Conceptual Change as Change of Inner Perspective

Contents

To be a genuinely useful methodology for cognitive psychology, situated action must be extended to explain higher-level human cognition. Yet there is a tension between the requirements for cognitive explanations and the kind of explanations situated action supplies. It is just not clear how to useembodied interaction with an external environment to explain processes that are so internal and that seem to crucially involve representations and concepts. In short, there is nothing for concepts to interact with. Perhaps they interact with each other. This is the idea we explore here. We give a situated action style explanation for conceptual change in the context of analogical reminding. We have two central results: 1) analogical reminding changes concepts in long-term memory, and 2) concepts have implicit as well as explicit structure.