underlying cognitive mechanism. In my opinion, this is due to the fact that prototypical effects, far from being a symptom of some homogeneous cognitive structure, are more plausibly the effect of some “ecological constraints” on the mind. In other words, our way of categorising the world does not exhibit prototypical effects because our mind is structured in a particular way; rather, prototypical effects are determined by the fact that the world interacts with our mind in a certain way.

Minds and Machines, 2007

Ecological Psychology, 2008

Noûs, 2011

A satisfactory theory of perception must meet a variety of metaphysical and epistemological demands. What is wanted is a view that simultaneously accounts for, among other things, the epistemic significance of experience, the nature and status of illusion and hallucination, the possibility of unmediated perceptual contact with the world, the “richness” of experience, and the source of perceptual concepts. It has been argued that experience must be conceptual in order to secure the justificatory role of perceptual states; at the same time, it has been thought that such states cannot be conceptual given their phenomenological and explanatory features. Our aim is to introduce and defend a new framework for conceptualism that, by marking ontological and epistemic differences between sensory awareness and perceptual experience, promises to resolve this dispute while accounting for all of the above phenomena. In §1, we clarify the conceptualist thesis at issue. In §2, we present and motiv...

In his collection of essays Having the World in View (2009), McDowell draws a distinction between empirical experience (conceived as the conceptual activity relevant to judgment) and empirical judgment (i.e., the full-fledged assertoric content itself). McDowell’s latest proposal is that the form of empirical experience is transferable into judgment, but it is not itself a judgment. Taking back the view he advanced in Mind and World, McDowell now believes that perception does not have propositional content as such, but the content of perception can, however, always be actualized in a judgment. There is, in other words, a strict parallelism between the deliverances of sensibility and potential future judgments of experience. The early Husserl disagrees with this and recognizes explicitly the existence of coherent forms of perceptual engagement with the world that is independent of the mastery of language and the use of concepts. Perception constitutes—together with certain other embodied practices—our primary mode of access to the world, and this occurs before and independently of our thinking activity. However, the realization of the centrality of time for intentionality will lead Husserl after 1905 to recognize a kind of lawfulness internal to the sensuous materials themselves, prior to any egoical achievement. The most immediate consequence of this paradigm change is that the very idea of non-conceptual content now seems unwarranted. Indeed, if time is that which keeps the process of sense formation unified even at the lowest levels of constitution, then the world-disclosing activity of the ego cannot be discontinuous with the conceptual realm. Against this background, it will be argued that the dialectic between the conceptual and non-conceptual ultimately makes no sense on a phenomenological basis. Once temporality has entered the scene, the only meaningful opposition that stands is that between the conceptual and pre-conceptual spheres.

The dominating models of information processes have been based on symbolic representations of information and knowledge. During the last decades, a variety of non-symbolic models have been proposed as superior. The prime examples of models within the non-symbolic approach are neural networks. However, to a large extent they lack a higher-level theory of representation. In this paper, conceptual spaces are suggested as an appropriate framework for non-symbolic models. Conceptual spaces consist of a number of “quality dimensions” that often are derived from perceptual mechanisms. It will be outlined how conceptual spaces can represent various kind of information and how they can be used to describe concept learning. The connections to prototype theory will also be presented.