Abstract
This paper reports the first empirical investigation of the hypothesis that epistemic appraisals form part of the structure of concepts. To date, studies of concepts have focused on the way concepts encode properties of objects and the way those features are used in categorization and in other cognitive tasks. Philosophical considerations show the importance of also considering how a thinker assesses the epistemic value of beliefs and other cognitive resources and, in particular, concepts. We demonstrate that there are multiple, reliably judged, dimensions of epistemic appraisal of concepts. Four of these dimensions are accounted for by a common underlying factor capturing how well people believe they understand a concept. Further studies show how dimensions of concept appraisal relate to other aspects of concepts. First, they relate directly to the hierarchical organization of concepts, reflecting the increase in specificity from superordinate to basic and subordinate levels. Second, they predict inductive choices in category-based induction. Our results suggest that epistemic appraisals of concepts form a psychologically important yet previously overlooked aspect of the structure of concepts. These findings will be important in understanding why individuals sometimes abandon and replace certain concepts; why social groups do so, for example, during a "scientific revolution"; and how we can facilitate such changes when we engage in deliberate "conceptual engineering" for epistemic, social, and political purposes.
Highlights
Most words in a person’s lexicon are associated in semantic memory with a meaning––with a lexical concept
Our aim is to investigate the structure of concepts from an entirely different perspective: Is a given concept epistemically useful? How much does a thinker know about the category? How well does the category allow generalization? We want to find out whether people’s conceptual knowledge includes appraisals of this kind––appraisals of the epistemic value of a concept
We investigated whether the concept appraisals established in Studies 1 and 2 would predict the choices made by a different group of participants when given an induction task, the task of extending features observed in some members of a category to a new instance
Summary
Most words in a person’s lexicon are associated in semantic memory with a meaning––with a lexical concept. Concepts organize information in ways that guide communication, perception, and action. They are the fundamental basis of shared knowledge and culture. Much is known about how concepts encode the features or properties that characterize a category. The study of concepts should not, be limited to how categories are demarcated. Our aim is to investigate the structure of concepts from an entirely different perspective: Is a given concept epistemically useful? How much does a thinker know about the category? How well does the category allow generalization? We want to find out whether people’s conceptual knowledge includes appraisals of this kind––appraisals of the epistemic value of a concept Our aim is to investigate the structure of concepts from an entirely different perspective: Is a given concept epistemically useful? How much does a thinker know about the category? How well does the category allow generalization? We want to find out whether people’s conceptual knowledge includes appraisals of this kind––appraisals of the epistemic value of a concept
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