Concepts of Concept: Perspectives across Languages, Cultures and Disciplines

Convenors

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Behr, Dr. Henning Trüper, and Dr. Ralph Weber

Organization

URPP Asia and Europe

Location

University of Zurich, Room KAB G-01, Kantonsschulstrasse 3, 8001 Zürich

Registration

Registration required: ralph.weber@uzh.ch

Description

The workshop addresses two fundamental gaps in research on concepts that are plainly evident at the beginning of the 21st century. The first gap is between two groups of disciplines, which—at least in their more radical positions—disagree considerably not only about the relevant research questions but also about the nature and use of concepts. Cognitive science, psychology and parts of analytic philosophy focus on concepts as mental representations and offer theories as to their acquisition, possession and use. In other parts of analytic philosophy, concepts are conceived either as abstract objects or as abstractions of the uses of words, whereas history and philology often take concepts to be fundamentally related to text. Linguists, it seems, may fall on either side of the divide. The gap between the extreme positions of this spectrum appears so wide that it is questionable whether each respective research approach can be understood as being about concepts in a similar sense.

Against this background, the workshop seeks to cover new territory and to extend the existing discussions of the concept of concept (and their respective implications) to various strands of linguistics and philology. The reasoning behind this is the following: if the gap between concepts as mental representations and concepts rooted in texts might be bridged at all, then the role of language is key and must be clarified. To the extent that language (and translation) is considered important in concept research, there is another gap in contemporary research on concepts, which regards natural languages. The second gap is best illustrated by considering which natural languages come to serve as examples in the existing research literature. These are almost exclusively Standard Average European (SAE) languages. It is at this juncture that the workshop hopes to contribute some new perspective to the existing discussions, by way of offering challenging cases from other languages (African, Chinese, Indian and Semitic languages, but also Old Irish), with a, presumably, different imagery.

The workshop will therefore bring together linguists, philosophers, and historians and scholars working in respective academic disciplines, particularly also in African, Chinese, Indian, Japanese or Islamic Studies. A discussion across languages and disciplines is urgently needed since research has been moving towards understandings of concepts so different as to frustrate any common debate. It thus becomes increasingly difficult to draw on each other’s research or to contribute and formulate challenges that do not misfire from the beginning due to different conceptual premises. The goal of the workshop is to bring the different groups to the table and initiate a debate on how the different research efforts on concepts interlink or may be profitably juxtaposed to be mutually informing or challenging – while it is of course no less desirable to demarcate the limits of such common debate as precisely as possible.

Program