Cognitive scientists sometimes find themselves embroiled
in debates over the precise definitions of high-level
concepts in their fields – COGNITION, EMOTION, SENSE, and
so on. The idea behind these debates seems to be that
achieving a precise definition of these concepts will be a
boon to scientific inquiry. We argue that these efforts of
conceptual analysis would benefit from greater appreciation
of the importance of such high-level concepts in supporting
association or semantic priming, as opposed to deduction.
In this associative role, they provide the basis for making
connections between related concepts, connections that can
then be explored by empirical methods, which in turn yield
more precise, but often quite novel, concepts. In
combination with well-established work in cognitive
psychology on the non-classical structure of natural
concepts, this perspective suggests that researchers should
be cautious about investing substantial time and energy in
attempts to precisely define concepts like COGNITION.