Concepts mediate our perception and understanding of reality
Antony Kagirison
What is a Concept?
“Reality is constructed by the brain, and no two brains are exactly alike”, Anil Seth – a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex in England.
No thought can exist without concepts. At its most basic form, a concept is an abstract mental construct, which means that they are formed in the mind. In other words, a concept is a mental entity. This raises a question, what function does this mental entity serve? Answering this question allows for the concept to be defined as follows.
A concept can be described as a mental entity that provides a meaning to an object and/or idea in the physical world or an idea in the imaginary world. This is how I define a concept at the moment. My definition differs from how a concept is defined by the computer scientist, Joseph Amadee Gougen, who defined concept according to his newly developed thesis that he designated as the Unified Concept Theory (UCT).
As I will explain later, a concept is a representational device, and like any device, it can be defective. A defective concept needs to be re-engineered to make it better serve its purpose. Also, like any device, a concept can be created and developed to fit a specific purpose. The creation of a new concept and re-engineering of an existing concept constitute the process of fixing language.
I consider fixing language as the basis of creating an evolved language. An evolved language has fewer defective concepts in its vocabulary as compared to its antecedent (or predecessor) language. Also, the ability of a language to support (or encourage) concept creation and concept re-engineering elevates this language into a superior language in the hierarchy of languages. This implies that if two languages are compared to each other, a superior language allows for conceptual engineering which reduces its load of defective concepts in its vocabulary as compared to an inferior language. This partly explains why a superior language develops the intellect while an inferior language straddles the intellect. In my opinion, English is a superior language to Kiswahili, which means that English speakers have access to a larger intellectual horizon as compared to Kiswahili speakers. This is quite obvious in the worldviews of monolingual Kiswahili speakers and monolingual English speakers.
Unified Concept Theory
According to UCT, a concept is simply an abstract idea that exists as the hypostasis of concrete thoughts, beliefs, and principles. Basically, according to UCT, a concept is the foundation of any principle, belief, or thought. The UCT definition is context dependent as it is developed from seven (7) formal theories of concept. These theories are the Information Flow theory developed by Jerry Seligman and Jon Barwise, the Formal Concept Analysis developed by Rudolf Wille, the Geometry-based Conceptual Spaces model developed by Peter Gärdenfors, the Logic-based Mental Spaces thesis developed by Gilles Fauconnier, and the Lattice of Theories developed by John Sowa; as well as the Conceptual Integration (or Blending) model that was jointly developed by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier.
For me, I am trying to eliminate context dependence in my definition. For this reason, I adopt a post-paradigmatic approach to describing what a concept is. My definition adopts the three (3) understandings of what a concept is in contemporary philosophy, i.e concept as a mental representation, concept as an ability of a human mind to study and interact with reality, and concept as a product of Fregean senses. Moreover, my definition allows the concept to retain its psychological and logical structures. The approach I have adopted allows me to explain de-novo conceptual engineering later in this study.
My definition implies that concepts allow human beings to interact with reality and strive to study and understand this reality – regardless of whether the reality is a noumenon or a phenomenon. Therefore, if two different people have different understandings of the same concept, then the two realities described by this single concept will be different to these two people. This is the basis of the process known as controlled hallucination in cognitive science. Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field of study that examines the concept in its formalized and raw states. The UCT approach studies concept in its formalized state. It also seeks to answer the pertinent question: do concepts mediate all cognition?
My definition of concept reveals that concept instantiation occurs in the mind – which is congruent with the principle of a concept as a mental representation. So, how critical is the concept to the operations of the mind? As it turns out, the mind cannot work without concepts.
Concept as the Building Block
The basic building block of any logic or language is the concept. The concept allows for categorization of an object. This allows this object to be classified under a specific category. Interestingly, category itself is a product of a concept. For example, man is a social animal is a statement that places the concept of man into the category called animal, with the qualifier social animal being used to reveal that there are different subcategories in the category of animal. Likewise, animal is a concept that belongs to a category called living beings; and living beings is a concept that falls the category called beings. Being is also a concept. Therefore, concepts are used to classify concepts, and this gives rise to a hierarchy of concepts that is described later.
The study of concept is significant in cognitive science, linguistics, psychology and the philosophical fields of ontology and philosophy of mind. In epistemics, a concept is used to validate a piece of knowledge by enabling the study of the origin and development of this piece of knowledge. This is the basis of the archaeology of knowledge and history of ideas, a field that concerned the French philosopher, Paul-Michel Foucault.
Superordinate Concept, Supervenience, and Subordinate Concept
As mentioned, a concept allows for categorization. This has also enabled philosophers to create a hierarchy of concepts so that we have a high-level concept, a basic concept, and a low-level concept.
A high-level concept is called a superordinate concept. The basic concept is also called a mid-level or middle-level concept or simply an ordinate concept. On the low tier is the low-level concept which is called the subordinate concept. Let me use the example of a MacBook laptop to differentiate between these three levels of concepts.
MacBook is a laptop manufactured by Apple Inc. Therefore, taking MacBook as a basic concept, we can show that laptop is a superordinate concept. It is quite simple to do this.
