Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T09:21:09.238Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Beyond the building blocks model1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2011

Eric Margolis  and
Stephen Laurence
Eric Margolis
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z1, Canada. [email protected]://web.mac.com/ericmargolis/primary_site/home.html
Stephen Laurence
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S3 7QB, United Kingdom. [email protected]://www.shef.ac.uk/philosophy/staff/profiles/slaurence.html
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Carey rightly rejects the building blocks model of concept acquisition on the grounds that new primitive concepts can be learned via the process of bootstrapping. But new primitives can be learned by other acquisition processes that do not involve bootstrapping, and bootstrapping itself is not a unitary process. Nonetheless, the processes associated with bootstrapping provide important insights into conceptual change.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , June 2011 , pp. 139 - 140
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1.

This article was fully collaborative; the order of the authors' names is arbitrary.

References

Block, N. J. (1986) Advertisement for a semantics for psychology. In: Midwest studies in philosophy, ed. French, P. A., pp. 615–78. University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Carey, S. (2009) The origin of concepts. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fodor, J. A. (1981) The present status of the innateness controversy. In: Representations: Philosophical essays on the foundations of cognitive science, pp. 257–316. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Gentner, D. (1983) Structure-mapping: A theoretical framework for analogy. Cognitive Science 7:155–70.Google Scholar
Laurence, S. & Margolis, E. (2002) Radical concept nativism. Cognition 86:22–55.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pinker, S. (2007) The stuff of thought. Viking.Google Scholar