Thanks to Barsalou's, Damasio's, Glenberg's, Prinz' and others' work, neo-empiricism is gaining a deserved recognition in the psychology and philosophy of concepts. I argue, however, that neo-empiricists have underestimated the difficulty of providing evidence against the amodal approach to concepts and higher cognition. I highlight three key problems: the difficulty of sorting out amodal predi...

This idea is a traditional assumption for empiricism, especially in its 20th century forms. It often goes unexamined, or is considered a fairly minor premise in empiricist argument. But it is a hard idea to defend, once it is explicitly challenged. So it would be fair to call this a "dogma" of empiricism. It is a dogma that some empiricists, such as Quine, retain, even when other dogmas are giv...