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Furnishing the mind : concepts and their perceptual basis

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"A Bradford book."Western philosophy has long been divided between empiricists, who argue that human understanding has its basis in experience, and rationalists, who argue that reason is the source of knowledge. A central issue in the debate is the nature of concepts, the internal representations we use to think about the world. The traditional empiricist thesis that concepts are built up from sensory input has fallen out of favor. Mainstream cognitive science tends to echo the rationalist tradition, with its emphasis on innateness. In Furnishing the Mind, Jesse Prinz attempts to swing the pendulum back toward empiricism. Prinz provides a critical survey of leading theories of concepts, including imagism, definitionism, prototype theory, exemplar theory, the theory theory, and informational atomism. He sets forth a new defense of concept empiricism that draws on philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology and introduces a new version of concept empiricism called proxytype theory. He also provides accounts of abstract concepts, intentionality, narrow content, and concept combination. In an extended discussion of innateness, he covers Noam Chomsky's arguments for the innateness of grammar, developmental psychologists' arguments for innate cognitive domains, and Jerry Fodor's argument for radical concept nativism.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.

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Detail Information

Series Title

Representation and Mind series

Call Number

100 PRI f

Publisher

Cambridge, Mass. : : MIT Press,., 2002.

Collation

1 online resource (x, 358 pages) :illustrations

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780262281935

Classification

100

Content Type

text

Media Type

computer

Carrier Type

online resource

Edition

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Subject(s)

Philosophy of mind.
Perception.
Concepts.
Empiricism.

Specific Detail Info

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Statement of Responsibility

Jesse J. Prinz.

Other Information

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Source

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Validator

maya

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3169.001.0001

Journal Volume

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Journal Issue

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