In Doing without Concepts, Machery (Reference Machery2009) provides a service to us all by reminding us of the challenges of specifying what concepts are and how they are mentally represented. Moreover, by moving to the radical position that we should do away with the concepts altogether, he forces all of us to think more deeply about why we might want to preserve such notions. Finally, he is correct in pointing out the ways in which philosophical and psychological approaches to concepts often seem to be asking and answering different questions. Despite all this, it seems too extreme to assume that more traditional notions of concepts are bankrupt or that philosophers and psychologists are always talking past each other.
Here I focus on one alternative to Machery's proposal that he seems to dismiss too lightly – the idea that concepts might have a hybrid structure. I am not yet sure about the extent to which the potentially hybrid facets to concepts are actually parts of the concepts per se, or whether they should instead be considered as linked to concepts that are themselves much simpler atoms in the manner described by Fodor (Reference Fodor1998). Cognitive science still has not fully answered Fodor's reasons for doubting that many cognitive phenomena associated with concepts reflect internal structural features of concepts as opposed to aspects of how we use and work with concepts; but to accept Fodor's arguments is to discount Machery's view as well, so let us assume here that we do want to assume internal structures to representations of concepts and that those structures help explain many psychological phenomena associated with concepts such as induction, categorization, and conceptual change.
Fodor (Reference Fodor1998) has characterized concepts as “the smallest units of thought” and, in this respect, many psychologists and philosophers agree. Does such a characterization compel us to Machery's heterogeneity hypothesis, namely, that we must have several distinct concepts of water because, depending on context, we seem to use the concept in different ways? It is difficult to see why. Machery discounts the hybrid alternative by arguing that people will endorse conflicting statements about kinds such as tomatoes, whales, and the like, and those conflicts can only be explained by assuming that they are drawing on different concepts. These different uses are supposedly not “coordinated,” and therefore people cannot be referring to the same concepts. But this coordination problem does not seem to be so lethal for hybrid views. If a given concept has a hybrid structure consisting, for example, of typicality-based information, causal schema, functional relations, and logical entailments, it might well be the case that different contexts cause people to weight those properties very differently and respond in different manners across tasks. Ever since Lakoff's (Reference Lakoff1972) demonstrations that different “hedges” such as “technically speaking” and “loosely speaking” can cause us to categorize kinds such as whales differently, it has been known that some hallmark ways we use concepts, such as categorization, can show strong variations as a function of situational and sentential concepts. But, if hybrid models are right, they seem more than adequate for dealing with such phenomena. Machery would need to provide a detailed model of internal hybrid representations of concepts that showed how they were intrinsically unable to computationally model such effects, and he has not yet done so.
Machery suggests that the parts of hybrid concepts must be “coordinated” such that this cannot create inconsistencies, such as categorization judgments that whales both are and are not fish. This coordination property is seen as an essential part of hybrid models, and hybrid models are described as incoherent or empty without it. This was not an obvious conclusion. Consider, for example, contexts in which we might describe a person as “short” and then “tall.” If we see a 2-meter person practicing with Olympic gymnasts, we might well call him tall; but when observing him practice with an Olympic basketball team, we would call him short. We may well know his true height and the true heights of the other players, but the contexts call for different ways of assigning thresholds on the vertical dimension that we would then use to consider someone tall or short. Is this to be taken as evidence for multiple concepts of tall and short? Are there then an indefinitely large number of such concepts that are depending on all the micro-contexts that could shift the thresholds to tiny degrees? There is a strong tendency to resist such a route, and it seems that, for similar reasons, we should resist claims that hybrid structures are undermined by conflicting categorization judgments in different contexts. Categorization inconsistencies do not pose a problem if there are still systematic ways that categorization judgments can be shown to vary across contexts as a function of a description of their internal hybrid structure. Machery would be correct in pointing out that such systematic accounts are not yet fully worked out, but there are no obvious reasons why they might not be in the long run.
Hybrid approaches also have other appeals. They can, for example provide continuity and coherence to models of conceptual change over time, as, for example, when the causal or rule-based aspects of a concept become more differentiated as a child grows older and come to be weighted more and more relative to the associative components (Keil Reference Keil1989; Keil & Newman Reference Keil, Newman, Mareschal, Quin and Lea2010). Machery's heterogeneity alternative sees the child as progressing through a series of unconnected concepts that somehow magically tend to unfold in the same way across children. Hybrid models can also help explain how concepts differ across broad categories such as natural kinds and artifacts, where different components of the hybrid might be present to different degrees and accordingly assigned different weights, as well as being processed in different ways (Hampton et al. Reference Hampton, Storms, Simmons and Heussen2009).
Machery has done us all a great service. He raises a host of interesting troubles for many accounts of concepts, and he is to be commended for trying to build a larger common ground of inquiry between philosophers and psychologists. His book is a refreshing new perspective that prods all of us to further develop our own theories of concepts.
