The newly minted cognitive psychology student is likely to have been taught that there are three major models of categorization – prototype, exemplar, and theory – and that they are vying with one another for the title of one true theory. The better part of Doing without Concepts (Machery Reference Machery2009) is spent revising this doctrine: rather than being mutually exclusive, the overwhelming evidence suggests that each of these strategies is used for determining category membership, depending on context.
From these modest conclusions Machery derives a fairly radical idea: What we have been referring to as “conceptual processing” is actually several distinct processes, so distinct that no scientifically meaningful relationship exists between them. Because these processes do not form a natural kind – they do not overlap at the cognitive or neural level – any further discussion of “concepts” as a unit is both incoherent and detrimental to the study of these processes. Thus Machery advances, in the final chapter, a proposal for concept eliminativism, where the notion of a concept must be banished from science entirely.
One would think that such a proposal requires some kind of evidence that these heuristic groupings generally prevent scientific advancement. Curiously, Machery provides virtually no support to this effect. He does mention, in passing, a few instances where scientific taxonomies have undergone restructuring based on deference to natural kinds (as when chemical classifications shifted to the periodic table), but this is quite separate from demonstrating that theories reflecting natural kinds are requisite for scientific progress. In any case, examples of such sea changes in psychology are rare. Machery cites “memory” and “emotion” as two terms which psychologists have successfully done away with, a claim we find puzzling. The idea that emotion contains “few scientifically relevant properties that are common to all emotions” (2009, p. 238) is far from the standard view – if anything, it is the division of emotions into ever-smaller categories that meets with resistance (Nesse & Ellsworth Reference Nesse and Ellsworth2009). Memory is an even worse example. Machery asserts that the umbrella term “memory” has been tidily replaced with a suite of finer-grained labels like “working memory” and “explicit memory.” In fact, psychologists debate today not only where to carve memory into its constituent parts, but also whether to disambiguate memory at all. In one recent review, Jonides and colleagues concluded that the longstanding division between long-term and short-term memory is artificial, owing to the fact that the same mechanisms are involved in encoding, maintenance, and retrieval in both systems (Jonides et al. Reference Jonides, Lewis, Nee, Lustig, Berman and Moore2008). Here is a case where overzealous compartmentalizing has led scientists to overlook alternate possibilities that were evident in the available data.
Of course, the memory case cannot directly inform whether “concept” should be discarded in favor of exemplar, prototype, and theory theories. But if a decades-long distinction between short-term memory and long-term memory has been overstated, then even the extensive evidence that Machery gathers in support of dividing concept into subcategories may erode after further study and review.
What of those psychological terms which were never divvied up into natural kinds – how have they fared? It may be instructive to look at research on concepts, which, by Machery's account, has been hobbled with an imperfect taxonomy for years. Fortunately, a survey of this research is conveniently located in the earlier chapters of his book, which is rich with experiments probing the nature of conceptual cognition. The arms race between camps of what were once considered competing theories appears to have led to a flourishing of work on this topic. If the unnatural kind-ness of “concept” has hindered research on conceptual processing, it certainly doesn't show in Machery's book.
There is another hurdle facing would-be converts to the eliminativist project, which is the delicate matter of what to do once the word “concept” has been cast from the psychological vernacular. Machery is happy to supply us with a more technically accurate replacement: “bodies of knowledge used by default in the processes underlying most higher cognitive competencies” (p. 239). It is not clear why Machery endorses this ungainly locution, which would seem to retain all the scientific baggage of “concept.” And it is probably not a good sign that Machery himself can hardly go more than a page without resorting to the forsaken term.
Although Machery presents his project as a fundamentally pragmatic one, concept eliminativism does not seem particularly practical. It requires that we not only convolute our vocabulary, but also renounce our natural inclination to think of these processes as related on a functional level. A truly pragmatic revolution can hardly fail to take into account the minds that must work within the confines of the new paradigm. In this sense, concept eliminativism and old-fashioned eliminativism (which Machery takes pains to distance himself from) bear quite a bit in common: The proposals to eradicate inaccurate terminology, even if technically more precise, are so unwieldy that they would be unrealistic to adopt.
If science were performed by robots, eliminating concepts might well be a reasonable prescription. Of course, the degree to which these rough intuitions hamper scientific progress would still need to be demonstrated. In considering proposals such as Machery's, we must weigh the inconvenience of the newer, less fluent way of thinking against the advantages of doing so. In this case, the inelegance of the project is evident, and the benefits of adopting it are, as yet, untested and unknown. We therefore see no reason to jettison “concept” from the scientific discourse.
