Book completed

Concepts and the Appeal to Cognitive Science, by Samuel D. Taylor. I read this book for work, and I found it interesting although slightly problematic. Taylor is a philosopher of cognitive science, and this book was his doctoral dissertation. He begins by reviewing a variety of theories about how we could think about what a concept is, in terms of what is stored in our brains that we can access for thinking. One theory focuses on all of the sensory images we associate with the concept. Another focuses on its definition. Two of them focus on examples – one’s a statistically weighted collection of all the examples we know, and the other is weighted in favor of those we’re most familiar with. Then there’s a theory that we think about a concept in terms of where it came from, what it’s capable of, etc., a more process-oriented way of thinking about it. Eventually he notes that some research programs use one definition, and others use others, and that none of them is sufficient for all of the purposes of cognitive science. Then he discusses three more complicated ways of thinking about concepts. One is that we don’t have concepts in our brain per se, just a variety of things of many types that are all about the thing the concept represents. Another is that a concept is a useful way of talking about the entire collection of those many things in our brain, and then there was a way that was rather like the latter but didn’t seem as useful to me so I didn’t retain it. Then he goes on and on about the various potential needs for cognitive science, that is, whether its explanations will be mechanistic, psychological (which is generally a subset of mechanistic), or dynamic, which includes emergent processes and other things happening over time. I assume that much of this was important for dissertation purposes. Then he gets to his main point, which is that trying to establish what a concept is externally to the needs of cognitive science doesn’t make as much sense as having various working hypotheses that cognitive science can explore. At one point he mentions a different theory than the previous ones, which makes the most sense to me – at least as I think about it, a concept is something we learn is a thing we should know about (whether it’s a category, a person, a place, etc., or a situation), and then we may collect a variety of ideas and memories that we link to that concept – images, definitions, examples of which some are more vivid than others, etc. This theory also helps make sense of the complication that we would like to think that we share concepts, but what we really share is the abstract idea – we each have our own specific versions of them in our minds.

The book could have used copyediting by someone other than the author, too – it would have been better if someone had pointed out the extremely large number of sentence fragments, typically starting with a phrase like “For example,” “For instance,” or occasionally “Namely.” They were distracting – I kept rereading those “sentences” looking for the verb.