Why I'm Against Concepts

Curtains do not help us to see out the window.

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I’m currently deep in the weeds of writing chapter two of my dissertation, “Content Empiricism: The Case Against Content Rationalism.”

If I had to drop the jargon and say what I’m arguing for in English, I would say I’m against concepts.

Concepts. They’re like the curtains of the mind. Whenever I want to argue that our minds are related to the things of the world, my discussion partner mentions “concepts.” The opaque curtains of the mind are drawn, and the room darkens.

We only ever see the world through our concepts, they say. But I’m looking toward my curtains right now. I don’t see anything through them.

I object to concepts most strongly when they are appealed to as blocking our view of the world itself. This happens chiefly in postmodernist and social constructionist accounts, broadly, anti-realist accounts. The world as we see it is a construction out of our concepts, which are themselves constructs.

But I’ve come to object to concepts more broadly. In analytic philosophy, there is a strong tradition that combines adherence to concepts with realism. It views our access to the real world as mediated by concepts. Concepts do not occlude our view of the world but rather enable it.

It’s a nice thought. But I fear that no view of our access to the world as mediated by concepts will do the job. No set of curtains helps us see better out the window.

What are concepts supposed to be anyway?

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I take it that a concept is supposed to serve several roles:

1. Concepts are more fundamental than words.

2. Concepts can be expressed in definitions.

3. Concepts can exist even if what they refer to does not.

First, concepts are fundamental than words.

I and a Frenchman, say, have a completely different set of words, but we share many of the same concepts. I say, “snow,” and he says, “la neige,” but we’re utilizing the same concept. That’s why, if I learn French, I’m learning a new word, but not a new concept when I learn the French word for “snow.”

Of course, there’s a popular theory that concepts do differ across languages, such that Eskimo languages, with their multiple words for different kinds of snow, possess more concepts as well. Still, the idea is that the Eskimos don’t just have more words; they have more concepts - so concepts are a kind of thing deeper and more fundamental than words.

Still, so far, we seem to be identifying concepts as corresponding one-to-one with a language with words. But concepts are supposed to be expressible in different words within a language as well. For instance, “donkey” and “ass” would express the same concept, even though they are different words. Once again, concepts are distinct from and more fundamental than words.

Second, concepts are expressed in definitions. In popular discourse, experts are often asked to “define terms.” The expectation is that they will offer a brief verbal description that covers all and only the instances that fall under that term or concept.

If different individuals are working with different definitions of terms, we take it that they have different concepts. This impedes communication and leads to people talking past each other.

This search for definitions has a philosophical basis. Socrates sought for the essence of certain key terms of human life, like justice, truth, knowledge, and the like. He and his interlocutors would try out various verbal descriptions that look much like our idea of definitions. They would test these against counter-examples, usually finding some counter-examples to any purported essence or definition.

Third, concepts exists even if what they refer to does not. For example, this is how many atheists and agnostics view the term “God.” Even if God does not exist, there is a human concept of God, more fundamental than the mere word “God,” and expressible in various traditional definitions, “the greatest possible being,” “a transcendent person,” “the prime mover,” “the creator,” and so on.

If I had to utilize the term, I would say that, here, I have expressed the very concept of a concept.

The Conceptual Theory of Thought

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Now the concept of a concept gives rise to a theory of thought:

Human beings think about the world by utilizing concepts. The concepts are human constructions, but they can refer to the world insofar as things in the world match the descriptions offered in the definitions of concepts.

Think of this as a set of criteria: A concept has a set of criteria for falling under it. Nothing is a cup, for instance, unless it is concave and designed for holding liquid. We think about the world by way of concepts that provide criteria for their own membership.

Now, an important feature of definitions or descriptions is that each of the terms in the definition itself expresses a concept, and so, when we determine whether something matches the description, we are ultimately making appeal to the application of other concepts.

For example, my definition of “cup” made appeal to “concave,” “designed,” “holding,” and “liquid.” (We’ll leave aside the semantics of the other words in the phrase.) Each of these words expresses a concept, which could be spelled out in a definition, which in turn, would utilize words that indicate concepts.

It is a key question of philosophy whether there are a fundamental set of concepts or whether there is a kind of perception of reality that is non-conceptual. This would provide a touchpoint, without which, it appears that we are trapped within a circle of concepts, of coherence rather than correspondence.

Many twentieth-century empiricists tried to provide this in terms of sense-data, the Given, or logically-proper names. (Bertrand Russell thought, or hoped, that we had “logically-proper names” that directly referred to something, though he thought we could only refer to sense-data.)

But even the chief twentieth-century empiricist, W. V. O. Quine concluded that we ultimately could not determine, nor did we need to, the reference of our words. Coherence was sufficient, so long as our conceptual scheme worked, pragmatically.

I think this demonstrates the degree to which even realist and empiricist philosophers have been beholden to concepts and the theory of thought they supply.

Frege and His Concepts as Case Study

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In the dissertation chapter I’m currently working on, the object of my study is a quite different figure, the founding father of analytic philosophy, Gottlob Frege.

Frege was a realist who gave concepts a quite prominent place in his theory of thought. He held that concepts were objective, immaterial entities called “senses.” We successfully refer to objects in the world based on whether they match, or meet the criteria, of the senses we grasp.

While the immaterial aspect of Frege’s thought has been abandoned by many contemporary analytic philosophers, they are beholden to his picture of thought in other ways.

But examining Frege provides an important opportunity to put my theory to the test, that is not just postmodernist and social constructionist theories of concepts that are problematic. Concepts themselves are the problem.

If even Frege’s objectivist and realist account of concepts leads to subjectivist results, then concepts themselves turn out to be nothing but curtains, occluding the mind’s view of the world.

So far, that is what I’m finding.

Our theory of thought is due for a clean-out, and it’s concepts that have got to go.

“Against Concepts” is a distinct section of The Natural Theologian, in the pages of which I’ll be detailing and summarizing the content of my Ph.D. dissertation. You can subscribe or unsubscribe to it separately if you choose at the Substack “Settings” page.