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.

Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis PDF

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