Concepts Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

An Essay on the Origin of Ideas pursues two ambitious and original projects. First, Gauker develops and defends the Sellarsian thesis that public language is the medium of conceptual thought, all thought that involves distinguishing between particulars on the basis of the kinds to which they belong. Concepts, on Gauker's view, are not expressed or conveyed by means of language. Rather, concepts are words and phrases used in meaningful acts of speech (p. 257). Second, Gauker undertakes to show that dispositions to produce and consume sentences containing ordinary, empirical words, like 'icicle', 'window', and 'blackbird', can be learned on the basis of a kind of imagistic thinking that does not involve the application of concepts. (Imagistic representations include both 'receptive' perceptions as well as 'prospective' mental imagery.) Since these words, when used in intersubjective communication or inner speech, according to Gauker, just are the concepts icicle, window, and blackbird, an account that explains how speakers acquire the aforementioned dispositions also functions as an account of concept learning. In the course of pursuing these projects, Gauker also outlines a radically pragmatist theory of language. Language is portrayed not as a means of conveying thoughts from one speaker to another, but rather as a tool for optimizing the performance of multi-agent tasks. More specifically, overt acts of speech are instruments that enable one agent to guide from outside, as it were, how another agent engages in prospective, imagistic planning. By making assertions, an agent can instill in those who hear her imagistic representations of their situation that permit each participant to carry out her part of a collaborative project in an optimal way (p. 242). On Gauker's view, the only genuine representations in the mind are nonconceptual, imagistic ones. Language does not augment or 'upgrade' our endogenous, imagistic mindware with novel representational resources à la Andy Clark (see Clark's 'Magic Words' in Language and Thought: Interdisciplinary Themes, edited by P. Carruthers and J. Boucher, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 162-83), but instead enables human beings to create and manipulate imagistic representations in ways that would otherwise be impossible. In this respect, Gauker's view sharply departs from other strong cognitive conceptions of language (for discussion, see Peter Carruthers, 'The Cognitive Functions of Language', Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 25 (2002), pp. 657-726). Chapters one through four critically examine alternative, languageindependent theories of concepts and are intended to clear the ground for positive developments in the second half of the book. Chapter one begins by raking the empiricist view that concepts are 'abstracted' from perceptions over