Abstract

To explain fundamental aspects of human thinking like its systematicity and productivity we need an account of how thoughts - mental acts and states with propositional content - can ‘consist of parts’ with subpropositional content. Concepts as they are investigated here are nothing but these ‘parts’ of thoughts. The Representational Theory of Mind takes concepts and thoughts to be mental representations - material bearers of content with a syntactic form and a specific content - in a ‘language of thought’. Concepts can then be understood as being literally parts of thoughts just as words are parts of sentences. In this paper I try to develop the main lines of an alternative account of concepts. According to this account - which has been hinted at by Peter Geach and Gareth Evans - concepts are mental abilities that are actualized in mental acts like judgments. I try to show that on this basis systematicity and productivity can be explained without invoking mental representations