Conceptual Combination, Property Inclusion, and the Aristotelian-Thomistic View of Concepts

Abstract

Understanding how properties are extended to combined concepts is critical to theories of concepts. In human judgments, properties true of a noun (ducks have webbed feet) become less true when that noun is modified (baby ducks have webbed feet), while properties false of a noun (candles have teeth) become less false when that noun is modified (purple candles have teeth). These modification and inverse modification effects have been shown to be extremely robust. Gagné and Spalding (2011, 2014b; Spalding and Gagné 2015) have argued that these effects are driven by expectation of contrast. The current experiment shows that, as expected, the modification and inverse modification effects are unaffected by the normative force with which a property is predicated of the head noun, supporting the expected contrast explanation. The results are discussed with respect to an Aristotelian-Thomistic approach to concepts (Spalding and Gagné 2013).