Flexibility, Structure, and Linguistic Vagary in Concepts: Manifestations of a Compositional System of Perceptual Symbols

Abstract

This chapter aims to develop temporary construction in working memory, derived from a larger body of knowledge in long-term memory to represent a category, where a category, roughly speaking, is a related set of entities from any ontological type. The conceptualisation of an entity or set of entities can vary widely across individuals and occasions. Numerous demonstrations of encoding variability in the memory literature reveal flexibility, illustrating that the encoding context of a word determines the conceptualisation of its referent. The primary purpose of using linguistic representations has been to express the content of people’s concepts. The haphazard nature of conceptual content is a problem for traditional theories of concepts, because they assume that a concept resides as a stable structure in long-term memory. Linguistic vagary is the problem that linguistic representations of conceptual content in long-term memory are unprincipled, haphazard, and incomplete.

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