You sketch a meaning of concept that serves well in the context of linguistics, but differs from my own sense of a "concept" as a neural model in someone's brain that also needs to be pinned down in terms of its extension, intension, and so on. For instance, to pick a contentious example, human brains have a concept of redness that arguably fails to pick out anything real in the world, and it is important to be able to talk about that concept without reference to whether it is backed up by a real-world property.
What word would you suggest for the neural model (of redness, or consciousness, or a dog) that would not clash with the meaning of "concept" in your article? The word "model" seems to have the wrong connotations, as it suggests a toy version with working parts; the word "idea" seems too loose, and so on.
I think there’s an important ambiguity between *what we mean* by a word (the mental representation that we have, which we are using the word to convey), versus *what a word is taken to mean in a language* (the general class of mental representations that the word can validly serve as a means of communicating).
It may be that the latter is what Carnap and others (like Putnam) consider meanings to be - a non-mental thing, which is basically an abstract class/category/set of mental representations - whereas the former (meaning in the sense of “what we mean”) is the mental thing to which you’re referring - which, if you’re using a word correctly within a language, would be one member of the larger class. If that makes sense.
For this mental thing, I think “idea” is a natural enough term to use, and roughly matches the usage of the term by early empiricists like Locke and Hume. But this is still something I’m working through!
Thanks for the response. The reason I ask is that, if "concept" is taken as a piece of jargon within linguistics, with specific connotations, then I am potentially short of a word for describing what I need to describe in the brain.
For now I will continue to use the word "concept' in a head-focussed sense, until I think of a better approach. "Idea" seems a little woolly to me, but that linguistic prejudice might not be shared by others. As long as I distinguish my usage from linguistic usage, it should be comprehensible.
In a computer programmed with an object-oriented language, it can be useful to distinguish between a variable and the value it contains; the variable is treated as a small box that can hold a value, and operations related to the box can have different results to operations related to the value inside it.
For much of the philosophy of the mind, this distinction has been forgotten or blurred, so I need separate names for the box and for the content of the box. I would naturally refer to these as "concept" and "content".
I suspect many of the same issues arise in linguistics. In fact, I tend to see much of the confusion in the philosophy of the mind as a series of use-mention distinctions.
So, the concept is outside heads, but each person would have their conception of the concept, eg, my conception of the number 3 is my understanding of what it can be used to communicate
I agree re distinguishing between the box and the things in it - that’s an absolutely vital point
Experimental philosophy and corpus linguistics and other fields in the empirical research paradigm are more useful than analytic philosophy for understanding meaning and language. Word meaning is indeterminate and word users always have the ability to revise what they mean by a word. It's by studying common usages that you can get a glimpse of what types of linguistic behavior people perform in certain circumstances. A priori disciplines will just have you rehashing your own conceptions of language back to yourself for idisyncratic and unrepresentative scenarios like Gettier cases.
Thanks. Very interesting work. Keep it up.
You sketch a meaning of concept that serves well in the context of linguistics, but differs from my own sense of a "concept" as a neural model in someone's brain that also needs to be pinned down in terms of its extension, intension, and so on. For instance, to pick a contentious example, human brains have a concept of redness that arguably fails to pick out anything real in the world, and it is important to be able to talk about that concept without reference to whether it is backed up by a real-world property.
What word would you suggest for the neural model (of redness, or consciousness, or a dog) that would not clash with the meaning of "concept" in your article? The word "model" seems to have the wrong connotations, as it suggests a toy version with working parts; the word "idea" seems too loose, and so on.
I think there’s an important ambiguity between *what we mean* by a word (the mental representation that we have, which we are using the word to convey), versus *what a word is taken to mean in a language* (the general class of mental representations that the word can validly serve as a means of communicating).
It may be that the latter is what Carnap and others (like Putnam) consider meanings to be - a non-mental thing, which is basically an abstract class/category/set of mental representations - whereas the former (meaning in the sense of “what we mean”) is the mental thing to which you’re referring - which, if you’re using a word correctly within a language, would be one member of the larger class. If that makes sense.
For this mental thing, I think “idea” is a natural enough term to use, and roughly matches the usage of the term by early empiricists like Locke and Hume. But this is still something I’m working through!
In any case, glad you liked the article!
Thanks for the response. The reason I ask is that, if "concept" is taken as a piece of jargon within linguistics, with specific connotations, then I am potentially short of a word for describing what I need to describe in the brain.
For now I will continue to use the word "concept' in a head-focussed sense, until I think of a better approach. "Idea" seems a little woolly to me, but that linguistic prejudice might not be shared by others. As long as I distinguish my usage from linguistic usage, it should be comprehensible.
In a computer programmed with an object-oriented language, it can be useful to distinguish between a variable and the value it contains; the variable is treated as a small box that can hold a value, and operations related to the box can have different results to operations related to the value inside it.
For much of the philosophy of the mind, this distinction has been forgotten or blurred, so I need separate names for the box and for the content of the box. I would naturally refer to these as "concept" and "content".
I suspect many of the same issues arise in linguistics. In fact, I tend to see much of the confusion in the philosophy of the mind as a series of use-mention distinctions.
Maybe “concept” vs “conception?”
So, the concept is outside heads, but each person would have their conception of the concept, eg, my conception of the number 3 is my understanding of what it can be used to communicate
I agree re distinguishing between the box and the things in it - that’s an absolutely vital point
Oh!, I have a good one on Semantics:
https://substack.com/@federicosotodelalba/note/c-107322166
I’ll take a look! Thanks!
Thanks for posting, good review for me
Thanks, glad you liked it!
An awesome morning read, thanks for sharing and keep up the great work
Thanks! I appreciate it!
Experimental philosophy and corpus linguistics and other fields in the empirical research paradigm are more useful than analytic philosophy for understanding meaning and language. Word meaning is indeterminate and word users always have the ability to revise what they mean by a word. It's by studying common usages that you can get a glimpse of what types of linguistic behavior people perform in certain circumstances. A priori disciplines will just have you rehashing your own conceptions of language back to yourself for idisyncratic and unrepresentative scenarios like Gettier cases.