About concepts
September 18th 2008 01:24
I tend to believe the following crazy things (or something akin to them):
1. When people talk about "concepts" (in the context of something like this blog), a lot of the time they're effectively talking about words, and practices associated with those words. The concept of tree, roughly speaking, is the ways in which the word "tree" is used.
-- When philosophers do "conceptual analysis", or Plato tells you what "love" is or "justice" is, the method is a sort of glorified dictionary-writing (or sometimes dictionary-rewriting -- fixing up, revising concepts rather than simply displaying them -- for instance, the Robert Brandom notion of philosophy as "keeping concepts sharp").
-- Not everything that is identifiable as "a concept" has a word that neatly accompanies it.
-- Concepts aren't queer objects that float inside people's heads.
-- The concepts "concept" and "meaning" are very close.
2. One difference between the concept of "concept" and the concept of "meaning" is that "meaning" also embraces possibilities of action. A difference of emphasis, perhaps. If something (a word, a sentence, a book) holds meaning, then potentially you can act on it. It has applicability and connections.
-- If you say to me, "What the hell are you talking about? What do you mean?", you're asking me to connect what I'm saying to something you know, or perhaps to express it in terms of something you know. You're asking me to show you how this chit-chat changes anything, or how it can be used. You might be asking for examples.
-- This is broader than the notion that something has to be verifiable to be meaningful, or that meaning is reducible to truth conditions.
-- It's difficult to say that anything is "utter nonsense" -- even a square circle, or furiously sleeping ideas, or a random noise.
-- "Meaning" is an English concept; what about Japanese? -- Well, it might be difficult or impossible for two cultures to have any concepts that are precisely the same.
3. Concepts aren't atoms, but can be analyzed into parts from this or that perspective. For example, the concept of "spoon" refers to an object you use to shove things into your mouth for eating, and it also refers to a customary shape.
-- Aristotle talks somewhere about different ways to "define" a thing.
-- Whether any concept has necessary parts, I'm unsure, though at the moment I'm skeptical. I had a discussion on this in relation to "homosexual"... Perhaps it's better to adopt an onion metaphor -- some parts may be more central or important or commonly occurring than others (just as, perhaps, all knowledge is synthetic, but some propositions are more central than others).
4. Concepts have normal assumptions of use, and normal effects on people. They pull whole frameworks of assumptions along with them.
-- This can give rise to problems in, for instance, teaching language to artificial intelligences.
-- There is no clear line between "normal assumption of use" and "part of the concept proper".
1. When people talk about "concepts" (in the context of something like this blog), a lot of the time they're effectively talking about words, and practices associated with those words. The concept of tree, roughly speaking, is the ways in which the word "tree" is used.
-- When philosophers do "conceptual analysis", or Plato tells you what "love" is or "justice" is, the method is a sort of glorified dictionary-writing (or sometimes dictionary-rewriting -- fixing up, revising concepts rather than simply displaying them -- for instance, the Robert Brandom notion of philosophy as "keeping concepts sharp").
-- Not everything that is identifiable as "a concept" has a word that neatly accompanies it.
-- Concepts aren't queer objects that float inside people's heads.
-- The concepts "concept" and "meaning" are very close.
2. One difference between the concept of "concept" and the concept of "meaning" is that "meaning" also embraces possibilities of action. A difference of emphasis, perhaps. If something (a word, a sentence, a book) holds meaning, then potentially you can act on it. It has applicability and connections.
-- If you say to me, "What the hell are you talking about? What do you mean?", you're asking me to connect what I'm saying to something you know, or perhaps to express it in terms of something you know. You're asking me to show you how this chit-chat changes anything, or how it can be used. You might be asking for examples.
-- This is broader than the notion that something has to be verifiable to be meaningful, or that meaning is reducible to truth conditions.
-- It's difficult to say that anything is "utter nonsense" -- even a square circle, or furiously sleeping ideas, or a random noise.
-- "Meaning" is an English concept; what about Japanese? -- Well, it might be difficult or impossible for two cultures to have any concepts that are precisely the same.
3. Concepts aren't atoms, but can be analyzed into parts from this or that perspective. For example, the concept of "spoon" refers to an object you use to shove things into your mouth for eating, and it also refers to a customary shape.
-- Aristotle talks somewhere about different ways to "define" a thing.
-- Whether any concept has necessary parts, I'm unsure, though at the moment I'm skeptical. I had a discussion on this in relation to "homosexual"... Perhaps it's better to adopt an onion metaphor -- some parts may be more central or important or commonly occurring than others (just as, perhaps, all knowledge is synthetic, but some propositions are more central than others).
4. Concepts have normal assumptions of use, and normal effects on people. They pull whole frameworks of assumptions along with them.
-- This can give rise to problems in, for instance, teaching language to artificial intelligences.
-- There is no clear line between "normal assumption of use" and "part of the concept proper".
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