Barsalou is essential for anyone interested in concepts- even if his ideas aren’t as neatly tied down as they could be:
Box 1. What is a concept? Cognitive scientists continue to argue about the construct of concept. For example, Platonists propose that concepts exist independently of minds, whereas naturalists argue that concepts are causal relations between the world and the mind [a–c]. From these two perspectives, the study of concepts constitutes a referential problem, namely, how do mental states refer to categories outside the mind? Many other cognitive scientists – especially psychologists – focus on the cognitive side of this relationship, assessing the structure, format and content of conceptual representations [d,e]. In the approach we take here, nothing is explicitly called a concept [f]. Instead our goal is to articulate specific mechanisms that produce conceptual processing. In the section on theoretical issues, one central mechanism is a simulator, namely, a skill for producing context-specific representations of a category. Most theorists would view such skills as peripheral to concepts. They would similarly consider the modality-specific information in simulators as peripheral, and also the extensive knowledge that supports situated action [g]. The difficulty of defining concept raises the issue of whether it is a useful scientific construct. Perhaps no discrete entity or event constitutes a concept. Perhaps conceptual functions emerge from a complex configuration of mechanisms in both the world and the brain. Thus, knowledge of car objects per se resides in the car simulator, but much other relevant knowledge resides in associated simulators, such as those for road and travel. Furthermore, referents in the world play a key role in producing and controlling this knowledge. The study of conceptual processing will be best served by discovering and describing the relevant mechanisms, rather than arguing about the meaning of lay terms such as concept. ftp://grey.colorado.edu/pub/oreilly/teach/prosem_lang/BarsalouEtAl03.pdf Simulators Because the instances of a category typically have statistically correlated properties, encountering these instances should tend to activate similar neural patterns in feature systems (e.g. Farah & McClelland 1991; Cree & McRae 2003). Additionally, similar populations of conjunctive neurons in association areas—tuned to these feature conjunctions—should typically capture these patterns (Damasio 1989; Simmons & Barsalou 2003). After experiencing a category's instances over time, a distributed multi-modal system develops to represent the category as a whole. Barsalou (1999)referred to these distributed systems as simulators. Theoretically, a simulator functions as a concept or type in more traditional theories by integrating the multi-modal content of a category across instances, and by providing the ability to interpret individuals as tokens of the type (Barsalou 2003a). Consider a simulator that represents the concept of bicycle. Across encounters with different instances, visual information about how bicycles look becomes integrated in the simulator, along with auditory information about how they sound, somatosensory information about how they feel, motor sequences for interacting with them, affective responses to experiencing them and so forth. The result is a distributed system throughout the brain's feature and association areas that accumulates and integrates modal content processed for the category. As Barsalou (2003a)describes, many additional simulators develop to represent properties, relations, events and mental states relevant to bicycles (e.g. spokes, mesh,pedal, effort). http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/364/1521/1281.full ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
