Abstract

SEREBRINSKY, Dalila. Semantic Monsters: Concept Empiricism and its Approach to Intentional Content. Prax. filos. [online]. 2021, n.53, pp.31-52.  Epub Aug 27, 2021. ISSN 0120-4688.  https://doi.org/10.25100/pfilosofica.v0i53.11436.

Concept empiricism, introduced by Jesse Prinz, intends to be a theory about concepts which satisfies the desiderata that, according to that author, every theory of concepts must fulfill, and which does it as economically as possible. Regarding intentional content, it puts forward a non atomistic informational semantic theory. According to Prinz, concepts are merely detectors for perceptible features, that is, they are structured entities. The meaningful parts of these detectors obtain their content in an informational way. The aim of this paper is to show that concept empiricism is unable to fulfill the desideratum about intentional content. We argue that concepts as mere detectors are unable to properly account for the content of concepts without facing the disjunction problem, and that they are incompatible with the externalism that characterise informational theories of content.

Keywords : Concept Empiricism; Intentional Content; Detectors; Informational Semantics; Semantic Atomism.

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