Concepts are the elementary units of reason and linguistic meaning. They are conventional and relatively stable. As such, they must somehow be the result of neural activity in the brain. The questions are: Where? and How? A common philosophical position is that all concepts-even concepts about action and perception-are symbolic and abstract, and therefore must be implemented outside the brain's sensory-motor system. We will argue against this position using (1) neuroscientific evidence; (2) results from neural computation; and (3) results about the nature of concepts from cognitive linguistics. We will propose that the sensory-motor system has the right kind of structure to characterise both sensory-motor and more abstract concepts. Central to this picture are the neural theory of language and the theory of cogs, according to which, brain structures in the sensory-motor regions are exploited to characterise the so-called "abstract" concepts that constitute the meanings of grammatical constructions and general inference patterns.
According to reports by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N., factory farming has made animal agriculture the No. 1 contributor to global warming (it is significantly more destructive than transportation alone) , and one of the Top 2 or 3 causes of all of the most serious environmental problems: air and water pollution, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, … Eating factory-farmed animals-which is to Draft October 11, 2009 2 say virtually every piece of meat sold in supermarkets and prepared in restaurants-is almost certainly the single worst thing that human do to the environment. Turning to the op-ed section, one comes across an odd couple, John Kerry and Lindsay Graham, Massachusetts liberal and South Carolina conservative, writing 'hopefully' on bipartisan climate change legislation. …we are advocating aggressive reductions in our emissions of carbon gases … without hindering global competitiveness or driving more jobs overseas … we must also take advantage of nuclear power, our single largest contributor of emissionsfree power … jettison cumbersome regulations that have stalled the construction of nuclear plants … encourage serious investment in research to find solutions to our nuclear waste problem … for the foreseeable future we will continue to burn fossil fuels … The United States should aim to become the Saudi Arabia of clean coal … we are committed to seeking compromise on additional onshore and offshore gas exploration … Failure to act comes with another cost … the administration will use the Environmental Protection Agency to impose new regulations .. likely to be tougher .. Industry needs the certainty that comes with Congressional action … we will pass on to future generations a strong economy, a clean environment, and an energy-independent nation. And looking back to the past, we find these quotes from a 2003 language advisory by Frank Luntz to the Bush administration, called Winning the Global Warming Debate: An Overview : It's time for us to start talking about "climate change" instead of global warming …
Logicians have, by and large, engaged in the convenient fiction that sentences of natural languages (at least declarative sentences) are either true or false or, at worst, lack a truth value, or have a third value often interpreted as 'nonsense'. And most contemporary linguists who have thought seriously about semantics, especially formal semantics, have largely shared this fiction, primarily for lack of a sensible alternative. Yet students of language, especially psychologists and linguistic philosophers, have long been attuned to the fact that natural language concepts have vague boundaries and fuzzy edges and that, consequently, natural language sentences will very often be neither true, nor false, nor nonsensical, but rather true to a certain extent and false to a certain extent, true in certain respects and false in other respects. It is common for logicians to give truth conditions for predicates in terms of classical set theory. 'John is tall' (or 'TALL(j)') is defined to be true just in case the individual denoted by 'John' (or 'j') is in the set of tall men. Putting aside the problem that tallness is really a relative concept (tallness for a pygmy and tallness for a basketball player are obviously different) 1, suppose we fix a population relative to which we want to define tallness. In contemporary America, how tall do you have to be to be tall? 5'8"? 5'9"? 5'10"? 5'11"? 6'? 6'2"? Obviously there is no single fixed answer. How old do you have to be to be middle-aged? 35? 37? 39? 40? 42? 45? 50? Again the concept is fuzzy. Clearly any attempt to limit truth conditions for natural language sentences to true, false and "nonsense' will distort the natural language concepts by portraying them as having sharply defined rather than fuzzily defined boundaries. Work dealing with such questions has been done in psychology. To take a recent example, Eleanor Rosch Heider (1971) took up the question of whether people perceive category membership as a clearcut issue or a matter of degree. For example, do people think of members of a given
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