The Essence of Artifacts: Developing the Design Stance
Deborah A. Kelemen, Susan E. Carey · 2007
Abstract First some terminology: by ‘concept’, we simply mean a mental representation. We endorse a ‘two factor’ theory of conceptual content: concepts are individuated both by causal processes that relate mental symbols to their referents and also by internal inferential role. Philosophers sometimes treat these two factors as determining distinct kinds of content (wide and narrow), but we will not take a stance on this issue here. We assume that the meanings of terms in natural language are fixed in the same way, and thus we will sometimes speak of the meaning of a word such as ‘accordion’ and sometimes speak of the concept accordion.