Tymon Kukier
Affiliation: Jagiellonian University
Category: Psychology
Keywords: Concepts, History of Psychology, Philosophy
Date: Thursday 4th of September
Time: 15:30
Location: Room 161 (161)
View the full session: Concepts & Propositional Attitudes
Introduction: Concepts are indispensable to the way we describe cognitive systems. Indeed, a central challenge in psychology lies in how concepts enable generalization and abstraction, allowing us to "enter the realm of reason.” Somewhat surprisingly, given this importance, concepts as a scientific entity have never had a strict definition, although not for the lack of trying—see the boom in concept theories in the 1990s (Margolis & Laurence, 1999). This puts contemporary psychology in an awkward position. Our theories aim to explain and use a vague and intuitive notion of a 'concept' (Slaney & Racine, 2011). In this hodgepodge, many lines of thought hinge on historical precedents. Theories of concepts are dismissed as being too behaviorist (Alksnis & Reynolds, 2021), too Aristotelian, or not up to date with the cognitive turn (Murphy, 2002). When critics refer to theories of concepts from pre-contemporary philosophy, they can draw from a wide range of historical accounts. For example, there is a wealth of work on concepts in Aristotle's or Hume's philosophy. Psychology, however, has diverged from philosophy, and little or nothing is known about the history of concepts in psychology. As far as our research shows, there is only one article on the subject, analyzing merely four publications on concepts from the last 100 years (Machery, 2007). In fact, most psychological textbooks suffer from disciplinary amnesia, where theories of concepts older than 30 years are rarely mentioned, even indirectly (Henry Gleitman, 2010; Jeanne & Ormrod, 2017; MacWhinney et al., 1992; Medin et al., 2001). If we are to progress towards an empirically operational notion of “concept,” we must shed the intuitive layers built up over history. Thus, the first step is an account of the historical evolution of 'concept'. Results: The present paper pioneers the study of the history of concepts in psychology using a hybrid bibliometric approach. To this end, we compiled a dataset of psychological publications spanning the last 130 years, with two primary objectives: to provide a data-driven overview of trends in the use of 'concept' and to assess prevailing views on concept theories. The results for both objectives of our analysis can be summarized as a mix of confirmations and surprises. The first objective produced two findings that are worth outlining immediately. First, conventional wisdom holds that behaviorism aimed to eliminate mental entities from psychology, so one would expect its research to reflect this. However, our data show the opposite. From the earliest authors associated with behaviorism to the last groups surviving the cognitive revolution, behaviorism as a whole introduced more 'concept' into psychology. Our second surprising finding concerns modern psychological publishing. Contemporary research on theories of concepts has declined sharply—even more so than during behaviorism's heyday. Many attribute this decline to the introduction of the term 'representation' . However, our data argue to the contrary: introduction and decline do not coincide historically, and no author group or topic exemplifies such an exchange. Regarding the broader aim of outlining the use of 'concept' in psychology, our findings were similarly two-sided. For example, we showed that James's Principles of Psychology spurred the initial rise of 'concepts' and that the subsequent decline was linked to behaviourism. But further analysis revealed more unexpected phenomena. The initial rise lasted from the 1880s until the 1940s. This is more than two decades after what previous research has identified as the beginning of widespread behaviorism (Braat et al., 2020). We also observed a repeating pattern of rise and fall in 'concepts', with a second rise beginning around the 1970s and lasting until the 1990s. Although the implications of these cycles merit further exploration, all our metrics concur that the modern decline (after the 1990s) is exceptional. Our data argued that, contrary to previous trends, theoretical developments were not a significant factor, leaving us to stipulate the granularization of research as a possible explanation. Methods: These results must be viewed through the methodology employed. We share parts of the toolset with previous studies. However, previous work has been limited to analyzing either specific research clusters in psychology (Benjafield, 2012) or the socioeconomics of publishing (Engelen et al., 2023). As our aim was to explore the conceptual dynamics of a single theoretical entity, we diverged significantly. First, we combined bibliometrics with textual analysis. This forced the second difference. Although parts of our analysis were applied to a dataset comparable in size to those of other studies (0.2 million articles), other metrics were applied only to those articles for which full content was available (20,000 articles). The latter formed the core of our dataset, which came from two journals: Psychological Review and the Journal of Experimental Psychology (including its five subsequent sub-journals). This core was analyzed for the frequency of occurrence of the word "concept" and its derivatives. Based on these results, we statistically outlined four separate historical trends. To each, we applied statistical analysis and computational algorithms for detecting areas of research (Bohlin et al., 2014). This allowed us to describe each trend from three perspectives: which article or book initiated the trend, which groups of researchers or topics sustained it, and which topic witnessed the trend 'ran out of steam.' Conclusion: Psychology, unlike its more empirical counterparts (such as physics), remains mindful of its roots. Not only do we wrestle with some of the same dilemmas, but we also refer to and evaluate even the most recent programs in the light of our history. For such discourse to be insightful, however, it must be based on more than a haphazard reading of past research. This study shows how, in the modern age, we have the tools to outline an empirically grounded theory of the philosophical, theoretical, and metatheoretical background behind the central issue of concepts.