[工程科技]Concepts Are Not a Natural Kind.pdf

Concepts Are Not a Natural Kind* Edouard Machery†‡ * † To contact the author, please write to Edouard Machery, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260; e-mail: machery@pitt.edu. ‡ I would like to thank the anonymous referees for their very useful comments. 1 ABSTRACT In cognitive psychology, concepts are those data structures that are stored in long-term memory and are used by default in human beings’ higher cognitive processes (categorization, inductive and deductive reasoning…). Most psychologists of concepts assume that these mental representations share many scientifically important properties, and the psychology of concepts is expected to describe those properties. Psychologists assume thereby that concepts constitute a natural kind. I call this assumption the Natural Kind Assumption . This article challenges the Natural Kind Assumption. It is argued that a growing body of evidence suggests that concepts do not constitute a natural kind. Hence, the notion of concept is inappropriate to carve human beings’ mental representations at their joints, if one aims at formulating scientifically relevant inductive generalizations about the human mind. 2 1. Introduction In cognitive science, concepts are the data structures that are stored in long-term memory and are used by default in the higher cognitive processes (categorization, inductive and deductive reasoning, analogy making, language understanding…).1 Cognitive scientists assume typically that they constitute a homogenous class of mental representations. Of course, everybody recognizes that there are plenty of differences between concepts and also between