Generalità e vaghezza: Charles Sanders Peirce e le teorie embodied dei concetti

Abstract

he neo-empiricist theories of concepts, supported by Prinz (2002), Barsalou (2008) and by the huge community of cognitive psychology, forecast that conceptual system is formed starting from segmentation, flexible and context-sensitive, of portions of perceptions and actions, concerning the objects with the concepts relating to. Subsequently these mobile constructs (coinciding with neutral pattern activation), extracted from interaction with external objects, are reactivated and reused when contextual conditions stimulate it. These theories explain well the formation of conceptual classes, concerning actions in concrete objects and situations, while they seem to fail if we speak about their universality and normativity: they don’t explain abstract concepts, like justice or democracy, nor what class of normative relations exists between concepts themselves and their carrier. For that reason they was also put under review: a lot of experts exhort to open embodied mental theories to sociality and to reatroactrive effects that learning a language or cultural background can have on conceptual structures. I set out to discuss these difficulties, relating it with some notions achieved by Peirce as result of his considerations about general principles, continuity and vagueness.