Cognitively Plausible Theories of Concept Composition

If a theory of concept composition aspires to psychological plausibility, it may first need to address several preliminary issues associated with naturally occurring human concepts: content variability, multiple representational forms, and pragmatic constraints. Not only do these issues constitute a significant challenge for explaining individual concepts, they pose an even more formidable challenge for explaining concept compositions. How do concepts combine as their content changes, as different representational forms become active, and as pragmatic constraints shape processing? Arguably, concepts are most ubiquitous and important in compositions, relative to when they occur in isolation. Furthermore, entering into compositions may play central roles in producing the changes in content, form, and pragmatic relevance observed for individual concepts. Developing a theory of concept composition that embraces and illuminates these issues would not only constitute a significant contribution to the study of concepts, it would provide insight into the nature of human cognition. The human ability to construct and combine concepts is prolific. On the one hand, people acquire tens of thousands of concepts for diverse categories of settings, agents, objects, actions, mental states, bodily states, properties, relations, and so forth. On the other, people combine these concepts to construct infinite numbers of more complex concepts, as the open-ended phrases, sentences, and texts that humans produce effortlessly and ubiquitously illustrate. Major changes in the brain, the emergence of language, and new capacities for social cognition all probably played central roles in the evolution of these impressive conceptual abilities (e.g., Deacon 1997; Donald 1993; Tomasello 2009). In psychology alone, much research addresses human concepts (e.g., Barsalou 2012;Murphy 2002; Smith andMedin 1981) and concept composition (often referred to as conceptual combination; e.g., Costello and Keane 2000; Gagné and Spalding 2014; Hampton 1997; Hampton and Jönsson 2012;Medin and Shoben 1988;Murphy L.W. Barsalou (✉) Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland e-mail: lawrence.barsalou@glasgow.ac.uk © The Author(s) 2017 J.A. Hampton and Y. Winter (eds.), Compositionality and Concepts in Linguistics and Psychology, Language, Cognition, and Mind 3, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45977-6_2 9 1988;Wisniewski 1997;Wu andBarsalou 2009).More generally across the cognitive sciences, much additional research addresses concepts and the broader construct of compositionality (for a recent collection, see Werning et al. 2012). 1 Background Framework A grounded approach to concepts. Here I assume that a concept is a dynamical distributed network in the brain coupled with a category in the environment or experience, with this network guiding situated interactions with the category’s instances (for further detail, see Barsalou 2003b, 2009, 2012, 2016a, 2016b). The concept of bicycle, for example, represents and guides interactions with the category of bicycles in the world. Across interactions with a category’s instances, a concept develops in memory by aggregating information from perception, action, and internal states. Thus, the concept of bicycle develops from aggregating multimodal information related to bicycles across the situations in which they are experienced. As a consequence of using selective attention to extract information relevant to the concept of bicycle from the current situation (e.g., a perceived bicycle), and then using integration mechanisms to integrate it with other bicycle information already in memory, aggregate information for the category develops continually (Barsalou 1999). As described later, however, background situational knowledge is also captured that plays important roles in conceptual processing (Barsalou 2016b, 2003b; Yeh and Barsalou 2006). Although learning plays central roles in establishing concepts, genetic and epigenetic processes constrain the features that can be represented for a concept, and also their integration in the brain’s association areas (e.g., Simmons and Barsalou 2003). For example, biologically-based neural circuits may anticipate the conceptual structure of evolutionarily important concepts, such as agents, minds, animals, foods, and tools. Once the conceptual system is in place, it supports virtually all other forms of cognitive activity, both online in the current situation and offline when representing the world in language, memory, and thought (e.g., Barsalou 2012, 2016a, 2016b). From the perspective developed here, when conceptual knowledge is needed for a task, concepts produce situation-specific simulations of the relevant category dynamically, where a simulation attempts to reenact the kind of neural and bodily states associated with processing the category. On needing conceptual knowledge about bicycles, for example, a small subset of the distributed bicycle network in the brain becomes active to simulate what it would be like to interact with an actual bicycle. This multimodal simulation provides anticipatory inferences about what is likely to be perceived further for the bicycle in the current situation, how to interact with it effectively, and what sorts of internal states might result (Barsalou 2009). The specific bicycle simulation that becomes active is one of infinitely many simulations that could be constructed dynamically from the bicycle network—the entire network never becomes fully active. Typically, simulations remain unconscious, at least to a large extent, while causally influencing cognition, affect, and 10 L.W. Barsalou