Concepts as Knowledge Facilitators

Objective

Concepts are crucial from an epistemic perspective. Having the right concepts allows asking the right questions, formulating new hypotheses, and providing good explanations. Good concepts are projectable in inductive reasoning. While the ability of concepts to aid and obstruct our thinking has been a recurring theme throughout the history of philosophy, discussions of concepts have little place in current epistemological debates. For instance, existing formal models and informal pictures of updating our beliefs hold fixed conceptual resources: there is no room for conceptual learning. The main aim of the project is to conduct the first large-scale current study of the epistemic significance of concepts, developing an ambitious view of concepts as knowledge facilitators. This aim is achieved by attaining four main objectives. O1: To lay down the groundwork for the rest of the project by developing a social epistemological methodology for studying the epistemic significance of concepts in a way that navigates the so-called concept problem. O2: To provide an account of conceptual inquiry and to model conceptual learning as a rational process. O3: To construct a novel view of epistemically good categorisations that avoids problems with both metaphysical and conventionalist/pragmatist views. O4: To develop an account of how concepts facilitate reasoning and inference, applying the account to thick normative concepts as a case study. The view of concepts as knowledge facilitators developed is continuous with the novel feasibilist view in epistemology that the PI has defended across numerous articles and a forthcoming monograph. Though the questions asked are distinctively philosophical ones, CONCEPT is informed by empirical research on concepts and categorisations in psychology, linguistics, and cognitive science. We deploy some powerful formal tools, and the overall epistemological approach developed is social rather than individualistic.