The Big Concepts Paper: A Defence of Hybridism

Abstract

The renewed interest in concepts and their role in psychological theorizing is partially motivated by Machery's claim that concepts are so heterogeneous that they have no explanatory role. Against this, pluralism argues that there is multiplicity of different concepts for any given category, while hybridism argues that a concept is constituted by a rich common representation. This paper aims to advance the understanding of the hybrid view of concepts. First, we examine the main arguments against hybrid concepts, and conclude that, even if not successful, they challenge hybridism to find a robust criterion for concept individuation, and to show an explanatory advantage for hybrid concepts. Then we propose such a criterion of individuation, which we will call functional stable coactivation. Finally, we examine the prospects of hybridism to understand what is involved in recent approaches to categorization and meaning-extraction.

What words mean and express: semantics and pragmatics of kind terms and verbs

“…its lexical meaning) is that conceptual material that the word activates regularly. Moreover, I want to call that 'a concept', following Vicente and Martínez-Manrique (2016). In psychology, a concept is a body of information or a knowledge structure that is used in categorization, inference and other higher level cognitive processes (Machery, 2009 and functional way.…”

Polysemy: Current perspectives and approaches

“…One possibility is that all these senses are stored together and form part of a structure -a SCHOOL concept -which accounts for the relationship between all these senses. When the context brings to the fore one of them, the other senses will also be primed but remain less active than the one highlighted (see also Vicente & Martínez-Manrique, 2015).…”

Chomskyan Arguments Against Truth-Conditional Semantics Based on Variability and Co-predication

“…Concepts understood in this sense are structured mental entities that support different ways of categorizing the categories they are about and of supporting inferences. Categorization and inference can be based (at least) on theory-like or prototypical knowledge, as well as on stored exemplars or on idealizations (Machery, 2009, Weiskopf, 2009, Murphy, 2002, Rice, 2014, Vicente & Martínez-Manrique, 2016). This variety of ways of categorizing explains why words can be used to denote only partially overlapping categories (say, water perhaps including tea but excluding water from a well vs. water including water from a well but excluding tea).…”