Carnap, Quine, Putnam and Burge on Concepts

Several prominent Anglo-American philosophers – the concept theorists, as I shall call them – argue that to engage rationally in inquiry, one must grasp and apply non-linguistic entities called concepts, which, when properly combined, yield non-linguistic entities called propositions, or thoughts that are true or false. Arguments of this sort have a long history that extends at least as far back as Plato. What is distinctive of theorizing about concepts since the late 1930s, however, is its reliance on methods of metalinguistic semantic analysis first devised by Alfred Tarski. My goals in this chapter are to explain this reliance and to reconstruct and evaluate a small but representative selection of the most influential philosophical views on concepts since 1945.