Dissertation Director:

FURRY, and SMOOTH (i.e., lexical concepts) are acquired from perceptual experiences along with some kind of inferential procedure. Models of how these concepts are inferentially acquired, however, force the acquired concepts to be representationally complex, built from, and composed by, the more primitive representations (e.g., GOLD is built from perceptual representations of yellowness, shininess, malleability, and so on). Since at least the time of Plato, philosophers and psychologists have struggled to find complex sets of representations that have the same meanings, definitionally or probabilistically, as these concepts. For example, to think about the property-kind being gold is not the same as to think about the complex property-kind being (probably) yellowish & (probably) shiny & (probably) malleable.... I call this Fodor's Challenge: Find an acquisition process that is genuinely inferential and yields a concept that genuinely is one of these lexical concepts. Rather than continue the pursuit of a complex representation that has the same meaning as our concept GOLD. I offer a model on which many lexical concepts are acquired from perception and inference, without being built up from, and composed by, the representations involved. The model, Baptizing Meanings for Concepts (BMC), is inspired in part by Saul Kripke's (1970) baptism process for assigning meanings to linguistic terms. Many lexica