UC Santa Barbara

My dissertation concerns the relation between two ways of understanding conceptual representations in cognitive science, that had by philosophers and that had by psychologists. For philosophers, concepts are supposed to make possible the representation of the world in thought and to act as building blocks for those representations which support our having of propositional attitudes, such as belief and desire. Psychologists, by contrast, see concepts as complex mental representations that function to guide practical activities such as categorizing and reasoning about the world around us.

Typically it has been thought by both philosophers and psychologists that both sides are concerned with the same thing when they use the word “concept,” and much has been said about how to reconcile the two approaches. In my dissertation I argue that such a reconciliation is not forthcoming, owing to the different and in tension functions concepts have been expected to perform by each side of the debate. To remedy this, I argue that a distinction ought to be made between what I term conceptual atoms and conceptual structures. It is conceptual atoms that I take many philosophers to be referring to when they use the word “concept,” while psychologists instead refer to conceptual structures. Conceptual atoms are semantically unstructured mental representations which combine together to form the aforementioned conceptual structures, with these structures forming an open-ended class of mental representation that includes the prototypes, exemplars, and folk theories posited by psychology. It is these conceptual structures that both guide our practical activities and support our having of propositional attitudes. In short, what are called “concepts” by philosophers are the building blocks of what are called the same by psychologists.

In chapter 1 I lay the groundwork for the dissertation as a whole by surveying some of the foundational issues for the study of concepts in both philosophy and psychology, including the explanatory roles for concepts as well as issues surrounding how to understand conceptual individuation and structure. In chapters 2-3 I survey the leading theories of concepts in psychology and argue that a pluralist theory allowing for a wide variety of structured concepts is most plausible given the available evidence. In chapter 4 I investigate the main philosophical competitor to psychological theories of concepts, namely conceptual atomism, and argue for a particular interpretation of it. In chapter 5 I argue for my own alternative view that divides concepts into conceptual atoms and structures and consider some of its implications and some of the difficulties that it must confront. In chapter 6 I argue that the study of conceptual atoms and structures should adopt an externalist and ecological approach that studies conceptual structures as they are actually used by normal thinkers, in environments normal to them, and in service of the ends they normally seek. Finally, in chapter 7 I argue that teleosemantics is best equipped to provide the form of explanation and theory of representation required by such an approach.