## 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 abstract objects such as
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, it is
simpler to say that occurrent beliefs just are mental representations
with this 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 often 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 to 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 (Carey 2009, Pinker 2007) 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 2006, Millikan 2000, Fodor 2003, Margolis &
Laurence
 2007).[1]
 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),
in explaining how mental processes can be both rational and
implemented in the brain, and in accommodating the need for
structure-sensitive mental processes (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 explicitly entertained the relevant mental
representations. 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 and Manfredi 1993 for
responses).



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 entry
 eliminative materialism),
 or that developments in computational modeling (esp. connectionism
and dynamic systems theory) offer alternatives, particularly to the
language of thought version of RTM (e.g., see Clark 1993, Van Gelder
1995, Elman et al. 1996, McClelland et al. 2010; see Fodor &
Pylyshyn 1988, Marcus 2001, and Gallistel & King 2009 for critical
discussion of theories that don't employ 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.,
Dummett 1993, Bennett & Hacker 2008, Kenny 2010). 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 2015, 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 abstract objects



An alternative conception of concepts takes concepts to be abstract
objects of one type or another. The idea behind this view is that
concepts are the meanings (or "contents") of words and
phrases as opposed to mental objects or mental states. This type of
view has most prominently been associated with the view that concepts
are Fregean senses (e.g., Peacocke 1992, Zalta 2001), so it is this
version of the view that concepts are abstract objects that we will
focus on here. For proponents of this view, concepts, as meanings,
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
mode of presentation which represents the referent in a particular
way. 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* even though George
Orwell and Eric Blair are the same person. 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 but rather the meanings of psychological states.)



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. Just as two speakers can each produce distinct
instances (that is, tokens)of the same type of word (e.g., the word
"chair"), different thinkers' minds can produce
distinct instances (that is, tokens) of the same type of mental
representation (e.g., the mental representation CHAIR). How does this
help with the present objection? According to the mental
representation view, to say that there are concepts that haven't
been acquired by anyone is just to say that, for some types of mental
representations, there has not yet been a token in anyone's
mind; to say that some concepts will never be acquired by anyone is
just to say that, for some types of mental representations, there
never will be a token in anyone's mind (Margolis & Laurence
2007).



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 merely 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 (see Margolis & Laurence
2007 for discussion).


One might also question 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. Given that the
disagreement about concepts is so closely tied to such clearly
substantive explanatory disagreements, the debate about what concepts
are would itself seem to be a substantive disagreement about what
sorts of entities are best suited to playing the central explanatory
roles associated with concepts.



Of course, it is possible to introduce new theoretical terms
("concepts1",
"concepts2", and
"concepts3") for the different theoretical
posits made by the different approaches we have been considering (the
ability view, the mental representation view, and the abstract object
view), and then reconstruct the debate regarding these different
approaches as a merely terminological disagreement about which of
these terms we should use. But notice that it is possible to do the
same thing even for clear-cut substantive debates. For example, we
could introduce new terms for moral goodness as understood by
deontologists ("good1") and as understood by
consequentialists ("good2"), and then
reconstruct the debate about what moral goodness consists in as a
merely terminological disagreement about which term we should use,
"good1" or "good2". Or
we could introduce "human1" for humans as
understood by standard evolutionary accounts (according to which
humans have nonhuman primate ancestors) and
"human2" for humans understood by creationists
(according to which they don't), and reconstruct the debate between
these different approaches as a merely terminological issue about
which term we should use, "human1" or
"human2". The danger, of course, is that this
would drain the very idea of a *merely terminological debate*
of its utility and obscure very real differences between different
sorts of disagreements (e.g., stipulative vs. substantive) that would
all end up counting as "merely terminological".



In the remainder of this entry we will frame questions from the
perspective of the mental representation view, but readers who prefer
a different view can reframe the issues in their preferred terms. For
example, the questions "Can there be concepts without
language?" is typically understood on the mental representation
view as asking whether a pre-linguistic or non-linguistic agent can
entertain mental representations of a particular kind. If one adopts
the view that concepts are abstract objects, the corresponding
question might be whether a pre-linguistic or non-linguistic agent can
stand in the concept possession relation to concepts understood as
abstract objects of a certain type. And if one adopts the view that
concepts are abilities, the corresponding question might be whether a
pre-linguistic or non-linguistic agent can have the abilities that are
constitutive of concept possession.


