Compositionality and Concepts in Linguistics and Psychology (Language, Cognition, and Mind, 3, Band 3) - Hardcover

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James A. Hampton is a psychologist and cognitive scientist with a career-long interest in how people represent the concepts they use in everyday life. With an MA in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge and a PhD from University College London, he has been based at City, University of London since 1977 where he has been a Professor since 1997. He has published over 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals and edited books. His empirical work has contributed to our understanding of how people’s intuitive reasoning based on vaguely defined word meanings can leads to judgments which are at odds with the strict rules of logic. In this research he has engaged in collaborative work with colleagues from other cognitive sciences, including philosophy and linguistics. A particular interest has been the way in which vague concepts can be combined using logical operators such as conjunction, disjunction and negation.

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By highlighting relations between experimental and theoretical work, this volume explores new ways of addressing one of the central challenges in the study of language and cognition. The articles bring together work by leading scholars and younger researchers in psychology, linguistics and philosophy. An introductory chapter lays out the background on concept composition, a problem that is stimulating much new research in cognitive science. Researchers in this interdisciplinary domain aim to explain how meanings of complex expressions are derived from simple lexical concepts and to show how these meanings connect to concept representations. Traditionally, much of the work on concept composition has been carried out within separate disciplines, where cognitive psychologists have concentrated on concept representations, and linguists and philosophers have focused on the meaning and use of logical operators. This volume demonstrates an important change in this situation, where convergence points between these three disciplines in cognitive science are emerging and are leading to new findings and theoretical insights.

This book is open access under a CC BY license.