Conceptual change and development on multiple time scales: From incremental evolution to origins

Abstract

Abstract. In the context of the relationship between signs and concepts, this paper tackles some of the ongoing controversies over conceptual development and change -including the claim by some that concepts are not open to revision at alltaking the position that concepts pull apart from language and that concepts can be discussed on at least four levels: that of individual agent, community, society, and language. More controversially, it claims that concepts are not just inherently open to revision but that they, and the frameworks of which they form part, are in a state of continuous, if generally incremental, change: a position that derives directly from the enactive tradition in philosophy. Concepts, to be effective as concepts, must strike a careful balance between being stable enough to apply across suitably many contexts and flexible enough to adapt to each new context. The paper's contribution is a comparison and contrast of conceptual development and change on four time scales: that of the day-to-day life of an individual conceptual agent, the day-to-day life of society, the lifetime of an individual agent, and the lifetime of society and the human species itself. It concludes that the relationship between concepts and experience (individual or collective) is one of circular and not linear causality.

Consciousness, semiosis, and the unbinding problem

“…All of this is not to say that concepts cannot change and conceptual frameworks become more sophisticated over time, for individuals, societies and species alike: indeed, in [45] I argue that they can, and do: concepts evolve not just as continent possibility but necessary and observable fact. In the language of conceptual spaces theory, where concepts are described as convex shapes within an n-dimensional Voronoi tessellation (see Figure 1), the minimally partitioned conceptual space required for being a semiotic agent is far more sophisticated than that required for the most basic of conceptual agents -which is why one finds so relatively many species possessing conceptual agency according to e.g.…”

“…Such an approach frames unity strictly in terms of bottom-up processes, from neural firings to readiness potentials (RPs) to conscious experiences, and consequently assumes a linear as opposed to -what enactivists are generally inclined toward [43,44,45] -circular model of causality, where effects can themselves be causes and vice versa. In contrast to many standard readings (see e.g.…”

On the Essentially Dynamic Nature of Concepts: Constant if Incremental Motion in Conceptual Spaces

“…While some would distinguish between concepts for the individual and concepts for the group or society (see e.g. the discussion in Woodfield, 1994), I have argued (Parthemore, 2014b) that these represent the same phenomena, structured in essentially the same way, on different levels: i.e., individual, group, society, and possibly species. 4 This longstanding debate, whether concepts are best understood as (abstract) objects or as abilities -is discussed in the opening pages of (Laurence & Margolis, 1999) and at some length in (Parthemore, 2011, Ch.…”

“…They are in a state of constant if incremental motion where each application of a concept (and we apply concepts constantly through our waking lives, along with no small part of our sleeping ones) causes ripples throughout the system. The claim further is that this should be true on every level on which one may talk about concepts -individual, group, society, even species -albeit on different time scales (Parthemore, 2014b). Even the most seemingly fixed of concepts -say, mathematical concepts of 13 Note, too, that, for Fodor, concepts are lexical concepts (or compounds of lexical concepts), whereas I have consistently taken the view that concepts and language pull apart (another reason to avoid anything even smacking of definitionism): see e.g.…”

Applications of Conceptual Spaces

“…All concepts trace back to one of these three proto-categories, which represent an initial, minimal, innate 10 partitioning of the unified space (Parthemore 2014).…”