## 2. The structure of concepts



Just as thoughts are composed of concepts, many concepts are
themselves complex entities that are composed of other concepts or
more basic representational components. In this section, we look at
different proposals about the structure of what are often called
*lexical concepts*. Roughly speaking, these are concepts that
tend to be associated with individual words in natural
language--concepts like BIRD and WALK as opposed to manifestly
complex concepts like NOCTURNAL ANIMALS THAT LIVE IN TREES or TO WALK
AIMLESSLY ON A NEWLY PAVED ROAD. With BIRD and WALK and similar
concepts, it isn't obvious what type of internal structure (if
any) they have, and this has led to a great deal of controversy
(Margolis & Laurence 1999, Murphy 2002). Accounts of the structure
of lexical concepts have focused on concepts for categories of
objects, actions, and events rather than concepts for individuals. Our
discussion will share this focus (see, e.g., Blok et al. 2005 and
Levine 2010 for discussion of concepts of individuals).


### 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
forty 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 (see the entry
 the analysis of knowledge)).
 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 second half of the twentieth century
is the *prototype theory* (e.g., Hampton 2006). 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 groundbreaking
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 1996, Fodor 1998; for
responses to the arguments from compositionality, see Prinz 2002,
Robbins 2002, Hampton & Jonsson 2012, and Del Pinal
2016).



One general solution that addresses all of 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
suggestion is that conceptual cores have classical structure (Osherson
& Smith 1981, Landau 1982). 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, 2009, 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 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 Atran & Medin 2008
on folkbiology). Another advantage of the theory theory is that it 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 the course of cognitive 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 & Kinzler 2007 on core
knowledge). However, there are certain specific examples where radical
conceptual reorganization is plausible, for instance, when children
eventually develop a theory of matter that allows them to
differentiate weight from density, and air from nothing (Carey
2009).


### 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 "Godel"
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 Godel
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 "Godel". But
intuitively that's not the case at all. In the imagined
scenario, the sentence "Godel discovered the incompleteness
of arithmetic" is saying something false about Godel, not
something trivially true about the discoverer of the incompleteness of
arithmetic, whoever that might be (though see Machery et al. 2004 on
whether this intuition is universal and Genone 2012 for discussion of
the role of intuitions in theories of reference). 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 and eliminativism



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). 



One way of responding to the plurality of conceptual structures is to
suppose that concepts have multiple types of structure. This is the
central idea behind *conceptual pluralism*. According to one
version of conceptual pluralism, suggested by Laurence & Margolis
(1999), a given concept will have a variety of different types of
structure associated with it as components of the concept in question.
For example, concepts may have atomic cores that are linked to
prototypes, internalized theories, and so on. On this approach, the
different types of structure that are components of a given concept
play different explanatory roles. Reference determination and
compositionality have more to do with the atomic cores themselves and
how they are causally related to things outside of the mind, while
rapid categorization and certain inferences depend on prototype
structure, and more considered inferences and reasoning depend upon
theory structure. Many variants on this general proposal are possible,
but the basic idea is that, while concepts have a plurality of
different types of structure with different explanatory roles, this
differing structure remains unified through the links to an atomic
representation that provides a concept's reference. One
challenge for this type of account is to delineate which of the
cognitive resources that are associated with a concept should be
counted as part of its structure and which should not. As a general
framework, the account is neutral regarding this question, but as the
framework is filled in, clarification will be needed regarding the
status of potential types of structure. 



A different form of pluralism about conceptual structure doesn't
employ atomic cores but simply says that the prototype, theory, etc.
are all themselves concepts (Weiskopf 2009). Rather than holding that
a single concept (e.g., the concept CAT) has multiple types of
structure as components, as in the first form of pluralism, this form
takes each type of structure to *be* a concept on its own,
resulting in a plurality of concepts (CAT1,
CAT2, CAT3, etc). On this view, it is wrong to
suppose that there is such a thing as *the* concept CAT. Instead,
there are many cat-concepts, each with a different type of structure,
where each is involved in just a subset of the high-level
psychological processes associated with cats. CAT1, for
example, might explain some instances of categorization and some
inferences, while CAT2, CAT3, etc. explain
others. What's more, on this form of pluralism, people might
also differ with respect to which kinds of cat-concepts they possess.
And even if two people have a cat-concept with the same general type
of structure (e.g., prototype structure), the concepts might still be
rather different (treating prototypical cats as having rather
different sorts of properties). In response to this second form of
pluralism, some philosophers have argued that CAT1,
CAT2, etc. may be better understood as different senses of
a single CAT concept, on analogy with the different senses of a
polysemous linguistic expression (e.g. the *physical object*
sense and the *content* sense of "book")(Vicente
& Manrique 2016). Regardless of whether one accepts this point
about polysemy, an important challenge facing this second
("multiple concepts") version of pluralism is to explain
why all of the different cat-concepts count as cat-concepts--that
is, to explain what unifies the plurality of cat-concepts. A natural
answer to this challenge is that what unifies them is that they all
refer to the same category, the category of cats. But it is not so
clear that they can all refer to the same category given the
differences between the different cat-concepts and the way that they
function in cognition. For example, a standard prototype structure
would capture prototypical cats and exclude the highly unusual,
atypical cats that a theory structure would cover, and consequently
the two concepts would refer to distinct (though related) categories.




