Book Club Potluck - All Concepts Are Ad Hoc Concepts

Karl will host our discussion of "All Concepts Are Ad Hoc Concepts"
by Daniel Casasanto & Gary Lupyan. Karl suggested this paper. Download the PDF by clicking on the link above.

This 19-page paper is not difficult to read nor technically obscure, but will likely challenge your intuitions about the meaning of meaning, and should provide for a lively and stimulating discussion.

From the introduction: "To explain how people think and communicate, cognitive scientists posit a repository of concepts, categories, and word meanings that are stable across time and shared across individuals. But if concepts are stable, how can people use them so flexibly? Here we explore a possible answer: maybe this stability is an illusion. Perhaps all concepts, categories, and word meanings (CC&Ms) are constructed ad hoc, each time we use them. On this proposal, which we call the ad hoc cognition (AHC) framework, all words are infinitely polysemous, all communication is 'good enough,' and no idea is ever the same twice.... If this is true, then a central goal of research on language and cognition should be to elucidate the fleeting, idiosyncratic neurocognitive representations that people actually use for thinking and communicating, rather than to discern the nature and origin of context-independent CC&Ms, which, we argue, only exist as theoretical abstractions. Thinking depends on brains, and brains are always changing; therefore thoughts are always changing. Rather than trying to explain concepts, categories, and word meanings as things that we have in our minds, like entries in a mental dictionary or mental encyclopedia, it may be more fruitful to build theories of conceptualizing, categorizing, and constructing word meanings: things that we do with our minds."

If you would like to host one of our events and you have a book in mind, please let me, Karl Kiefer, or Mark Hopkins know, and we will create a Meetup event for your book, assuming your suggested title qualifies as a book on philosophy in our view. Our criteria are somewhat vague, but let's just say that we are not interested in books on the supernatural. We are interested in books that you might find in a syllabus for a college philosophy course. You can always email me at camkruger@gmail.com if you have questions and/or suggestions.

As always, it's essential that everyone who comes to the meeting reads the book in its entirety and brings something for the potluck.

Happy reading!