In “Concepts Are Not a Natural Kind ” (2005), I argued that the notion of concept in psychology and in neuropsychology fails to pick out a natural kind. Piccinini and Scott (2006, in this issue) have criticized the argument I used to support this conclusion. They also proposed two alternative arguments for a similar conclusion. In this reply, I rebut Piccinini and Scott’s main objection against the argument proposed in “Concepts Are Not a Natural Kind. ” Moreover, I show that the two alternative arguments developed by Piccinini and Scott are not promising for supporting the conclusion that concepts are not a natural kind.

In this article, I argue that: the idea that within the mind there exists a collection of more or less homogenous structures of some kind, corresponding to our commonsense notion of “concept”, is likely upon investigation to prove wrong.

www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsc 100 years of psychology of concepts: the theoretical notion of concept and its operationalization

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Traditionally, theories of concepts in psychology assume that concepts are a single, uniform kind of mental representation. But no single kind of representation can explain all of the empirical data for which concepts are responsible. I argue that the assumption that concepts are uniformly the same kind of mental structure is responsible for these theories ’ shortcomings, and outline a pluralist theory of concepts that rejects this assumption. On pluralism, concepts should be thought of as being constituted by multiple representational kinds, with the particular kind of concept used on an occasion being determined by the context. I argue that endorsing pluralism does not lead to eliminativism about concepts as an object of scientific interest.

Psychologists of concepts ’ traditional assumption that there are many properties common to all concepts has been subject to devastating critiques in psychology and in the philosophy of psychology. However, it is currently unclear what approach to concepts is best suited to replace this traditional assumption. In this article, we compare two competing approaches, the Heterogeneity Hypothesis and the hybrid theories of concepts, and we present an empirical argument that tentatively supports the former over the latter. Psychologists working on human higher cognitive competences (e.g., categorization, induction, analogy-making, etc.) have traditionally assumed that there are numerous properties common to all concepts, and theories of concepts have attempted to characterize these common properties. There is however a growing consensus against this

Abstract: Philosophy of psychology takes various forms. Some philosophers of psychology use psychological findings and theories to develop new answers to traditional philosophical issues. A smaller number of philosophers of psychology take their cue from the philosophy of science. They describe and evaluate the discovery heuristics, theories, and explanatory practices endorsed by psychologists. Finally, much philosophy of psychology can be characterized as psychological theorizing. Just like psychologists, philosophers propose empirical theories of specific aspects of our mind, trying to explain relevant psychological phenomena. Focusing mostly on this aspect of the philosophy of psychology, I will consider philosophers ’ contribution to the theoretical development of psychology in four areas: cognitive architecture and modularity (§2); situated, embodied and extended cognition (§3); concepts (§4), and mindreading (§6). 1 Before doing this, however, I will discuss philosophers’ and psychologists ’ views and arguments about the distinctive character of psychology—its mentalistic nature (§1).

In psychology, concepts are typically characterized as those bodies of knowledge that are used by default in the psychological processes underlying numerous higher cognitive competences, such as categorization, induction, language understanding, analogymaking, and so on (Machery, In Press). These cognitive competences include concept combination, the capacity to produce new concepts out of pre-existing concepts—for instance, the capacity to produce the concept of a Harvard graduate who is a carpenter out of the concepts of a Harvard graduate and of a carpenter (Kunda, Miller, & Clare, 1990). The outcome of this process is said to be a “complex concept, ” while the concepts permanently stored in long-term memory are said to be “simple concepts. ” 1 Psychologists interested in concepts have studied at length the psychological phenomena associated with concept combination in order to better understand the cognitive processes underlying concept combination (for an overview, see Murphy, 2002, Chapter 12). However, psychological research on concept combination has failed to yield any consensus on the nature of these processes. In this article, we will critically review the main theories of concept combination that have been developed since the 1980s. This review will set the stage for some new hypotheses about the cognitive processes underlying concept combination, which emphasize their diversity and their ecological rationality. Here is how we will proceed. In the first three sections, we consider three important models of concept combination—Smith and colleagues ’ Selective Modification