Progetto di ricerca
Marco Fenici
Titolo: The concepts of mind
Abstract: In this project I intend to investigate how a cognitive agent can acquire mental
concepts, namely concepts about beliefs, desires, intentions, etc. I defend a view of
concepts as sensorymotor representations (Barsalou 1999) against several theories of
concepts available in the philosophical literature (Fodor 1999, Millikan 2000, Prinz 2003). I
take the content of these sensorymotor representations to be related with the abilities of a
cognitive agent who interacts with his environment. However, I defend an internal view of
semantics, so that the content of a cognitive, representational state cannot be
characterized in the terms of the states of the environment. Therefore I claim that the
internal state of a cognitive system defines the content of concepts, and this refers only
implicitly to the conditions of the environment (Dennet 1987, Bickhard 2000).
The specific verbal label attached to a sensorymotor representation is particularly
important to identify a concept. This fact holds for every kind of concepts, from perceptual
to abstract ones. Moreover, having verbal labels for concepts allows new ways of
manipulation for inner representations, then increasing the cognitive abilities of an agent
(Clark 1996). I intend to investigate how much mental concepts fit into this hypothesis.
Attaching labels to mental concepts might then be an important step in the development of
a theory of mind in young children. However the literature in the field is not sure whether
verbal labels really make the difference in the case of mental concepts. On one hand,
some psychologists, like Olson (1988), claim that the acquisition of mental concepts
depends exclusively on lexicon acquisition. On the other hand, linguists like de Villiers
(2005) affirm that propositional representations (in the format of that-clauses) are
necessary to their full development. Without grasping how the representation of
propositional content arises in a cognitive agent we would not be able to explain mental
concepts. I intend to shape a mean position between those two poles, explaining at the
same time how the kind of verbal skill required to speak about mental concepts can be
implemented in a cognitive system like the brain.