ABSTRACT
Studies of concepts are central to several disciplines including, at least, anthropology, cognitive neurobiology, intellectual history, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and sociology. This is as it should be since concepts play a central role in human thought. Yet this last claim is fraught with ambiguities since how we understand it, and whether we think it true, depends on our view of the nature of concepts. At the same time, our view of the nature of concepts will typically be constrained by the specific questions we are asking – which, in turn, may be a function of the discipline we are coming from and the state of that discipline. For example, when the physiological psychologist Hebb (1949) wrote about concepts he was mainly concerned with identifying neural structures at the basis of what psychologists refer to as concepts. Once he identified these structures he attempted to use them as the starting point for a purely neurological account of thought. Literally, for Hebb, concepts are in the head.
