Concepts As Correlates of Lexical Labels. a Cognitivist Perspective
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This is a submitted manuscript version. The publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use or reprint the material in any form. Final published version, copyright Peter Lang: https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-653-05287-9 Sławomir Wacewicz Concepts as Correlates of Lexical Labels. A Cognitivist Perspective. This is a submitted manuscript version. The publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use or reprint the material in any form. Final published version, copyright Peter Lang: https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-653-05287-9 CONTENTS Introduction………………………………………………………………... 6 PART I INTERNALISTIC PERSPECTIVE ON LANGUAGE IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE Preliminary remarks………………………………………………………… 17 1. History and profile of Cognitive Science……………………………….. 18 1.1. Introduction…………………………………………………………. 18 1.2. Cognitive Science: definitions and basic assumptions ……………. 19 1.3. Basic tenets of Cognitive 22 Science…………………………………… 1.3.1. Cognition……………………………………………………... 23 1.3.2. Representationism and presentationism…………………….... 25 1.3.3. Naturalism and physical character of mind…………………... 28 1.3.4. Levels of description…………………………………………. 30 1.3.5. Internalism (Individualism) ………………………………….. 31 1.4. History……………………………………………………………... 34 1.4.1. Prehistory…………………………………………………….. 35 1.4.2. Germination…………………………………………………... 36 1.4.3. Beginnings……………………………………………………. 37 1.4.4. Early and classical Cognitive Science………………………… 40 1.4.5. Contemporary Cognitive Science……………………………... 42 1.4.6. Methodological notes on interdisciplinarity………………….. 52 1.5. Summary…………………………………………………………. 59 2. Intrasystemic and extrasystemic principles of concept individuation 60 2.1. Existential status of concepts ……………………………………… 60 2 This is a submitted manuscript version. The publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use or reprint the material in any form. Final published version, copyright Peter Lang: https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-653-05287-9 2.1.1. I-language and E-language………………………………........ 60 2.1.2. I-concepts and E-concepts……………………………………. 63 2.1.3. Gottlob Frege: metaphysical views and their influence…….... 66 2.2. Internalist and externalist principles of content-individuation …….. 70 2.2.1. Externalism: arguments by H. Putnam……………………….. 71 2.2.2. Common misunderstandings concerning internalism and externalism about content………………………………………. 73 2.2.3. Case against externalism……………………………………... 80 2.4. Summary and conclusion………….………………………………. 87 PART II THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF STUDY OF CONCEPTS Introduction and notation……...………………………………………... 90 3. Concept, category, categorisation, mental representation. Preliminary definitions and discussion. Historical background. …... 93 Introduction and caveats... …...………………………………………… 93 3.1. Concepts…………………………………………………………… 93 3.1.1. Preliminary definitions……………………………………….. 93 3.1.2. Historical note…………………………………………...…… 94 3.1.3. Discussion……………………………………………………. 95 3.2. Categories and categorisation……………………………………… 110 3.2.1. Preliminary definition………………………………………... 110 3.2.2. Categories………………………..…………………………... 111 3.2.3. Categorisation………………………………………………… 115 3.3. Mental representation……………………………………………… 121 Summary…………………………………………………………. 125 4. Concepts in Cognitive Science………………………………………….. 127 4.1. Scope of study……………………………………………………… 127 4.2. Concepts in Cognitive Science. Concepts as lexical categories…..... 130 3 This is a submitted manuscript version. The publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use or reprint the material in any form. Final published version, copyright Peter Lang: https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-653-05287-9 4.2.1. Introductory remarks…………………………………………. 130 4.2.2. What is ‘a concept’? Conditions on theory of concepts……… 131 4.2.3. Concepts are mental representations. ………………………... 133 4.2.4. Concepts are categories. …………………………………….. 139 4.2.5. Concepts have lexical correlates. ……………………………. 144 4.2.6. Concepts are shareable/concepts subserve communication. … 157 4.3. Conclusion…………………………………………………………. 159 PART III CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES TO CATEGORISATION AND CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE 5. Classical approach to categorisation and conceptual structure ……. 162 5.1. Theories of categorisation or theories of concepts? Review of terminological problems. ………………………………….. 162 5.2. Classical approach…………………………………………………. 164 5.2.1. Exposition……………………………………………………. 164 5.2.2. History……………………………………………………….. 169 5.2.3. Criticism……………………………………………………… 176 5.2.4. Evaluation……………………………………………………. 188 5.2.5. Specific problem: feature format…………………………….. 191 5.2.6. Natural Semantic Metalanguage……………………………... 194 5.3. Summary and conclusion………..…………………………………. 