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Philosophia Mathematica Advance Access published online on November 5, 2009
Philosophia Mathematica, doi:10.1093/philmat/nkp020
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© The Author [2009]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Book Review

Exploring the Boundaries of Conceptual Evaluation

Christopher Pincock*

* Department of Philosophy, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907, U.S.A. pincock@purdue.edu

MARK WILSON. Wandering Significance: An Essay on Conceptual Behavior. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0-19-926925-9 (hbk); 978-0-19-953230-8 (pbk). Pp. xx + 670.

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

This monumental volume aims to redirect philosophical work on concepts towards explaining how we can successfully navigate the daunting complexity of the natural world. For Wilson, talk of concepts is primarily useful in the context of evaluating the activities of others and ourselves, as when we say ‘Archie has never fully grasped the concepts of the calculus, so of course he can’t work the problems’ (p. 2). This critical task is not best achieved using the theories of concepts that are the focus of many philosophers of language and mind. The reason for this is that most of these approaches are developed in the grip of what Wilson calls the ‘classical picture of concepts’ (p. 4). This picture has many aspects, but the central feature that seems to concern Wilson most is the assumption that a concept is something that can be definitively grasped by an individual, often at a . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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