In all of its forms, pluralism about conceptual structure recognizes
that concepts have diverse functions and that a corresponding variety
of types of representations are needed to fulfill these functions.
These same considerations have led some theorists to advocate
*concept eliminativism*--the view that there are no concepts
(Machery 2009). The reasoning behind concept eliminativism is that
*concept* should be understood to be a natural kind if concepts
exist at all, and that natural kinds ought to have significant
commonalities that can be discovered using empirical methods,
including commonalities that go well beyond the criteria that are
initially used to characterize them. But according to concept
eliminativists, there are no such commonalities that hold among the
types of representations that pluralists embrace. Perhaps we need
prototypes and theories and other types of representations for
distinct higher-level cognitive processes, but they are too diverse to
warrant the claim that they constitute a single kind. On this view,
then, we should simply abandon the theoretical construct of a concept
and refer only to more fine-grained types of representations, such as
prototypes and theories. Opponents of concept eliminativism have
responded to the eliminativist's challenge in a number of ways.
Some have argued that Machery's criteria for elimination are
simply too strong and that *concept*, understood as a
higher-level kind or perhaps a functional kind, has great utility in
psychological models of cognitive processes (e.g., Hampton 2010,
Lalumera 2010, Strohminger & Moore 2010). Others have argued that
Machery's criteria for something's being a natural kind
are too restrictive and that his view would have the consequence of
ruling out clear cases of legitimate higher-level kinds in science
generally (e.g., Gonnerman & Weinberg 2010, Margolis &
Laurence 2010). And others have argued that even if we grant
Machery's stringent criteria for being a natural kind,
elimination wouldn't follow, as concepts *are* natural
kinds according to his criteria (Samuels & Ferreira 2010, Weiskopf
2010). (For further critical discussion of eliminativism, see the peer
commentary that appears with Machery 2010 and the author's
response.) 


## 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., Elman et al. 1996, Carruthers,
Laurence, & Stich 2005, 2006, 2007, Johnson 2010). 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 and
Roberts 2017 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 Sampson 2005; on the nativist
side, see Laurence & Margolis 2001 and Pietroski & Crain 2012;
see also the entry
 innateness and language
 and the entry
 philosophy of linguistics).
 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 (2001) and Crain & Pietroski (2001) 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 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 et al. 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 representations tied to a particular sensory
modality 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 2003). Finally, there are
difficulties regarding how to interpret behavioral and neurological
evidence that is supposed to support Prinz and Barsalou's case
against amodal representations. For example, Machery (2007) points out
that proponents of amodal representations typically suppose that
imagery is useful in solving certain types of problems. So to argue
against amodal representations, it is not enough to show that sensory
representations show up in a task in which experimental subjects are
not explicitly told to visualize a solution, since the use of
sensory-based imagery in a task is perfectly compatible with there
also being amodal representations in play. (For further critical
discussion of the form of empiricism that is opposed to amodal
representations, see Weiskopf 2007, Dove 2009, and Mahon 2015).


### 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*.
Fodor's arguments have had a great deal of influence on debates
about nativism and concept learning, especially amongst cognitive
scientists. Few if any have endorsed Fodor's radical
conclusions, but many have shaped their views of cognitive development
at least in part in response to Fodor's arguments (Jackendoff
1989, Levin & Pinker 1991, Spelke & Tsivkin 2001, Carey 2009).
And Fodor has convinced many that primitive concepts are in principle
unlearnable (see, e.g., Pinker 2007). Fodor's arguments for this
conclusion, however, can be challenged in a number of ways. The most
direct way to challenge it is to construct an account of what it is to
learn a primitive concept and to show that it is immune to
Fodor's challenges (Margolis 1998, Laurence & Margolis 2002,
Carey 2009).



