University of Missouri, St. Louis IRL @ UMSL Philosophy Faculty Works Philosophy 10-1-2006 Splitting Concepts Gualtiero Piccinini University of Missouri-St. Louis,
[email protected] Sam Scott Follow this and additional works at: https://irl.umsl.edu/philosophy-faculty Part of the Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Gualtiero Piccinini and Sam Scott, "Splitting Concepts," Philosophy of Science 73, no. 4 (October 2006): 390-409. https://doi.org/10.1086/516806 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Philosophy at IRL @ UMSL. It has been accepted for inclusion in Philosophy Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of IRL @ UMSL. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Splitting Concepts* Gualtiero Piccinini and Sam Scott†‡ A common presupposition in the concepts literature is that concepts constitute a sin- gular natural kind. If, on the contrary, concepts split into more than one kind, this literature needs to be recast in terms of other kinds of mental representation. We offer two new arguments that concepts, in fact, divide into different kinds: (a) concepts split because different kinds of mental representation, processed independently, must be posited to explain different sets of relevant phenomena; (b) concepts split because different kinds of mental representation, processed independently, must be posited to explain responses to different kinds of category. Whether these arguments are sound remains an open empirical question, to be resolved by future empirical and theoretical work. 1. Introduction. In the past 35 years, psychologists, philosophers, and linguists have generated a vast interdisciplinary literature on the nature of concepts. This literature has produced three main families of psycho- logical theories: the prototype, exemplar, and theory theories of concepts (e.g., Hampton [1993] for prototypes, Nosofsky [1988] for exemplars, and Gopnik and Meltzoff [1997] for theories).