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A semi-detached house in an estate on the outskirts of a town in Ireland, late 60's, early 70's. Two married couples in their forties, small-talking in Hiberno-English... Smokes, booze, gossip - and an occasional suggestion of Valium. They know each other well, this foursome: Nora and Maureen have been bosom friends down the years; Dick and Clem, drinking buddies, weekend boozers... So much for the status quo. Into this cosy quorum comes darling Ursula, eldest daughter to Dick and Nora, her agnostic boy friend in tow... and in jig time the status quo is upset, Big Time. Will a modern audience readily identify with this piece - setting, storyline, characters, mores? Hardly... The Ireland depicted no longer exists to any great extent. Times, attitudes, outlooks no longer hold sway as before in today's world. Yet remnants of that closed, enclosed, society remain: "What will the neighbours say?.. What will people think?.. Oh, the scandal! The shame! I won't be able to lift my head..."

In this work, Edouard Machery argues that the dominant psychological theories of concepts fail to provide a framework and that drastic conceptual changes are required to make sense of the research on concepts in psychology and neuropsychology.