Semantic monsters: concept empiricism and its approach to intentional content

https://doi.org/10.25100/pfilosofica.v0i53.11436

Article Sidebar

PDF (Español) XML (Español)

Published: Aug 15, 2021
Updated: 2021-08-15
Issue: No. 53 (2021): Praxis Filosófica No. 53 julio-diciembre 2021
Section Articles

Publcation metrics

399




 


Main Article Content

Authors

  Dalila Serebrinsky Universidad de Buenos Aires
Abstract

Concept empiricism, introduced by Jesse Prinz, intends to be a theory about concepts which satisfies the desiderata that, according to that author, every theory of concepts must fulfill, and which does it as economically as possible. Regarding intentional content, it puts forward a non atomistic informational semantic theory. According to Prinz, concepts are merely detectors for perceptible features, that is, they are structured entities. The meaningful parts of these detectors obtain their content in an informational way. The aim of this paper is to show that concept empiricism is unable to fulfill the desideratum about intentional content. We argue that concepts as mere detectors are unable to properly account for the content of concepts without facing the disjunction problem, and that they are incompatible with the externalism that characterise informational theories of content.

Keywords
  • concept empiricism
  • intentional content
  • detectors
  • informational semantics
  • semantic atomism
Author Biography

Dalila Serebrinsky, Universidad de Buenos Aires

Doctoranda en Filosofía de la Universidad de Buenos Aires. Profesora en Filosofía por
la Universidad de Buenos Aires. Principal publicación: Serebrinsky, D. y Borge, B. Términos
teóricos y teorías híbridas de la referencia (en prensa). Áreas de trabajo: Filosofía de las
Ciencias y Filosofía del Lenguaje.

References

De Rosa, R. (2005). Prinz’s problematic proxytypes. The Philosophical Quarterly, 55(221), 594-606.

Devitt, M., & Sterelny, K. (1999). Language and Reality. Basil Blackwell.

Dretske, F. (1981). Knowledge and the Flow of Information. MIT/Bradford Press.

Fodor, J. (1984). Semantics, Wisconsin Style. Synthese, 59(3), 231–250.

Fodor, J. (1987). Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind. MIT/Bradford.

Fodor, J. (1994). The Elm and the Expert. MIT Press.

Fodor, J. (1998). Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong. Oxford University Press.

Grice, H. P. (1957). Meaning. The Philosophical Review, 66(3), 377–88.

Markman, A. B., & Stilwell, C. H. (2004). Concepts á la modal: An extended review of Prinz's Furnishing the mind. Philosophical Psychology, 17(3), 391-401. https://doi.org/10.1080/0951508042000286749

Prinz, J. (2002). Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and their Perceptual Basis. MIT Press.

Putnam, H. (1975). The Meaning of Meaning. Philosophy of Science, 7, 215–271.

Rice, C. (2013). Concept empiricism, content, and compositionality. Philosophical Studies, 162(3), 567-583.

Skidelsky, L. (2011). La importancia de un buen transporte: la distinción conceptual-no conceptual y el empirismo de conceptos. Analítica, (5), 29-60.

How to Cite
Serebrinsky, D. (2021). Semantic monsters: concept empiricism and its approach to intentional content. Praxis Filosófica, (53), 31–52. https://doi.org/10.25100/pfilosofica.v0i53.11436
Usage statistics

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.
Received 2021-07-06
Accepted 2021-07-06
Published 2021-08-15
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

De acuerdo con nuestra política (Licencia Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) los artículos presentados y sometidos al proceso editorial en la revista Praxis Filosófica no tienen costo alguno para sus autores ni retribuciones económicas para la revista. El artículo de carácter inédito, producto de investigación o de algún proyecto que se presente a Praxis Filosófica, no podrá estar sometido a otro proceso de publicación durante el proceso que se lleve en nuestra revista.