PHIL. 500 – Philosophy of Mind: Concepts

Course Description: As components of thought, concepts play crucial roles in everyday cognition, ranging from making decisions to simply remembering things. Their analysis is likewise at the core of contemporary analytic philosophy, especially metaphysics. And yet, there is little agreement on just what they are; theories of concepts tend to be highly dependent upon one's theory of mind or language. In this course, we will examine the nature and function of concepts. We will begin by examining whether and how inferential roles can play a constitutive role in individuating concepts (atomism vs. holism), then consider how to determine the reference of concepts (individualism vs. externalism), and finally we'll consider the compositionality of concepts (prototypes, the language of thought, and cognitive maps), and ask whether infants and non-human animals are capable of deploying concepts.

Schedule of Readings

Week 1 Introduction Desiderata + the classical view of concepts

 Jesse Prinz – Furnishing the Mind – Ch. 1

Week 2 The classical view More on the traditional view of concepts

 John Locke – Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk. II: Chs. 2, 3, 12, 23 (1-11), 24; Bk. III, Ch. 3  Gottlob Frege – Function and Concept  Gottlob Frege – Thought

Week 3 Inference, Holism, and "Theory-Theory" I Philosophical and Psychological Background

 W.V.O. Quine – Two Dogmas of Empiricism  Susan Carey – The Origin of Concepts – Ch. 12

Week 4 Inference, Holism, and "Theory-Theory" II Psychological Investigations  Eric Margolis – The Significance of the Theory Analogy in the Psychological Study of Concepts  Jerry Fodor – Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong, Ch. 6.  Fiona Cowie – Mad Dog Nativism

Week 5 Inference, Holism, and "Theory-Theory" III Philosophical Alternatives

 Ruth Millikan – A common structure for concepts of individuals, stuffs, and real kinds  Edouard Machery – Concepts Are Not a Natural Kind  Elisabetta Lalumera – Concepts Are a Functional Kind

Week 6 Reference, Externalism, and Essentialism I Philosophical Background

 Hilary Putnam – Mind, Language, and Reality, Ch. 12: The meaning of 'meaning'  Jesse Prinz – Furnishing the Mind – Chs. 3-4

Week 7 Reference, Externalism, and Essentialism II Psychological Investigations

 Douglas Medin and Andrew Ortony – Psychological Essentialism  Michael Strevens – The Essentialist Aspect of Naïve Theories

Week 8 Reference, Externalism, and Essentialism III Philosophical Alternatives

 Jerry Fodor – Methodological Solipsism Considered as a Research Strategy  Jesse Prinz – Furnishing the Mind – Ch. 5, 8

Week 9 Compositionality and Mental Representations I Arguments for a language of thought

 Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn – Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis  Martin Davies – Concepts, Connectionism, and the Language of Thought

Week 10 Compositionality and Mental Representations II Prototypes

 Eleanor Rosch – Principles of Categorization  Jesse Prinz – Furnishing the Mind – Ch. 6, 10

Week 11 Compositionality and Mental Representations III Systematicity and Stimulus-Independence

 Peter Carruthers – On Being Simple-Minded  Elisabeth Camp – Putting Thoughts to Work: Concepts, Systematicity, and Stimulus-Independence

Week 12 Infants and non-human animals I Do they have concepts? How does their thinking work?

 Kristine Onishi & Renée Baillargeon – Do 15-Month-Old Infants Understand False Beliefs?  Paul Bloom & Tim German – Two Reasons to Abandon the False Belief Task as a Test of Theory of Mind  Nicola Clayton, Timothy Bussey, & Anthony Dickinson – Can Animals Recall the Past and Plan for the Future?  Michael Tomasello, Josep Call, & Brian Hare – Chimpanzees Understand Psychological States—The Question is Which Ones and To What Extent  Charles Randy Gallistel – Animal Cognition – The Representation of Space, Time, and Number

Week 13 Infants and non-human animals II A model for their cognition

 José Luis Bermudez – Thinking without Words, Chs. 3-5  Elizabeth Spelke – What Makes Us Smart? Core Knowledge and Natural Language

Final Essay Due: December 3rd