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The newly minted cognitive psychology student is likely to have been taught that there are three major models of categorization – prototype, exemplar, and theory – and that they are vying with one another for the title of one true theory. The better part of Doing without Concepts (Machery Reference Machery2009) is spent revising this doctrine: rather than being mutually exclusive, the overwhelming evidence suggests that each of these strategies is used for determining category membership, depending on context.
From these modest conclusions Machery derives a fairly radical idea: What we have been referring to as “conceptual processing” is actually several distinct processes, so distinct that no scientifically meaningful relationship exists between them. Because these processes do not form a natural kind – they do not overlap at the cognitive or neural level – any further discussion of “concepts” as a unit is both incoherent and detrimental to the study of these processes. Thus Machery advances, in the final chapter, a proposal for concept eliminativism, where the notion of a concept must be banished from science entirely.
One would think that such a proposal requires some kind of evidence that these heuristic groupings generally prevent scientific advancement. Curiously, Machery provides virtually no support to this effect. He does mention, in passing, a few instances where scientific taxonomies have undergone restructuring based on deference to natural kinds (as when chemical classifications shifted to the periodic table), but this is quite separate from demonstrating that theories reflecting natural kinds are requisite for scientific progress. In any case, examples of such sea changes in psychology are rare. Machery cites “memory” and “emotion” as two terms which psychologists have successfully done away with, a claim we find puzzling. The idea that emotion contains “few scientifically relevant properties that are common to all emotions” (2009, p. 238) is far from the standard view – if anything, it is the division of emotions into ever-smaller categories that meets with resistance (Nesse & Ellsworth Reference Nesse and Ellsworth2009). Memory is an even worse example. Machery asserts that the umbrella term “memory” has been tidily replaced with a suite of finer-grained labels like “working memory” and “explicit memory.” In fact, psychologists debate today not only where to carve memory into its constituent parts, but also whether to disambiguate memory at all. In one recent review, Jonides and colleagues concluded that the longstanding division between long-term and short-term memory is artificial, owing to the fact that the same mechanisms are involved in encoding, maintenance, and retrieval in both systems (Jonides et al. Reference Jonides, Lewis, Nee, Lustig, Berman and Moore2008). Here is a case where overzealous compartmentalizing has led scientists to overlook alternate possibilities that were evident in the available data.
Of course, the memory case cannot directly inform whether “concept” should be discarded in favor of exemplar, prototype, and theory theories. But if a decades-long distinction between short-term memory and long-term memory has been overstated, then even the extensive evidence that Machery gathers in support of dividing concept into subcategories may erode after further study and review.
What of those psychological terms which were never divvied up into natural kinds – how have they fared? It may be instructive to look at research on concepts, which, by Machery's account, has been hobbled with an imperfect taxonomy for years. Fortunately, a survey of this research is conveniently located in the earlier chapters of his book, which is rich with experiments probing the nature of conceptual cognition. The arms race between camps of what were once considered competing theories appears to have led to a flourishing of work on this topic. If the unnatural kind-ness of “concept” has hindered research on conceptual processing, it certainly doesn't show in Machery's book.
There is another hurdle facing would-be converts to the eliminativist project, which is the delicate matter of what to do once the word “concept” has been cast from the psychological vernacular. Machery is happy to supply us with a more technically accurate replacement: “bodies of knowledge used by default in the processes underlying most higher cognitive competencies” (p. 239). It is not clear why Machery endorses this ungainly locution, which would seem to retain all the scientific baggage of “concept.” And it is probably not a good sign that Machery himself can hardly go more than a page without resorting to the forsaken term.
Although Machery presents his project as a fundamentally pragmatic one, concept eliminativism does not seem particularly practical. It requires that we not only convolute our vocabulary, but also renounce our natural inclination to think of these processes as related on a functional level. A truly pragmatic revolution can hardly fail to take into account the minds that must work within the confines of the new paradigm. In this sense, concept eliminativism and old-fashioned eliminativism (which Machery takes pains to distance himself from) bear quite a bit in common: The proposals to eradicate inaccurate terminology, even if technically more precise, are so unwieldy that they would be unrealistic to adopt.
If science were performed by robots, eliminating concepts might well be a reasonable prescription. Of course, the degree to which these rough intuitions hamper scientific progress would still need to be demonstrated. In considering proposals such as Machery's, we must weigh the inconvenience of the newer, less fluent way of thinking against the advantages of doing so. In this case, the inelegance of the project is evident, and the benefits of adopting it are, as yet, untested and unknown. We therefore see no reason to jettison “concept” from the scientific discourse.