Non-referring Concepts. Technical Report 2003-03
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Non-referring concepts are mental representations of nonexistent things like \ndragons and time machines. Non-referring words are the words that express those \nconcepts. In reference-based approaches to formal semantics, there is a well-known \npuzzle about how non-referring words and concepts get their meanings. The default \nsolution is that they are special cases, with a different semantic structure from their \nreferring counterparts. Despite over a century of debate in formal semantics, the issue of \nnon-reference has, until now, been ignored in the psychological literature on concepts. \nBut it is not obvious in advance what the psychological structure and processing of nonreferring \nconcepts will be like. Furthermore, experimental evidence about non-referring \nconcepts can help resolve issues fundamental to both semantics and psychology, such as \nthe nature of meaning, the nature of concepts, and the debate over representational \nexternalism. \nI used the methods of experimental psychology to provide the first empirical test \nof the claim that non-referring concepts are a special kind of concept. I found that nonreferring \nconcepts have a very similar structure to referring concepts. This finding \nsuggests that many popular versions of reference-based semantics are flawed, perhaps \nfatally. I also found that non-referring concepts take measurably longer to process than \nreferring concepts. I argue that the best way of reconciling the second result with the first \nis to make a distinction between the knowledge that is constitutive of a concept and the \nknowledge that is external to it. Non-referring concepts are processed more cautiously \nbecause we know that their referents do not exist – a fact that is about the world rather \nthan the concept itself. This distinction is consistent with the apparently contradictory \nevidence that motivates “Theory Theory” accounts of conceptual structure on one hand, \nand similarity-based accounts such as prototype and exemplar theories on the other. \nThis dissertation concerns the following topic areas: cognitive psychology, \ncognitive science, concepts, empty names, externalism, internalism, mental \nrepresentation, nonexistent objects, non-referring concepts, philosophy of language, \nphilosophy of mind, prototypes, reference, semantics, similarity, and Theory Theory.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it