180129 KU What are terms? (2025S)

Concepts are the essential components of our thinking, judgment and reasoning; they are also the central object of philosophical analysis, at least according to a widespread view of philosophy as “conceptual analysis”. But what exactly are concepts? There is currently disagreement in analytic philosophy about this question. For one philosophical tradition, a tradition influenced by logic, concepts are abstract entities (such as numbers, quantities or properties). For others, concepts are mental representations, i.e. certain states in the mind (or brain) that refer to some entities or that have an intentional content. For others, concepts consist of certain abilities, e.g. the ability to distinguish things of a certain category from others or the ability to make inferences. The diversity of theories about concepts is also reflected in the different areas of philosophy: in logic and philosophy of science, the formal aspects of concepts and their logical structure are studied; in the philosophy of mind or the philosophy of psychology, concepts are seen as mental representations, which should be studied using empirical methods. The aim of the course is to provide an overview of these different views of concepts. In particular, the course will choose two points of view to investigate concepts: (1) the view of concepts as developed in logic and philosophy of science from Frege and Carnap to Ramsey and Wittgenstein; (2) the philosophical reflection on the so-called non-classical theories of concepts (prototype theory, theory-theory); theories which emerged since the 1970s, especially under the impact of research in psychology and the cognitive sciences.

(1) Concepts from Frege to Wittgenstein: Frege is generally seen as a representative of the classical view of concepts: according to this view, concepts are given by definitions that specify necessary and sufficient conditions for something to fall under the concept. We will see how this classical view of concepts was criticized in analytic philosophy from early on: explicitly defined concepts were contrasted with implicit definitions (Carnap); “theoretical concepts“ were introduced, which require a continuous enrichment of content (Ramsey, Carnap); the view also began to prevail that concepts cannot be defined by necessary conditions, but that most of our concepts have a certain openness, that they are only specified by similarities (Wittgenstein's ‘family resemblance’) or cannot be defined conclusively at all (”open texture” of concepts according to Waismann (1945), Shapiro (2006)). The course will analyze how these theories in analytic philosophy go beyond the classical view of concepts.

(2) Non-classical and empirical theories of concepts: Under the pressure of research in the cognitive sciences, the classical view of concepts (definitions with necessary & sufficient conditions) was increasingly questioned and rejected since the 1970s. The course will look at the alternative theories of concepts which emerged since then such as the prototype theory and the theory-theory (concepts as something like rudimentary scientific theories). In particular, we will examine the philosophical reflections about these alternative theories of concepts as well as analyze how these empirical theories differ from previous philosophical theories (Prinz 2002, Machery 2009).