Concepts are a functional kind

Lalumera, Elisabetta

doi:10.1017/s0140525x10000403

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…Yet, this selection goes further: It also provides us with a baseline from which the psychological concept of concept can be further improved for the purposes of conceptual engineering. For instance, in order to increase the scope and impact conceptual engineering may have on our conceptual apparatuses, future research in this direction could appropriately draw upon a psychological, invariantist characterization of concepts as bodies of information that are retrieved from our long-term memory to play a role in the cognitive processes that underlie our higher cognitive competences, and then combine it with a pluralist take on the basic kinds of bodies of information (e.g., exemplar, prototypes, and theories) in the form of a model of concepts as “multiply realiz[ed] functional kinds” (Lalumera 2010 : 218). However, this remains another story to be told.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Which Concept of Concept for Conceptual Engineering?

Isaac

2021

Erkenn

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Conceptual engineering is the method for assessing and improving our concepts. However, little has been written about how best to conceive of concepts for the purposes of conceptual engineering. In this paper, I aim to fill this foundational gap, proceeding in three main steps: First, I propose a methodological framework for evaluating the conduciveness of a given concept of concept for conceptual engineering. Then, I develop a typology that contrasts two competing concepts of concept that can be used in conceptual engineering—namely, the philosophical and psychological ones. Finally, I evaluate these two concepts of concept using the proposed methodological framework and I show that, when it comes to making conceptual engineering an actionable method, the psychological concept of concept outclasses its philosophical counterpart on all counts. This provides a baseline from which the concept of concept can be further improved for the purposes of conceptual engineering.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Which Concept of Concept for Conceptual Engineering?

Isaac

2021

Erkenn

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“…The cognitive processes here in play consist of a series of operations that access the information stored in the agent's long‐term memory in order to bring about the functions to be fulfilled by the exercise of a given higher cognitive competence. These operations in turn can be reduced to category‐abstraction, on the one hand, which is ‘the “bottom‐up” process of extracting information from a single encounter with an object or property‐instance, and generalising such information to all encounters with that object or property,’ and category‐induction, on the other hand, which is ‘the complementary “top‐down” process of projecting such knowledge to new encounters’ (Lalumera, 2010, p. 218). As for the functions fulfilled by the higher cognitive competences, they are typically those of categorisation, deduction, induction, action‐planning, analogy‐making, and linguistic understanding.…”

Section: A Positive Proposalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These two desiderata have been satisfied by the development in two steps of a psychological characterisation of concepts as ‘multiply realiz[ed] functional kinds’ (cf. Lalumera, 2010). With this concept of concept at hand, the upshot for conceptual engineering as the method for the cognitive amelioration of our conceptual devices is that it will then consist in redesigning the mind's patterns of inferences, possibly at each step of information processing (that is, from retrieval to use) and at any level of abstraction for the informational content (that is, for any basic kinds of concepts).…”

Section: A Positive Proposalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Broad‐spectrum conceptual engineering

Isaac

2021

Ratio

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Conceptual engineering is the method for assessing and improving our representational devices. On its ‘broad‐spectrum’ version, it is expected to be appropriately applicable to any of our representation‐involving cognitive activities, with major consequences for our whole cognitive life. This paper is about the theoretical foundations of conceptual engineering thus characterised. With a view to ensuring the actionability of conceptual engineering as a broad‐spectrum method, it addresses the issue of how best to construe the subject matter of conceptual engineering and successively defends the theses that conceptual engineering should be: (i) About concepts, (ii) psychologically theorised, (iii) as multiply realised functional kinds. Thereby, I claim to theoretically secure and justify the maximum scope, flexibility, and impact for the method of conceptual engineering on our representational devices in our whole cognitive life—in other words, a broad‐spectrum version of conceptual engineering.

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“…The Oxford Research Encyclopedia defines Lexical Semantics as the study of word meanings, i.e., concepts [25], where concepts are assumed to be constructed by humans through language. In the same line of thinking, this research focuses on Visual Semantics, namely, on how humans build concepts when using vision to perceive the world.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards Visual Semantics

2021

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Lexical Semantics is concerned with how words encode mental representations of the world, i.e., concepts. We call this type of concepts, classification concepts. In this paper, we focus on Visual Semantics, namely, on how humans build concepts representing what they perceive visually. We call this second type of concepts, substance concepts. As shown in the paper, these two types of concepts are different and, furthermore, the mapping between them is many-to-many. In this paper we provide a theory and an algorithm for how to build substance concepts which are in a one-to-one correspondence with classifications concepts, thus paving the way to the seamless integration between natural language descriptions and visual perception. This work builds upon three main intuitions: (i) substance concepts are modeled as visual objects, namely, sequences of similar frames, as perceived in multiple encounters; (ii) substance concepts are organized into a visual subsumption hierarchy based on the notions of and ; (iii) the human feedback is exploited not to name objects, but, rather, to align the hierarchy of substance concepts with that of classification concepts. The learning algorithm is implemented for the base case of a hierarchy of depth two. The experiments, though preliminary, show that the algorithm manages to acquire the notions of and with reasonable accuracy, this despite seeing a small number of examples and receiving supervision on a fraction of them.

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Concepts are a functional kind

Cited by 8 publications

References 55 publications

Which Concept of Concept for Conceptual Engineering?

Which Concept of Concept for Conceptual Engineering?

Broad‐spectrum conceptual engineering

Towards Visual Semantics

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