Fodor himself changed his view about these issues when he revisited
them in Fodor (2008). He now maintains that while considerations about
the need for hypothesis testing show that no concepts can be learned,
not even complex concepts, this does not require concepts to be innate
(Fodor 2008). Instead, Fodor suggests that they are largely acquired
via processes that are merely biological in that they don't
admit of a psychological-level description. Though such a
"biological" account of concept acquisition does offer an
alternative to the innate/learned dichotomy, there are reasons for
supposing that many concepts are learned all the same (Margolis &
Laurence 2011). These include the fact that a person's
conceptual system is highly sensitive to the surrounding culture. For
example, the concept PURGATORY comes from cultural products such as
books, stories, and sermons. But clearly these can only succeed in
conveying the concept when mediated by the right sort of psychological
processes. Acquiring such concepts is a cognitive-level achievement,
not a merely biological one.



Although much of the philosophical discussion of concept nativism has
focused on Fodor's radical concept nativism, it is important to
note that other less radical approaches to the origins of concepts
exist and that these other approaches embrace a fair amount of
learning--they just hold that much of this learning is structured
by innate special-purpose acquisition systems (for example, Gallistel
1990, Keil 1989, Spelke & Newport 1998, Baillargeon 2008, Carey 2009,
Margolis & Laurence 2013, Tooby & Cosmides 2016).



One further issue concerning innate concepts that is in dispute 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 to fully untangle the two (Elman
et al. 1996, Griffiths 2002; see also Clark 1998 and Marcus 2004, and
the entry on the
 distinction between innate and acquired characteristics).
 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 (Margolis & Laurence
(2013). For discussion of different proposals of what innateness is
see Ariew (1999), Cowie (1999), Samuels (2002), Mallon & Weinberg
(2006), Mameli (2008) and Khalidi (2015).


## 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 if 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 Andrews & Beck 2018 for work on animals and
Baillargeon et al. 2015 for work on infants). 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 best explained by appealing to an internal system of
representation (e.g., Bermudez 2003, Carruthers 2006, Camp 2009; for
overviews within cognitive science, see Gallistel 1990, Bekoff, Allen,
& Burghardt 2002, and Shettleworth 2010). 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 that make use 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 facon 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 (Laurence & Margolis 2012).
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 and Carruthers 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) or that natural language augments
our concepts in significant ways (Lupyan 2012).



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 for
each person, there is some person that they love, 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 given a linguistic label later; the
concept comes first, the linguistic label 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; see also Langland-Hassan & Vicente 2018 on the nature and
significance of inner speech). Another type of consideration that
proponents of this view highlight is the finding 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; see also Gleitman &
Papafragou 2012 for a critical overview of a range of tasks where
online processing has been thought to rely on linguistic
representation).


### 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 both causes her to conceptualize the world in
certain ways and limits what she can think about by imposing
boundaries on 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 (Pinker 1994).



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 spatial frames of reference (in
non-linguistic spatial reasoning) (e.g., Li & Gleitman 2002,
Levinson et al. 2002, Levinson 2003, Li et al. 2011), spatial
relations (in non-linguistic reasoning) (e.g., Choi & Bowerman
1991, Hespos & Spelke 2004), sex (the impact of grammatical
gender) (e.g., Boroditsky, Schmidt, & Phillips 2003) and number
(e.g., Gordon 2004, Pica et al. 2004, Laurence & Margolis
2007).


## 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, DePaul & Ramsey 1998, Block & Stalnaker 1999, Williamson
2007, Stich 2012, Machery 2017, Strevens 2018). 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. For proponents of
traditional conceptual analysis, the analysis of a concept is
successful to the extent that the proposed definition matches
people's intuitions about particular cases, including
hypothetical cases that figure in crucial thought experiments.


### 5.1 Attractions of conceptual analysis



Conceptual analysis has been 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*. Thought experiments and the elicitation
of intuitions are characteristic features of philosophical practice.
If this practice is justified, then there has to be an understanding
of what philosophy is that explains why. 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 how
philosophy could 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 causal 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, 2010 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, Levine 2001, Laurence & Margolis 2003,
Yablo 2008, Papineau 2002).



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., Devitt 1996,
Kornblith 2002, Papineau 2013; 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 (though see Machery et al
2017 for evidence that some of these intuitions may in fact be
universal). 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 possibility of cultural diversity 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; for
further discussion see Williamson 2005, Sosa 2009, Stich 2009,
Weinberg, Nichols, & Stich 2001, Weinberg et al. 2010).



The critique of traditional philosophical analysis has also generated
proposals for various types of normative, revisionary projects.
Instead of asking which cases are or are not covered by a concept,
they ask how a concept should be modified or what new concept should
be adopted in its place, given the practical context in which the
concept is used--for example, given the goal of promoting social
equality (Haslanger 2012, Cappelen 2018).



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.