Cognitively Plausible Theories of Concept Composition

Abstract

If a theory of concept composition aspires to psychological plausibility, it may first need to address several preliminary issues associated with naturally occurring human concepts: content variability, multiple representational forms, and pragmatic constraints. Not only do these issues constitute a significant challenge for explaining individual concepts, they pose an even more formidable challenge for explaining concept compositions. How do concepts combine as their content changes, as different representational forms become active, and as pragmatic constraints shape processing? Arguably, concepts are most ubiquitous and important in compositions, relative to when they occur in isolation. Furthermore, entering into compositions may play central roles in producing the changes in content, form, and pragmatic relevance observed for individual concepts. Developing a theory of concept composition that embraces and illuminates these issues would not only constitute a significant contribution to the study of concepts, it would provide insight into the nature of human cognition.The human ability to construct and combine concepts is prolific. On the one hand, people acquire tens of thousands of concepts for diverse categories of settings, agents, objects, actions, mental states, bodily states, properties, relations, and so forth. On the other, people combine these concepts to construct infinite numbers of more complex concepts, as the open-ended phrases, sentences, and texts that humans produce effortlessly and ubiquitously illustrate. Major changes in the brain, the emergence of language, and new capacities for social cognition all probably played central roles in the evolution of these impressive conceptual abilities (e.g.,

Compositionality and Concepts—A Perspective from Formal Semantics and Philosophy of Language

“…In other words, the extrinsic properties active for a concept also vary across situations, not just its intrinsic properties. (Barsalou 2017) And so each particular situation uses the word in the sense appropriate exactly to such a situation, and not in its general sense.…”

Moral Judgment as Categorization (MJAC)

“…We argue that contemporary dynamic approaches to concept and category formation (e.g., Barsalou, 2003Barsalou, , 2017Barsalou & Wiemer-Hastings, 2005; see also Sloman et al, 2008;Barrett et al, 2014), provide the best framework for making sense of the complexity of moral judgment. MJAC encompasses the same phenomena addressed by extant theories of moral judgment (and phenomena not directly addressed by these theories), but does so in a more parsimonious way.…”

Critical Typicality: Truth Judgements and Compositionality with Plurals and Other Gradable Concepts

“…Because of contextual effects, it is likely that some of the participants in Lee's experiment would accept the hair in Image 1 as red but reject the car in Image 2, even if the nouns would not be mentioned, relativizing redness to the visual instances of the concepts HAIR and CAR. Lee's work did not try to factor out possible effects of the visual stimuli, which are also central for concept composition (see Barsalou, 2017). However, Lee's effects in distinguishing gradable-concept categorization in complex expressions with "neutral" versus "biased" categorizes are much stronger than in previous work on categorization with simple color terms.…”

“…Therefore, a theory of semantic composition must pay close attention to contextual effects, and not only consider the formal description of language structures. In view of this point, some researchers in cognitive psychology doubt that formal semantic theories, with their arcane symbolic methods, have a prominent role to play in the analysis of concept composition (Barsalou, 2017).…”