Concepts as General Representations in Situated Theories

According to an increasingly popular view, concepts are ad hoc representations of categories, created on the fly out of contextually relevant information. The claim of this paper is that ad hoc concepts may be useful scientific explananda for various cognitive activities, but their postulation as components of thought is not mandatory on purely philosophical and linguistic grounds.I propose an alternative explanation, according to which, at least in some cases of metaphorical utterances, context does not do as much as to create a new concept; rather, it helps us associate a pre-existing but non-lexicalized concept with a word that may provide the audience with a cue for retrieving it, sometimes in virtue of its conventional meaning. In such cases, the concept itself may well be a stable representation, though the concept-word association is ad hoc. If this is so, there is no direct route from linguistic ad hocness to the ad hoc nature of concepts.