196 6. Conceptual atomism and its refutation……………………………….. 199 6.1. Introduction………………………………………………………… 199 6.2. Jerry Fodor’s theory of concepts…………………………………... 201 6.2.1. Naturalism……………………………………………………. 202 6.2.2. Folk psychology……………………………………………… 203 6.2.3. Systematic nature of human thought (compositionality) ……. 204 6.2.4. Consequences………………………………………………… 205 4 This is a submitted manuscript version. The publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use or reprint the material in any form. Final published version, copyright Peter Lang: https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-653-05287-9 6.2.5. Fodor’s conceptual atomism and informational semantic…… 209 6.3. Criticism of Fodor’s conceptual atomism…………………………. 218 6.3.1. Radical concept nativism…………………………………….. 218 6.3.2. Problem of elimination of epistemic factors…………………. 223 6.4. Recapitulation……………………………………………………… 227 7. From prototype to exemplar models in nonlexical and lexical categorisation …………………………………………......................... 228 7.1. Preliminary remarks……...………………………………………… 228 7.2. Similarity as theoretical notion…………………………………….. 229 7.2.1. Problems with similarity……………………………………... 230 7.2.2. Ways of constraining similarity……………………………… 233 7.3. Prototype and exemplar models of categorisation…………………. 236 7.3.1. What is ‘a prototype’? ……………………………………… 237 7.3.2. Categorisation by prototype………………………………….. 238 7.3.3. What is ‘an exemplar’? ……………………………………… 239 7.3.4. Categorisation by exemplars…………………………………. 241 7.4. From prototype to exemplar models in lexical categorisation…….. 242 7.4.1. Distinguishing exemplar from prototype models....................... 243 7.4.2. Distinctiveness and advantages of exemplar models………… 245 7.5. Summary...…………………………………………………………. 247 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………... 249 Bibliography……………………………………………………………… 252 Glossary of central terms………………………………………………… 272 5 This is a submitted manuscript version. The publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use or reprint the material in any form. Final published version, copyright Peter Lang: https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-653-05287-9 Introduction Objectives and Methods The primary objective of this work consists in providing a typology and a critical examination of the key contemporary approaches to the topic of concepts and conceptual structure in its relation to categorisation. In the course of the text, I advance and defend two specific main theses. Firstly, concepts – at least for the purposes relevant to cognitive scientific research – are most fruitfully understood as ‘lexical categories’, in the sense of mental representations with lexical correlates. Secondly, concepts, so conceived, have internal structures, contrary to the influential proposal put forward by conceptual atomists. By way of conclusion, I suggest that quantitative categorisation models from other content domains (e.g. perceptual categorisation), such as exemplar models, may be the best suited to revealing the internal structures of concepts. The other major goal, which can be considered auxiliary, consists in a comprehensive and epistemologically informed discussion of the cognitive perspective on the study of language, its utility and validity. What is worth stressing is the broad construal of ‘the cognitive perspective’, which embraces but also largely transcends cognitive linguistics. In accordance with the spirit of Cognitive Science, it extends to cover all research that is both founded on strong mentalistic and representational assumptions and relevant to understanding human language processing – thus being open to insights from experimental psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, neurolinguistics, philosophy of language and mind, as well as a number of related fields. The character of the present book is theoretical. In view of the breadth of the thematic scope of this work, I pursue the two major goals presented above mostly by way of surveying and synthesising contemporary research in the cognitivist tradition. However, contemporary and historic research from other traditions is presented as well, not just to seek the due theoretical distance that is 6 This is a submitted manuscript version. The publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use or reprint the material in any form. Final published version, copyright Peter Lang: https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-653-05287-9 necessary for this type of academic work, but also in order to provide a proper background. Despite the theoretical character, in the course of the text I devote substantial effort to grounding the theorising in available empirical findings, whenever such results come as relevant. This work is based (largely but not exclusively) on a review and analysis of literature in the English language that dominates contemporary international research on the topic of categorisation and concepts. Philosophically, it builds to a substantial degree on the theoretical achievements of