Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and their Perceptual Basis

By jesse prinz

MIT Press, 2002. pp. x + 358, $40.00

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Furnishing the Mind makes an innovative proposal. Following the track of British empiricism, Prinz presents his “proxytype theory” of concepts, as he calls it, in an attempt to reconcile classical imagism with the latest results in cognitive science and psychology. He produces a hybrid theory that is both consistent and promising, a theory that has earned its place among the small number of currently competing positions about concepts. Prinz takes from imagism the idea that concepts are perceptual representations, from informational atomism its account of intentionality and from psychology the kind of information that is needed by our concepts to encode. And his proposal is that concepts are proxytypes, mechanisms of detection that we actualise in our working memory.

The book has ten chapters, a conclusion, an extensive list of references and a useful index of subjects and names.

In the first chapter, entitled ‘Desiderata on a theory of concepts’, Prinz lists seven requirements that every theory of concepts deserving the name should meet. These requirements are as follows. A requirement of scope, which means that any acceptable theory of concepts should possess enough expressive power to accommodate the wide variety of concepts used by human beings. It must also explain how concepts refer to entities that are distinct from themselves, that is, the requirement of intentional content. It must also account for the cognitive content of concepts, as something different from their intentional content, and offer an acceptable explanation of the way in which we acquire them. Finally, any suitable theory of concepts must deal with the fact that we use our concepts as mechanisms of categorisation, that they combine compositionally and that they are public and sharable. The final diagnosis of Prinz’s book is that none of the available theories of concepts scores well on all these desiderata, and that there are reasons to expect that an empiricist account such as his will be, once completely worked out, the best option.

As regards the pressing question of the relations between language and concepts, Prinz chooses an independence view: although concepts, meanings and words are related in a variety of ways, concepts do not need language to exist. Infraverbal creatures, such as some animals and small babies, possess concepts without possessing a language.

In the following chapters other philosophical accounts are presented, especially imagism and definitionism, the two most successful accounts in the history of philosophy. Other views are also sketched and criticised, such as informational atomism, the theory theory, prototype theory and exemplar theory, although not in the detailed systematic way in which he discusses imagism and definitionism.

Prinz’s proposal is concept empiricism. Concept empiricism makes a claim about the nature of mental representations, the claim that concepts have a perceptual origin. This claim, however, is neither epistemological nor semantic. Prinz is not committed to any particular theory of justification or to any particular account of verification conditions. In fact, his defence of empiricism does not push him to reject nativism, the fight against which was one of the traditional roots of empiricism.

Concepts are proxytypes, i.e. copies of mental representations that we use when thinking, as proxies for categories. The author characterises proxytypes as temporary constructions in working memory. Concepts work as detection mechanisms susceptible to activation by the right inputs. For Prinz, thought is a process of simulation. The way in which Prinz explains how simulation takes place strongly resembles Wittgenstein’s picture theory of meaning.

One of the most serious problems for concept empiricism is coping with the scope desideratum. Many concepts we possess do not represent things that can be experienced. A classical example is provided by logical constants. Prinz’s answer to the challenges posed by them consists of allowing concepts to be not the only constituents of our mental life. Besides concepts, we also possess means of operating with concepts. Thus, some constituents of thought are operations among concepts and inference rules. In this particular case, he defends the claim that logical constants are not concepts: they do not represent. Positive and negative versions of a thought have the same constituents. To handle quantification he relies on Johnson-Laird’s mental models. Mathematical thought rests on a combination of abilities, spatial representations, verbal skills, and other factors.

The next serious difficulty is trying to make empiricism compatible with certain forms of nativism for which the cognitive sciences have found overwhelming evidence. The strategy followed at this point is to review the most widely accepted innateness arguments and show that in all cases an explanation can be given that makes them compatible with Prinz’s proxytypes theory.

To explain how proxytypes refer to the right sort of referents, i.e. to explain their intentional content, he borrows resources from informational semantics and rejects the requirement that concepts be atomistic. He overcomes criticisms of the etiological theory of intentionality using the empiricist thesis of covariance. He hopes that this combination will be able to safeguard proxytype theory from the usual onslaughts made on both informational and classical empiricist theories.

Intentional content does not suffice to account for human behaviour. Consider Putnam’s Twin Earth experiments, Frege’s problem of Hesperus and Phosphorus, and others. Some kind of cognitive content is required. Taking advantage of his classical empiricist heritage, Prinz borrows from Locke the distinction between nominal and real essence, and identifies intentional content with real essences, loading nominal essences with the burden of making our behaviour intelligible.

The author is concerned with assuring that his proxytypes can be compositionally combined. To do so, he rejects Fodor’s attack on prototypes, and argues that it is unjustified. Prototypes can be combined in a way compatible with Prinz’s compositionality requirement, which is weaker than the traditional compositionality principle. All that is required, Prinz maintains, is that prototypes can be compositionally combined, not that they are in fact so. And he sees no difficulty that would preclude this possibility. The last step in this argument shows that his defence of prototypes can be directly applied to proxytypes.

With the historical pendulum that has taken us to and from between rationalism and empiricism, it is high time, Prinz declares, that we come “back to our senses” (p. 315). In fact, ‘Back to our Senses’ is the title of the book’s conclusion. In it, the author goes over the highlights of proxytype theory, how it behaves in relation to the desiderata mentioned in the first chapter, and concludes that his is the only proposal to hand that can respond to all of them. None of the competing theories can satisfy the desiderata as well as his, and if proxytype theory shows its capacity here, then it is the best proposal available.

Furnishing the Mind presents a highly suggestive view. It is not completely worked out, and as it stands does not fully justify Prinz’s optimism. Nevertheless, it is a workable research project in progress that deserves great respect and awakens many expectations. Prinz has made plausible a renewed empirical stance compatible with experimental results in psychology and has shown that concept empiricism can no longer be dismissed as a dead end.

the university of granada m. j. frapolli

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