Concepts: Stored or Created?

  • Authors:
  • Marco Mazzone;Elisabetta Lalumera

  • Affiliations:
  • Laboratory of Cognitive Science, Department of Modern Philology, University of Catania, Catania, Italy 95124;Department of Psychology, University of Milan --- Bicocca, Milan, Italy

  • Venue:
  • Minds and Machines
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Are concepts stable entities, unchanged from context to context? Or rather are they context-dependent structures, created on the fly? We argue that this does not constitute a genuine dilemma. Our main thesis is that the more a pattern of features is general and shared, the more it qualifies as a concept. Contextualists have not shown that conceptual structures lack a stable, general core, acting as an attractor on idiosyncratic information. What they have done instead is to give a contribution to the comprehension of how conceptual structure organized around such a stable core can produce contextually appropriate representations on demand.