Simple Heuristics For Concept Combination
Édouard Machery, Lisa Guttentag Lederer · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2012
In psychology, concepts are typically characterized as those bodies of knowledge that are used by default in the psychological processes underlying numerous higher cognitive competences, such as categorization, induction, language understanding, analogymaking, and so on (Machery, In Press). These cognitive competences include concept combination, the capacity to produce new concepts out of pre-existing concepts—for instance, the capacity to produce the concept of a Harvard graduate who is a carpenter out of the concepts of a Harvard graduate and of a carpenter (Kunda, Miller, & Clare, 1990). The outcome of this process is said to be a “complex concept, ” while the concepts permanently stored in long-term memory are said to be “simple concepts. ” 1 Psychologists interested in concepts have studied at length the psychological phenomena associated with concept combination in order to better understand the cognitive processes underlying concept combination (for an overview, see Murphy, 2002, Chapter 12). However, psychological research on concept combination has failed to yield any consensus on the nature of these processes. In this article, we will critically review the main theories of concept combination that have been developed since the 1980s. This review will set the stage for some new hypotheses about the cognitive processes underlying concept combination, which emphasize their diversity and their ecological rationality. Here is how we will proceed. In the first three sections, we consider three important models of concept combination—Smith and colleagues ’ Selective Modification