Michaelmas Term, 2018.
Meetings on Fridays, 9am-11am (except Week 6), in the Ryle Room (1st floor of the Radcliffe Humanities Building).
Readings will be posted here, at least a week in advance.
Readings:
Chapters 1 and 2 of Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong (1998) by Jerry Fodor. [pdf]
Sections 1 and 2 of "Concepts and Cognitive Science" (1999) by Stephen Laurence and Eric Margolis. [pdf]
Optional:
Chapter 1 of Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and their Perceptual Basis (2002) by Jesse Prinz. [pdf]
Readings:
"Principles of Categorization" (1978) by Eleanor Rosch. [pdf]
Chapter 5 of Concepts (1998) by Jerry Fodor (appendix not necessary). [pdf under Wk1]
Section 3 of "Concepts and Cognitive Science" (1999) by Stephen Laurence and Eric Margolis. [pdf under Wk1]
"Regaining Composure: A Defence of Prototype Compositionality" (2012) by Jesse Prinz. [pdf]
Optional:
"Can Prototype Representations Support Composition And Decomposition?" (2012) by Lila R. Gleitman, Andrew C. Connolly, & Sharon Lee Armstrong. [pdf]
"The Modifier Effect in Within-Category Induction: Default Inheritance in Complex Noun Phrases" (2012) by Martin Jönsson & James A. Hampton. [pdf]
"Property Attribution in Combined Concepts" (2015) by Thomas L. Spalding & Christina L. Gagné. [pdf]
Chapter 2 of The Big Book of Concepts (2004) by Gregory L. Murphy. [pdf]
Readings:
Chapters 6 and 7 of Concepts (1998) by Jerry Fodor. [pdf under Wk1]
"Radical Concept Nativism" (2002) by Stephen Laurence and Eric Margolis. [pdf]
"Psychological Essentialism in Children" (2004) by Susan Gelman. [pdf]
Optional:
Pages 161-193 of Chapter 6 of The Big Book of Concepts (2004) by Gregory L. Murphy. [pdf under Wk2]
Appendix to Chapter 5 of Concepts (1998) by Jerry Fodor. [pdf under Wk1]
"Why Theories of Concepts Should Not Ignore the Problem of Acquisition" (2015) by Susan Carey. [pdf]
"Innate and Learned: Carey, Mad Dog Nativism, and the Poverty of Stimuli and Analogies (Yet Again)" (2014) by Georges Rey. [pdf]
"Word Learning as Bayesian Inference" (2007) by Joshua Tenenbaum and Fei Xu. [pdf]
"The Structural Sources of Verb Meanings" (1990) by Lila Gleitman. [pdf]
Readings:
Sections 6 and 7 of "Concepts and Cognitive Science" (1999) by Stephen Laurence and Eric Margolis. [pdf under Wk1]
"The Plurality of Concepts" (2009) by Daniel Weiskopf. [pdf]
"The Big Concepts Paper: A Defence of Hybridism" (2016) by Agustín Vicente and Fernando Martínez Manrique. [pdf]
Optional (I suggest skimming the Machery and Potter):
Readings:
Pages 385-422 of Chapter 11 of The Big Book of Concepts (2004) by Gregory L. Murphy. [pdf under Wk2]
Pages 49-54 of Chapter 3 of Concepts (1998) by Jerry Fodor. [pdf under Wk1]
"The Emptiness of the Lexicon: Reflections on James Pustejovksy's The Generative Lexicon" (2002) by Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore (especially from page 102 on). [pdf]
"Judging a book by its Cover and Its Contents: The Representation of Polysemous and Homophonous Meanings in Four-year-old Children" (2011) by Mahesh Srinivasan and Jesse Snedeker. [pdf]
Chapter 0, Sections 2, 3, & 4.4 of Conjoining Meanings: Semantics without Truth Values (2018) by Paul Pietroski. [pdf]
Optional:
"Word Meaning and Concept Expressed" (2012) by Robyn Carston. [pdf]
"Pictures in Sentences: Understanding Without Words" (1986) by Mary C. Potter, Judith F. Kroll, Betsy Yachzel, Elizabeth Carpenter, and Janet Sherman. [pdf]
"Polysemy and Word Meaning: An Account of Lexical Meaning for Different Kinds of Content Words" (2018) by Agustín Vicente. [pdf]
"Disambiguating the Ambiguity Advantage Effect in Word Recognition: An Advantage for Polysemous but Not Homonymous Words" (2007) by Ekaterini Klepousniotou and Shari R. Baum. [pdf]
"Lexical Meaning, Concepts, and the Metasemantics of Predicates" (2018) by Michael Glanzberg. [pdf]
Readings:
Chapter 9 of Memory and the Computational Brain (2010) by C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King. [pdf]
"Concepts as Semantic Pointers: A Framework and Computational Model" (2015) by Peter Blouw, Eugene Solodkin, Paul Thagard, and Chris Eliasmith. [pdf]
"Semantics without Semantic Content" (forthcoming) by Daniel Harris. [pdf]
Optional:
Chapter 3 (incl. appendix) of LOT 2: The Language of Thought Revisited (2008) by Jerry Fodor. [pdf]
Readings:
"Putting Thoughts to Work: Concepts, Systematicity, and Stimulus Independence" (2009) by Elisabeth Camp. [pdf]
"Seeing and Conceptualizing: Modularity and the Shallow Contents of Perception" (2018) by Eric Mandelbaum. [pdf]
"Marking the Perception-Cognition Boundary: The Criterion of Stimulus Dependence" (2018) by Jacob Beck. [pdf]
Optional:
"Steps Toward the Origin of Propositional Thought" (2010) by Tyler Burge. [pdf]