L1.7 Lottie’s seventh lesson on concepts
On Tuesday morning, Lottie finds that pTravis and Masongill are lingering after the shared communal breakfast of strong coffee, grapefruit or orange juice and as many pieces of crusty white or whole grain brown toast and marmalade as one wants. When she first arrived at the Potting Shed last year, Lottie didn’t know what to do with coffee so strong but now enjoys a café con leche. Although she’d never admit this to any of the grownups, she rather likes the atmosphere of potting Shed breakfasts. There are never any large scale conversations. People talk quietly in twos and threes sitting in the armchairs near the front door. In winter the stove at this end of the shed is kept burning at full heat all day and every day but now, in late spring it is merely lit to take the chill off the morning. But why are her friends lingering?
“We’re coming to your tutorial. We stayed up talking to Hipparchus last night and he said he was going to say something general about the generality of the conceptual. It sounded quite interesting.”
A few minutes later, they walk along to Hipparchus’ dark corner study: really just a space marked off from the rest of the Potting Shed’s large single space by bookshelves. In fact, visible high above it is Lottie’s bunk. Lottie notices, to her surprise, that her tutor seems to be walking to and fro as though thinking of the tutorial to come. She had assumed he prepared nothing! Teachers are really not to be trusted.
The generality of the conceptual
“Welcome all three! Today I want to talk about the generality of the conceptual. Yesterday, Lottie and I were talking about the special generality of the predicational aspect of thoughts or judgements. Unlike names, a predicate leaves open a gap between thought and world such that if it turns out not to apply, it is merely false. Falsity is, as it were, just as prepared for as truth. The predicate is a ruler placed against nature and either truth or falsity is a verdict it can deliver. By contrast, the failure of application of a name disrupts the comparison. I am, of course, speaking in metaphors.
A predicate is general in that it leaves open an infinite number of ways the world might be even if the predicate applies and the judgement is true.
But before we come to the more general picture I wish to offer, let’s think about the contrast I’ve been suggesting with names, ordinary proper names. Oh, before that, let’s consider the example Lottie and I discussed: The next visitor to the Potting Shed will be shorter than me, ie. Hipparchus. Now the ‘naming part’ of this thought isn’t a proper name at all but a description, used in Donnellan’s attributive sense. And, as I suggested to Lottie, even assuming the thought turns out to be true, there is an infinite number of ways it might be true. The particular circumstances of its being true could vary in every conceivable way providing, only, that whoever is the next visitor is shorter than me.
Now consider a proper name. Let’s say that Alcock is shorter than me, ie. Hipparchus. To make things particularly clear, we could say that Alcock, when measured at the start of tomorrow’s breakfast, will be shorter than me. Consider the name here. The ‘Alcock’ measured tomorrow might be wearing a scarf or not and many of the things that applied in the descriptive case. But, also, there are counter-factual possibilities. Alcock left the army after a short career. But he might have stayed longer or never joined. He might have followed up his political interests. He might never have formed this commune. In all these possible worlds, he is still Alcock. ‘Alcock’, too, has a kind of generality. It would apply to Alcock even had things been different in all these ways.”
“But you are not denying the contrast between a name and a predicate, are you? A name is singular, a predicate general. A name names one thing. A predicate could apply to infinitely many.” pTravis has not heard the last lessons and is unsure of the thrust of the current thoughts.
“Quite right. Or wrong. Whichever! No, I am not denying that contrast. What you say is exactly right. Still, even in the case of a concept that is essentially tailored to pick out just one thing or person, there is a generality in how it applies to that person. The concept of Frege applies only to Frege but Frege could have been different in all sorts of ways while still being Frege and thus while still instantiating or instancing the concept of ‘Frege’. It may be odd to speak this way…”
“Too right, Teach!”
“But this is the nature of the conceptual.
The conceptual and the historical
“In one story, Sherlock Holmes turns to Dr Watson and says: ‘Look here, Watson, just sit down in this chair and let me preach to you for a little.’ Well let me do that. Let me sketch a picture of thought and world. It is what I have drawn from the philosophy of Charles Travis.
We have been describing the nature of thought assuming it to have an abstract conceptual structure. Thought, however, also makes contact with the world. One way to think of this is that the conceptual realm, the abstract content of thoughts and their articulations into subsidiary concepts, has an essential generality. Predicates but also names.
The world, by contrast, comprises states of affairs, situations, events and particulars – things and people – each of which is singular and particular. Travis calls this ‘the historical’. Events, dear boy, events! It is the nature of such worldly things – or ‘things being the case’ as Travis puts it – that they are not general and do not contain generalities. It is of the nature of the conceptual realm that it is general. The generalities of the conceptual are instantiated or instanced by things being as they are, in all their particularity, in the world. The conceptual in its generality ‘reaches’ as far as the world.
This picture is not addressed at easing Lottie’s worry from the start of last week which concerned how there could be meaning in the world. Saying that a concept reaches as far as its instances, that the concept of marmalade ‘reaches’ as far as the jars in the kitchen, is not to offer a scientific, or any other, explanation of how the nature described by physics and biology can also contain concepts. The story presupposes the relation of thought and world and merely describes how the world appears from the realm of thought.”
“Just a minute!” This is Masongill. “I’m a mole and I know that my senses are a bit different from most other creatures in the Potting Shed. I do not see as well as you, for example. And this has made me sensitive to something. You seem to be saying that there is a big divide between the conceptual realm – by the way, is that the same as the realm of sense? – and the world, the empirical world, perhaps the realm of reference? But is it really true that we can only think thoughts for which we have words? Because I don’t think that’s true. I think I have smell based thoughts that I could communicate with fellow moles but not with you partly because I don’t have words for them. Sorry, this thought is a bit of a mess!”
“Hmm. Excellent. Your question highlights something I should have been more careful about. Although I have mainly been talking about thoughts or judgements rather than linguistic assertions, what I have said has suggested an equivalence. I have talked of expressing thoughts in assertions and that might imply that the thoughts I have been speaking of are essentially linguistically codifiable. But if you recall, I have also talked about thoughts that are singular or object-dependent and not descriptive. These are thoughts that are not, thus, carried by descriptions alone. If one expresses a singular thought by saying ‘This football…’, still, the thought depends on the presence of an actual football. The words alone do not single out the specific ball. So thought resists of codification in words alone. But the philosopher John McDowell suggests another use of demonstratives: to construct general though demonstrative concepts. If I say I will buy a new scarf in this colour, pointing to some coloured flower, I can speak of that colour without meaning merely the patch of it on that flower. I mean the colour that that flower, and perhaps the scarf I later buy, and perhaps one the wrong size that I do not buy, can share. So the conceptual is not limited to words alone.
This example helps make something clearer. Although the conceptual and the historical are distinct, there is a sense in which the former is made for the latter. Demonstrative concepts form one example. But another is a permanent colour sample, such as a paint sample card, or a ruler such as the Paris metre. Here parts of the world are employed within the conceptual. Asking himself whether these entities, these things, are best thought of as parts of the world or of language, Wittgenstein replies language.”