Current Research

In recent years, the discussion of the nature of Concepts has gained renewed interest within the Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Sciences. One obstacle to this theorization is the multiplicity of roles that the notion of concept fulfills within the natural and human sciences, which implies the coexistence of multiple Concepts of Concept: it is, at best, an umbrella term that covers multiple phenomena.

A possible ontological categorization relevant to the debate about the metaphysics of concepts consists of distinguishing three levels: Concreta, material entities and processes that can be analyzed through the postulation of physical mechanisms; Mentalia, mental entities and processes that can be analyzed through the postulation of psychological mechanisms; and Abstracta, entities, and properties that traditionally have been understood through the postulation of a Platonic or Fregean "Third Realm," and can be analyzed through linguistic and sociocultural phenomena. In the Cognitive Sciences, these three levels correspond in a non-strict way with the disciplinary interests of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Philosophy; in addition, it is possible to understand the ontological commitments underlying various philosophical systems in the history of philosophy in terms of the acceptance or rejection of the existence of one or two of those levels, and the relations between them.

A theory of concepts should, in principle, answer questions regarding their Ontology –what concepts are–their Epistemology -their acquisition and possession conditions, and the role they play in neurobiological, psychological, and cultural processes- and their Semantics -what kind of information they carry and how this information confers them meaning and allows them to be individuated. For this, it is also essential to establish which kinds of relationship –causality, emergence, supervenience, grounding, etc.– can fulfill the role of integrating and explaining these ontological levels.

My first assumption is that regardless of the privileged ontological level –a notion that is philosophically suspicious– for the analysis and explanation of concepts and the psychological skills and cognitive and cultural phenomena in whose explanation they appear, a Theory of Concepts should account for the concrete, the mental and the abstract aspects of Concepts: it should allow both satisfactory explanations within said ontological levels, and the interdisciplinary integration of the theories in which concepts appear as an element of analysis.

A second assumption is that the notion of Concept understood as Abstract Mental Representations in Cognitive Psychology is the most appropriate to, on the one hand, link this notion with the entities and mechanisms within Cognitive Neuroscience -that is, explain their emergence-, and link these representations at the mental level with the units of meaning traditionally postulated in Philosophy at a higher level of abstraction, as is in the case of Conceptual Analysis as a traditional method, or in Conceptual Engineering as a philosophical activity.

My third assumption is that a fundamental desideratum for building a Theory of Concepts is to formulate a Theory of Abstraction in a triple sense: Abstractness as a property of entities (Ontology), Abstraction as a psychological process of creating mental representations (Epistemology), and Abstract Content (the semantics of concepts and other mental representations). My intuition is that Abstractness requires articulating the relationship between Concreta and Abstracta; Abstraction requires articulating the relationship between Concreta and Mentalia; and Abstract Content requires articulating the relationship between Mentalia and Abstracta.

These three assumptions underlie my current project: to articulate and defend a new Mechanistic Theory of Concepts that is realistic regarding its representational vehicles, pluralistic in terms of its neuropsychological mechanisms of implementation, and hybrid in terms of its semantic contents. To this end, my PhD project contemplates:

First, analyzing the different classical theories around the concepts, such as those that arise from the theoretical framework of classical cognitivism or enactivism.

Second, to argue that a satisfactory theory of concepts must satisfy at least three explanatory desiderata: Systematicity –explain the productivity and compositionality exhibited by both thought and language–, Intentionality –provide a mental semantics for conceptual content– and Abstraction –how categorization and reasoning are possible, which require general or offline representations.

Finally, to argue on the basis of these considerations that an hybrid, pluralistic and realistic neo-mechanist proposal is the best alternative to account for concepts as abstract mental representations.