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    The Building Blocks of Thought

    A Rationalist Account of the Origins of Concepts

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    Author(s)
    Laurence, Stephen
    Margolis, Eric
    Language
    English
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    Abstract
    The human mind is capable of entertaining an astounding range of thoughts. These thoughts are composed of concepts or ideas, which are the building blocks of thoughts. This book is about where all of these concepts come from and the psychological structures that ultimately account for their acquisition. We argue that the debate over the origins of concepts, known as the rationalism-empiricism debate, has been widely misunderstood—not just by its critics but also by researchers who have been active participants in the debate. Part I fundamentally rethinks the foundations of the debate. Part II defends a rationalist view of the origins of concepts according to which many concepts across many conceptual domains are either innate or acquired via rationalist learning mechanisms. Our case is built around seven distinct arguments, which together form a large-scale inference to the best explanation argument for our account. Part III then defends this account against the most important empiricist objections and alternatives. Finally, Part IV argues against an extreme but highly influential rationalist view—Jerry Fodor’s infamous view that it is impossible to learn new concepts and his related radical concept nativism, which holds that essentially all lexical concepts are innate. Throughout the book, our discussion blends philosophical and theoretical reflection with consideration of a broad range of empirical work drawn from many different disciplines studying the mind, providing a thorough update to the rationalism-empiricism debate in philosophy and cognitive science and a major new rationalist account of the origins of concepts.
    URI
    https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/92579
    Keywords
    rationalism, nativism, innativism, empiricism, concepts, concept nativism, concept empiricism, learning, innateness, innate ideas
    DOI
    10.1093/9780191925375.001.0001
    ISBN
    9780192898838, 9780192898920, 9780191925375
    Publisher
    Oxford University Press
    Publisher website
    https://global.oup.com/
    Publication date and place
    Oxford, 2024
    Grantor
    • University of British Columbia
    Classification
    Philosophy of mind
    Cognition and cognitive psychology
    Child, developmental and lifespan psychology
    Pages
    692
    Rights
    https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
    • Imported or submitted locally

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    License

    • If not noted otherwise all contents are available under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

    Credits

    • logo EU
    • This project received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 683680, 810640, 871069 and 964352.

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