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Concepts are constituents of thought contents, or constituents of abilities to entertain, or reason with, contents. Your belief that this is an encyclopedia entry has the content: that this is an encyclopedia entry and that content embeds constituent concepts: encyclopedia and entry. Your ability to entertain or reason with the content that this is an encyclopedia entry involves abilities to think about encyclopedias and entries and, thus, possession of concepts of encyclopedias and entries. This entry restricts attention to a brief discussion of three large questions about connections between concepts and language; it focuses on philosophical rather than psychological issues.

Q1: We use language to express thoughts, and thus, concepts. How are the properties of language that underwrite expression connected with the thoughts, and thus concepts, expressed?

Q2: Humans are unusual, perhaps unique, in both linguistic and conceptual abilities. To what extent are these abilities interdependent? Could a creature think at all—possess any conceptual abilities—without language? Could creatures without language use the same concepts as the linguistically competent? Could a creature have language without concepts?

Q3: Human languages, and human linguistic abilities, appear to vary, for instance in the forms of classification imposed by their vocabularies. Does such variance induce, or reflect, variance in conceptual abilities?

Linguistic Expression of Concepts (Q1)

Many philosophers hold the following: (a) Thoughts (e.g., beliefs), in concert with the way the world is, determine truth values, so are either true or false. (b) Determination of truth value for thoughts is derivative from determination of truth value for thought contents (so that, for example, your belief that this is an encyclopedia entry is true because it is true that this is an encyclopedia entry). (c) Determination of truth value for thought contents is derivative from contributions made by constituent concepts and the way those concepts are combined in constituting the thought content. From (a) through (c), if we hold fixed the way the world is, then two beliefs with contents constituted in the same way from the same concepts must have the same truth value.

The most straightforward view (SV) about the way language expresses concepts is this: Each substantive expression type (perhaps as typed by meaning) expresses a concept, and each type of sentential mode of combination (broadly, each syntactic structure type, including nonsubstantive expression types) expresses a way of putting concepts together to constitute a thought content. (Very roughly, substantive expression types—such as heavy and encyclopedia—make a distinctive contribution to the subject matter of a sentence, while nonsubstantives and structural features of sentences—perhaps including is, the, and the way expressions are combined in “The encyclopedia is heavy”—determine how the substantives work together to determine the subject matter of sentences.)

Given a through c, we can test SV by seeing whether, if we hold fixed the way the rest of the world is, all thoughts expressed by a sentence type are guaranteed to have the same truth value. If they are not, then we must reject SV. (If we do not hold fixed the way the rest of the world is, changes in truth-value are to be expected: The true thought that the encyclopedia is heavy would be false if the world was such that it was a far lighter book.)

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