Journal of Anthropological Psychology No. 19, 2008. (ISSN 1902-4649) Mammen: Commentary to Osman Kingo: The Concept of Concepts 25 Jens Mammen Department of Psychology, University of Aarhus What is a Concept? (Commentary to Osman Kingo: The Concept of Concepts) The issue of sensation and perception versus conception and thought is as old as the discipline of psychology and even the discipline of philosophy. It has been raised in many different contexts of discourse of which I shall emphasise three, or three and a half. The philosophical question: How can we explain that our knowledge and understanding of the world is empiri- cal and beyond the simple sensual and superficial physical-chemical origin? This is the classical philosophical debate between empiricism and rationalism. The ontogenetic question: How can we understand the seemingly dramatic changes in our mental capacities from new-born infant to educated adult? Are the changes only quantitative or are there qualitative leaps in this individual development? And, finally, the phylogenetic question, or question from comparative psychology: What explains that humans seemingly equipped with basically the same sensory and motor organs as a lot of other species as the only ones are capable of creating and living in a world of arte- facts and cultural institutions and as the only ones are able to use a genuine referential language as a vehicle for both com- munication and thinking? Depending of what kind of explana- tions you are looking for the last question may also be formu- lated as the sociogenetic question of which conditions of so- cial or societal life were crucial for the rise of the specific human mind? All these contexts of discourse refer in some degree to the dichotomy of sensation and perception versus concepts and thought. But it is also evident that they are not talking about the same dichotomy, which explains much of the confusion when the dichotomy is discussed across contexts or without x- ception, although it makes a lot of very good points in relation to empirical study of ontogenetic development in infancy. The above mentioned philosophical dichotomy of percep- tion vs. conception is closely related to the question of catego- ries i.e. classes of objects or events characterised by there content (extension) and (soft or sharp) criteria of inclusion (intension). From the empiricist perspective it is a question of moving from categories in terms of simple perceptual dimen- sions to categories in terms of criteria with more sophisticated dimensions. Although dramatic quantitative difference be- tween the poles of this continuum there is no place for a quali- tative difference between perception and conception and thus no qualitative leap in development from perception to concep- tion. It is only a matter of degrees of sophistication. The ra- tionalist perspective on the other hand is operating with a sharp and qualitative distinction between perception and con- ception. Here the concepts are at hand before and independent of the perceptions and can be considered as a priori rules for how to include perceived objects and events in categories and how to relate categories to each other in a nested system. Here all categorisation is fundamentally conceptual and a qualita- tive leap in development is thus also ruled out. Much cognitive and developmental psychology is moving within these frames of reference, often in terms of environmentalism versus nativ- ism. So it is no wonder they have hard times finding empirical solutions to the question of psychological transition from per- ception to conception. This is a dead end. Kingo and some of the researchers he is discussing try what seems to be an emergency exit from the dead alley. If membership of some categories are decided from perceptual criteria and membership of other ones from functional criteria, the first categories could be considered perceptual and the latter ones conceptual. The ontogenetic question could then be reformulated to when infants move from purely perceptual categories to functional ones, i.e. conceptual categories. Func- tional categories are defined from what the objects in the cate- gories do or can be used for. There is explicit reference to J. J. with this approach, however. First, we may question if we have escaped the empiricism- rationalism trap. Maybe the criteria for membership of a func- tional category are functional. But how does the infant in prac- tice decide the membership of a functional category when only equipped with his or her senses? Although the explicit rules can be hard to trace, is the decision not after all perceptual, and thus also the category as the empiricists would claim? If not, then the child must in some way be equipped with an a priory concept of function, just looking after perceptual cues for confirming or rejecting his or her hypothesis as the ration- alists would claim, and we are back to zero. On the other hand, the rationalists could have a point, if this a priory capacity for functional categorization is not present from birth but de- mands some maturation, and what we are looking for is its onset. The question is, however, what we achieve by defining concepts as functional, or affordances, outside the narrow frame of one line of discussion in developmental psychology, as we shall see just below. Can we use such a concept of con- cepts outside this exclusive discourse? Second, if we want to have a concept of concepts which could also be used in answering what I called the phylogenetic or comparative psychological question, then to link concepts as sophisticated and late phenomena to function and affor- dance in contrast to pure sensation or perception as more primitive and early is to turn the whole matter upside-down. As far as I know there is no evidence of what may be called pure perception in animals in their natural habitat. Even the