Dynamic Conceptual Semantics: A Logico-Philosophical Investigation into Concept Formation and Understanding

Renate Bartsch

The book presents a theory of concept formation and understanding that does not make use of a notion of an innate mental language as a means of concept representation. Instead, experimental concepts are treated semantically as stabilising structuring of growing sets of data, which are sets of experienced satisfaction situations for expressions, and theoretical concepts are based on coherent sets of general sentences held true. There are two kinds of structures to be established. First, there are general concepts by means of similarity sets under perspectives, which grow towards maximal sets with a stabilised internal similarity degree, and these stabilised similarity sets represent a concept, which is understood as an equivalence class of such sets with respect to the internal similarity. Second, there are historical concepts, especially individual concepts as sets of situations connected to each other by contiguity relationships, such as spatial, temporal and causal relationships.This basically data-oriented vision of concept formation gives rise to a theory of understanding new situations and expressions by integrating new data into established sets of data salva stability, or by extending the conceptual structure in a metaphorical or metonymical way. The theory provides a way to understand what identity between propositional attititudes amounts to, especially how people can have more or less the same belief. A comparison with connectionist models of concept formation shows the intended parallels in flexibility and context-addressability.

12/1/98

ISBN (Paperback): 1575861240

ISBN (Cloth): 1575861259

Subject: Linguistics; Semantics; Concepts