The function of concepts must be taken seriously to understand the scientific practices of developing and working with concepts. Despite its significance, little philosophical attention has been paid to the function of concepts. A notable exception is Brigandt (2010), who suggests incorporating the epistemic goal pursued with the concept’s use as an additional semantic property along with the reference and inferential role. The suggestion, however, has at least two limitations. First, his proposal to introduce epistemic goals as the third component of concepts lacks independent grounding, except to account for the rationality of semantic change (the Grounding Problem). Second, it is hardly justified to consider epistemic goals as a semantic property (the Misplacement Problem). To remedy these predicaments, we suggest a new perspective that takes concepts as cognitive entities with a 2-layered structure rather than as merely linguistic entities and develop an account of the function of concepts. We provide empirical evidence showing that functional information affects our cognitive processes. It is claimed that the function of concepts is not a semantic property but a type of meta-information regulating a body of concept-constitutive information.

必须认真对待概念的功能，以理解发展和使用概念的科学实践。尽管它很重要，但概念的功能却很少受到哲学关注。一个值得注意的例外是 Brigandt（2010），他建议将所追求的认知目标与概念的使用结合起来，作为附加的语义属性以及参考和推理作用。然而，该建议至少有两个局限性。首先，他提出的引入认知目标作为概念的第三个组成部分的建议缺乏独立的基础，除了考虑语义变化的合理性（基础问题）。其次，将认知目标视为语义属性（错位问题）是没有道理的。为了解决这些困境，我们提出了一种新的视角，将概念视为具有两层结构的认知实体，而不仅仅是语言实体，并对概念的功能进行了解释。我们提供的经验证据表明功能信息影响我们的认知过程。认为概念的功能不是一种语义属性，而是一种规范概念构成信息体的元信息。