To appear in Concepts: New Directions. Ed. by Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence. MIT Press
Draft July 2013. — 32 p.Any account of language and the human mind has to grapple, ultimately, with the nature of concepts, the subject of this chapter. In the words of cognitive scientist Jesse Prinz (2002: 1), concepts are the basic timber of our mental lives. For without concepts that could be no thought, and language would have nothing to express. What is less clear, however, is exactly how concepts are constituted, and the relationship between language and concepts. These are the two issues I address in this chapter. I address these issues by posing and attempting to answer the following question: do linguistic units (e.g., words) have semantic content independently of the human conceptual system. The answer to this question is, I will argue, a clear yes.
