“Concepts had; Concepts used”

Speaker:

Hunter Gentry
Kansas State University

Abstract:

The battle over the nature of concepts rages on. Jerry Fodor and sympathizers tell us that concepts are discrete, atomic units of meaning in a “language of thought”. Neo-Empiricists insist that concepts are non-discrete, probabilistic collections of information, highly sensitive to context. I argue that a certain widely recognized distinction may point the way toward at least an armistice. This is the distinction between storing a concept and deploying a concept—or, “having” a concept and “using” it. I show how the distinction can be leveraged against Fodor’s Language of Thought argument and, plausibly, many other arguments that presuppose that concepts are uniform across storage and deployment. The tentative picture of concepts that arises is one which promises to capture the explanatory benefits of both the Fodorian picture and the Neo-Empiricist picture. I show, in particular, that there is a metaphysical argument and empirical data to support the hypothesis that there are concepts we store in non-discrete, probabilistic form but deploy in discrete, atomic form. I conclude by situating the proposal in relation to other aspects of my work aimed at deepening our understanding of the mind.

This is a FREE event; no registration necessary.