Graduate Module: Concepts

Concepts are the building blocks of thoughts. As such, they play a central role in many psychological processes, including categorization, inference, memory, learning, decision-making, and language. This much is relatively uncontroversial. But the nature of concepts—the kind of things concepts are—have been the subject of much debate. This course will provide a rigorous overview of theories of concepts in cognitive science, focusing on psychology, but also incorporating classical and current work in philosophy, linguistics, and artificial intelligence.