The Unified Conceptual Space Theory: an enactive theory of concepts

Abstract

Theories of concepts address systematically and productively structured thought. Until the Unified Conceptual Space Theory (UCST), based on Peter Gärdenfors' Conceptual Spaces Theory, no one had attempted to offer an explicitly enactive theory of concepts. UCST is set apart from its competitors in locating concepts not in the mind (or brain) of the conceptual agent nor in the affordances of the agent's environment but in the interaction between the two. On the UCST account, concepts are never truly static: conceptual knowledge is always in the process of being ''brought forth'', such that neither agent nor environment can cleanly be separated from the other, and the preconceptual noumena cannot be reconstructed free of conceptual taint. Through such conceptual coloring, mind extends into the world. Concepts create binary distinctions -beginning, most importantly, with the self/non-self distinction -and discrete entities that mask what are, with respect to the conceptual framework, underlying continua. These distinctions -implying notions of e.g. internal and external, inner experience and outer world -are both conceptually necessary and, at the same time, lacking prior ontological status. They are meaningful only with respect to some identifiable observer (which could, in appropriate circumstances, be the organism itself). In consequence, phenomenology has a key role to play, and first-person methods are indispensable to any empirical investigation of concepts.

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

“…They seek to lay out the ground rules for the organization of "higher-order" minds capable of stepping back from the present moment to consider it and its contents in light of moments past and moments yet to come. Among the contemporary theories being debated one finds Jerry Fodor's (1998) Informational Atomism, Jesse Prinz's (2004) Proxytypes Theory, Peter Gärdenfors' (2004) Conceptual Spaces Theory (CST) -and the author's own (Parthemore, 2013(Parthemore, , 2011 Unified Conceptual Space Theory (UCST), an extension of CST. CST sees conceptual spaces as the analog to physical spaces, with a different space for each conceptual domain, its geometry determined by the integral dimensions of that domain 1 ; while UCST attempts to show how all the different conceptual spaces described by CST come together in a single, unified "space of spaces" defined by the most basic integral dimensions common to all concepts.…”

Consciousness, semiosis, and the unbinding problem

“…7 Such experience still counts as conceptually structured on Peter Gärdenfors' [34] Conceptual Spaces Theory of concepts, which my own Unified Conceptual Space Theory [35,36] builds upon, provided it is systematically and productively structured. On Gärdenfors' account, paradigmatic concepts occupy the space between knowledge how and knowledge that,…”

Material Engagement Theory and its philosophical ties to pragmatism

“…Seeking to reorient the theoretical dispositions of cognitive archaeology, MET draws upon enactivism, a theory of cognition that is currently gaining momentum in philosophy and the cognitive sciences (Iliopoulos and Malafouris 2014). Varela and his colleagues (Varela et al 1991, p.9) advanced the term enactive in order Bto emphasize the growing conviction that cognition is not the representation of a pregiven world by a pregiven mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs.^According to the theory of enactivism, emotional, perceptual, and conceptual meaning is brought forth through a relational process of interaction between neuronal, bodily, and environmental elements (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007;Colombetti and Thompson 2008;Thompson and Stapleton 2009;Parthemore 2013;Krueger 2014). Two themes that are particularly common in enactivist literature are: sensorimotor contingency and autopoiesis.…”