Blueprint for a Science of Mind: A Critical Notice of Christopher Peacocke's A Study of Concepts *

The word 'concept' is used in a variety of ways, as Frege remarked over a century ago; 'its sense', he said, 'is sometimes psychological, sometimes logical, and sometimes perhaps a confused mixture of both' (Frege, 1960a, p.42). Despite the ambiguity of the word, it has long played a central role in philosophical discussion, and the questions of what concepts are and how we are to undertand talk of them are of central importance to that self-understanding which is one of the peculiar aims of philosophy. And to the extent to which it is correct to conceive of philosophy as mapping out the conceptual structure of the world, and to see that structure as the structure within which empirical variation of theory can take place, these questions are of fundamental importance to all scientific and rational inquiry. Despite the centrality of the concept (or concepts) of a concept in philosophy, it tends to be used in the course of philosophical inquiry rather more often than it is taken as its subject. This makes Christopher Peacocke's contribution to its discussion in A Study of Concepts a welcome one. As the title suggests, the book makes no pretence of being an exhaustive examination of the concept of a concept, nor of being restricted in scope to the concept of a concept. The book does not introduce and argue for a central thesis, but rather introduces a research program, and cames out a number of investigations under its guidance, which the author admits