Yes, I admit that I had forgotten your views on this. I guess it’s been a while since last time you discussed them. And I broadly agree if by concept you meant the object of a thought rather than something existing outside spacetime.
Object of thought seems more sensible. There's no obvious reason to argue for some kind of literal mental landscape of Platonic forms.
Ok, so a concept is just the object of one of somebody’s thoughts. If so I would agree.
The question is how they would be shared between different people, or indeed between different thoughts. How something which is ontologically restricted to being objects of our presumably separate thoughts could nonetheless be effectively shared by different people? I don’t believe that other people have some sort of ontological access to the object of my thoughts, so how could these objects be properly said to be shared at all by different people? How the object of one of my thoughts also be object of one of your thoughts? In what sense are concepts shared?
Here I’m coming back on your third objection because I seem to have explained myself rather poorly.
The point I'm making is that an immaterial concept of ownership and sale is an accurate, useful and reliable way of dealing with the phenomenon, while a discourse on the neural changes made in the buyer's and seller's brain does not, in practice, accurately capture what is going on.
Now you can make a conscious choice to try and base everything in physical interaction. So to represent a concept, you imagine a theoretical set of physical interactions that would populate all the necessary mental, physical and social interactions, from words on paper, to computers to people's heads, in which that concept is instantiated, or could ever be instantiated, in all of space and time.
It's possible, but there are some objections. A few off the top of my head...
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The third is that it's not really an adequate replacement. Replacing a conceptual category with the instantiation of everything that could fall into that category is not an equivalency. A category is not equivalent to its contents, a set is not equivalent to its members. One does not accurately replace the other.
The view of concepts as material things does not have to capture accurately what is going on in terms of (I guess) our subjective experience of concepts. Instead, it has to specify what it is that will have to be explained. Broadly, it’s showing that whatever relevant material processes can be identified are properly accounted for. Hence, the concept of circle can be investigated through physical things we could agree to regard as instances of what we think of as the concept of circle. Another example would be Alan Turing’s suggestion that the test for an AI is to be able to pass off its conversation as that of a human being. So, it’s an entirely pragmatic test. And it’s entirely material except that the status of the observer is left unexamined. This is no problem since we’re not trying to prove that subjective experience doesn’t exist by reducing the mental to the physical, merely that we have a materialist explanation of concepts regarded as material things.
A materialist explanation doesn’t have to account for the subjective experience we have of concepts. Instead, it can start from a different definition of what is a concept and explain that kind of concept. The idea is that the notion of concept as object of a thought is inconsequential. Even if it captures our subjective experience of it, it is irrelevant to actual concepts regarded as material things. So in effect, a materialist explanation of concepts shouldn’t try to base our subjective experience of them on physical interactions. It doesn’t have to represent any particular concept. Instead, it has to explain things, essentially different from each other, but that we can agree to regard as instances of the concept we have in mind even though they wouldn’t be instance of anything. They are just essentially different material things which happen to have in common that we can agree to regard them as instances of what we think of as a concept.
So, this doesn’t amount to replacing a conceptual category with everything that could fall into that category, replacing the concept by instances of it. Instead, all we need is that it should look to us as if it did, not to each human being at all times and all the time but here and now, at the moment we are looking at it. All I need to trade is to believe that the things believed to be exchanged are genuine instances of my concept of whatever I think I’m trading, even if they are not. We don’t need accuracy, equivalency or instantiation. We need belief. And then science can step in and endeavour to explain what it is we are really doing beyond what we believe we are doing.
I don't need to show that it's 'real', merely that what is meant is not accurately represented by specific physical systems. It can simply be an abstraction.
Abstraction of what?
I understand the notion of abstraction as representation abstracted from facts. The basic notion of concept is straightforward as something we conceive, irrespective of whether concepts could or could not have a reference but the notion of abstraction ordinarily assumes that an abstraction is abstracted from something else which it can be taken to represent. Are you talking about something else?
Togo said:
A fourth objection is that you lose the distinction between fact and fiction. If 'the scientific method' is merely a collection of physical descriptions or conceptions of that concept, and 'Santa Claus' is similarly a collection of physical descriptions or conceptions of that concept, then on what grounds are they treated differently?
I don’t see any distinction as far as concepts are concerned, so I don’t have this problem. The distinction may be made by reality itself, i.e. some concepts may have a reference, other do not. But the belief that a certain concept has a reference is something else entirely.
How can you have a 'reference' to a physical system? By what physical mechanism does this 'reference' operate?
How can a physical state/system have a truth value?
If the concept is physical, it exists. I think you will struggle to hang 'true' or 'false' on a purely physical mechanism without making some kind of reference to an abstraction which has no physical counterparty within the system.
A materialist explanation doesn’t have to explain how concepts regarded as objects of our thoughts could have actual references in the material world. All it needs to do is show that material things that are essentially different, for example a circle drawn in chalk on a blackboard and the orbit of a planet, are perceived by each of us as similar. This quite easy, I believe, relatively speaking. Broadly, some neuron, perhaps in the retina, will fire if it’s similar to a circle, and will not otherwise.
This is also a material specification of what kind of reference concepts would have. A thing can be deemed a reference of a concept if our percept of this thing is believed by us as sufficiently similar to the concept we have in mind.
Broadly, this is also saying that there are no actual concepts at all, if they have to be properly shared. Instead, there are material things we come to regard as as many instances of a particular concept. A materialist view of concepts will try to explain how this can come about. But it’s not going to try to explain that a concept as object of a thought is nothing but a particular set of material events or process.
We don’t need accuracy, equivalency or instantiation. These are all… concepts. They don’t exist in the material world at all. Instead, science could try to explain how we come to having these concepts, which is usually nothing but us believing that these concepts have actual instances in the material world.
I'm not saying this is the actual situation. But it seems a convincing explanation (maybe even explaining a kind of sharing of concepts), just one explanation among others, making all explanations possibly sufficient but none necessary, at least as far as I know.
Sorry for skipping some items but I think this is long enough as it is.
EB
