Abstract
This dissertation focuses on an often-overlooked function performed by concepts, which is to facilitate learning. This function is often implicit in theorists’ glosses of concepts’ basic jobs but has rarely been treated as a proper explanatory target. So I will try to make explicit this function of concepts in this dissertation and see what impact it will have on our current theories of concepts.Part 1 aims to give an overview of the dissertation, explain my main motivation and clarify some terminologies/notions. I shall present five common theoretical desiderata on a theory of concepts to demonstrate that learning has not been treated as a proper explanatory target. I also display the thoughts that led me to see the importance of learning in concepts’ functions. I finish Part 1 by drawing attention to the distinction between “concepts” and “conceptions”.
Part 2 does a literature review of theories of concepts. I begin by grouping the theories into two camps: descriptivism plus internalism (“interiptivism”) and referentialism plus externalism (“refernalism”). I then go through some of the main arguments that have been made by each camp based on the five common desiderata. Among these arguments, I shall highlight two criticisms of refernalism: that it is explanatorily “idle” and that it has trouble with explaining concept acquisition. I advertise that appealing to concepts’ learning function can help resolve them.
Part 3 first attempts to make explicit my idea that concepts function to facilitate learning and then proceeds to elaborate on how it can help resolve the two criticisms respectively. I begin by specifying concepts’ learning function into two functional roles -- the reidentification role and the signal-to-memory role -- by comparing them with what mental/object files do. I justify the ascription of the two roles by showing how the metaphysical structure of the world makes them apt for enhancing one’s adaptive ability. Taking the two functional roles of concepts as given, I move on to explain how they can allow us to demonstrate refernalism’s explanatory value and thus resolve the explanatory idleness criticism. I use memory storage as a case study to show that refernalism is especially suitable for explaining how our mind uses concepts to build models of environmental entities. After that, I turn to deal with the criticism that refernalism has trouble explaining concept acquisition. I show that by reflecting on concepts’ learning function we can see that concept acquisition is a form of “meta-learning”. I argue that conceptualising concept acquisition as meta-learning can help clear away some traditional confusions regarding concept acquisition and show that refernalism can account for concept acquisition very well.
I conclude by summarising the core idea of this dissertation and raising some potentially related research questions.
| Date of Award | 1 Jan 2023 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
|
| Supervisor | David Papineau (Supervisor) & James Stazicker (Supervisor) |