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In Doing without Concepts, Machery (Reference Machery2009) provides a service to us all by reminding us of the challenges of specifying what concepts are and how they are mentally represented. Moreover, by moving to the radical position that we should do away with the concepts altogether, he forces all of us to think more deeply about why we might want to preserve such notions. Finally, he is correct in pointing out the ways in which philosophical and psychological approaches to concepts often seem to be asking and answering different questions. Despite all this, it seems too extreme to assume that more traditional notions of concepts are bankrupt or that philosophers and psychologists are always talking past each other.
Here I focus on one alternative to Machery's proposal that he seems to dismiss too lightly – the idea that concepts might have a hybrid structure. I am not yet sure about the extent to which the potentially hybrid facets to concepts are actually parts of the concepts per se, or whether they should instead be considered as linked to concepts that are themselves much simpler atoms in the manner described by Fodor (Reference Fodor1998). Cognitive science still has not fully answered Fodor's reasons for doubting that many cognitive phenomena associated with concepts reflect internal structural features of concepts as opposed to aspects of how we use and work with concepts; but to accept Fodor's arguments is to discount Machery's view as well, so let us assume here that we do want to assume internal structures to representations of concepts and that those structures help explain many psychological phenomena associated with concepts such as induction, categorization, and conceptual change.
Fodor (Reference Fodor1998) has characterized concepts as “the smallest units of thought” and, in this respect, many psychologists and philosophers agree. Does such a characterization compel us to Machery's heterogeneity hypothesis, namely, that we must have several distinct concepts of water because, depending on context, we seem to use the concept in different ways? It is difficult to see why. Machery discounts the hybrid alternative by arguing that people will endorse conflicting statements about kinds such as tomatoes, whales, and the like, and those conflicts can only be explained by assuming that they are drawing on different concepts. These different uses are supposedly not “coordinated,” and therefore people cannot be referring to the same concepts. But this coordination problem does not seem to be so lethal for hybrid views. If a given concept has a hybrid structure consisting, for example, of typicality-based information, causal schema, functional relations, and logical entailments, it might well be the case that different contexts cause people to weight those properties very differently and respond in different manners across tasks. Ever since Lakoff's (Reference Lakoff1972) demonstrations that different “hedges” such as “technically speaking” and “loosely speaking” can cause us to categorize kinds such as whales differently, it has been known that some hallmark ways we use concepts, such as categorization, can show strong variations as a function of situational and sentential concepts. But, if hybrid models are right, they seem more than adequate for dealing with such phenomena. Machery would need to provide a detailed model of internal hybrid representations of concepts that showed how they were intrinsically unable to computationally model such effects, and he has not yet done so.
Machery suggests that the parts of hybrid concepts must be “coordinated” such that this cannot create inconsistencies, such as categorization judgments that whales both are and are not fish. This coordination property is seen as an essential part of hybrid models, and hybrid models are described as incoherent or empty without it. This was not an obvious conclusion. Consider, for example, contexts in which we might describe a person as “short” and then “tall.” If we see a 2-meter person practicing with Olympic gymnasts, we might well call him tall; but when observing him practice with an Olympic basketball team, we would call him short. We may well know his true height and the true heights of the other players, but the contexts call for different ways of assigning thresholds on the vertical dimension that we would then use to consider someone tall or short. Is this to be taken as evidence for multiple concepts of tall and short? Are there then an indefinitely large number of such concepts that are depending on all the micro-contexts that could shift the thresholds to tiny degrees? There is a strong tendency to resist such a route, and it seems that, for similar reasons, we should resist claims that hybrid structures are undermined by conflicting categorization judgments in different contexts. Categorization inconsistencies do not pose a problem if there are still systematic ways that categorization judgments can be shown to vary across contexts as a function of a description of their internal hybrid structure. Machery would be correct in pointing out that such systematic accounts are not yet fully worked out, but there are no obvious reasons why they might not be in the long run.
Hybrid approaches also have other appeals. They can, for example provide continuity and coherence to models of conceptual change over time, as, for example, when the causal or rule-based aspects of a concept become more differentiated as a child grows older and come to be weighted more and more relative to the associative components (Keil Reference Keil1989; Keil & Newman Reference Keil, Newman, Mareschal, Quin and Lea2010). Machery's heterogeneity alternative sees the child as progressing through a series of unconnected concepts that somehow magically tend to unfold in the same way across children. Hybrid models can also help explain how concepts differ across broad categories such as natural kinds and artifacts, where different components of the hybrid might be present to different degrees and accordingly assigned different weights, as well as being processed in different ways (Hampton et al. Reference Hampton, Storms, Simmons and Heussen2009).
Machery has done us all a great service. He raises a host of interesting troubles for many accounts of concepts, and he is to be commended for trying to build a larger common ground of inquiry between philosophers and psychologists. His book is a refreshing new perspective that prods all of us to further develop our own theories of concepts.