MacBook as mentioned is classified as a laptop, and there are different types of laptops with MacBook being one of these types of laptop. To confirm that laptop is a superordinate concept to the concept of the MacBook, one needs to know that (s)he cannot define what a MacBook is without deferring to the concept of the laptop. This is application of the principle of differance as developed by the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida. Basically, MacBook and Laptop are two different concepts, but one concept is nested in the other concept i.e there is a concept that one must know in order to know the other concept. In other words, the understanding of the basic concept is deferred to understanding the meaning of the superordinate concept.
Relatedly, there are also two different types of MacBook laptops – the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro. Because the MacBook Air falls under the category of MacBook, then it is considered as a subordinate concept in reference to the concept of the MacBook. As expected, to know what a MacBook Air is, one must know what a MacBook is.
The understanding of the basic (or ordinate) concept is deferred to understanding the meaning of the superordinate concept.
Understanding this heirarchy of levels allows one to understand the philosophical principles of supervenience and entailment in symbolic logic. An example of supervenience is the relationship between the internet and the World Wide Web (WWW). The WWW is part of the internet, and is thus not synonymous with the internet but it is a class below the internet. To know what the WWW is, one must know what the internet is. Therefore, supervenience is simply a description of how two concepts relate to each other in terms of their hierarchy of meaning. In the example above, the internet supervenes on the WWW. Entailment is explained later in this study.
Understanding the relationships that superordinate and subordinate concepts have in reference to the basic/ordinate concept allows one to perform philosophical analysis of these concepts in terms of their etymology and teleology, as well as determine if the concepts are fit for purpose.
Equally, understanding what a concept is, as well as its place in the hierarchy of concepts, are central to training of artificial intelligence (AI) models and engines. In fact, the definition of a concept provided by UCT allows for an AI to be trained to understand concepts. This training allows the AI to perform tasks – such as computer vision and speech recognition – as an intelligent machine. The machine is intelligence because it can recognize concepts and utilize them in its computations.
Ontology
Ontology is the study of being. According to Martin Heidegger in his magnum opus, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), being is described as anything that exists, be it an idea, material object, or thought process. This borrows from the phenomenological approach to studying reality that was pioneered by the German philosopher, Edmund Husserl. Husserl argued that our perception of reality is influenced by our intentions, and thus our understanding of things is colored by our intentions. This Heideggerian approach to the study of being would later influence the development of the philosophical school of postmodernism which described the ground of being as subjective, rather than objective. This allowed for a single concept to have different meaning to different people. which served as the basis of ontological relativism.
In this study, I am applying the Heidegerrian approach to being in the study of the concept. Basically, this means that a concept is a being, and thus can be subjected to the Husserlian inquiry of the noumenon of this being as per the Heidegerrian maxim of “back to the things themselves”. To do this, we start with a simple question, what kind of being is a concept? Answering this question allows us to answer three related questions:
1. What functions are allowed by the being of the concept?
2. What functions are disallowed by the being of the concept?
3. How is concept as a being integrated into the theory of mind?
Concept as the Psychological Being that Builds the Weltanschauung
In cognitive science and philosophy of the mind, there is a theory called the representational theory of the mind or simply, cognitive representation. According to this theory, the mind creates a cognitive symbol to represent an object or being in the external reality. This means that the external reality is represented by cognitive symbols in the mind. This cognitive symbol is a mental image (or mental representation) of what exists in reality. According to this theory, our understanding of the material reality depends on our understanding of its representative cognitive symbols. Now, here is the question: how is a concept related to the cognitive symbol?
The building block of the cognitive symbol is the concept. In other words, a cognitive symbol is made up of concepts. This means that the cognitive symbol cannot exist without concepts.
The cognitive symbol serves as the building block of a propositional attitude. A propositional attitude is basically the way a person perceives a proposition. A proposition is a statement that is considered by a person to be either true or false. In symbolic logic, a proposition mirrors a premise, and is considered to be a declarative statement. Colloquially, a propositional attitude is called a stance and it is the stand that a person takes towards an idea or set of ideas.
The propositional attitude is the building block of the understating of reality that a person has, and this conception of reality is called the worldview or weltanschauung. This worldview shapes the behavior of a person. Because the cognitive symbol determines how a person perceives reality, I can state equivocally that concepts mediate our perception and understanding of reality.
Physicalism and the Concept
Physicalism is a philosophical school of thought that states that “everything is physical”, and it expresses this stance as follows: “there is nothing over and above the physical”. Like the representational theory of the mind, physicalism considers a concept to be a mental representation.
However, it differs from cognitive representation by stating that this mental representation is a symbol (or set of symbols) that are created from the brain’s physical matter. There is medical evidence for this because damage to some parts of the brain affect the way the patient understands reality. For example, a traumatic brain injury to the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex (of the brain) results in memory dysfunction that expresses itself as behavioral memory deficits, which reveal that propositional attitudes of the patient have been impaired.
Recent neurophysiological research has revealed that concepts are stored in long-term memory in the cerebral cortex (i.e cortical memory), while the memory of daily events (i.e episodic memory) that put these concepts into use is stored in the hippocampus. This means that hippocampal damage causes the patient to lose memory of daily events, but still retain his/her acquired understanding of concepts. Another interesting fact is that events that occur during dreams use concepts already stored in cortical memory, and may also influence how a person understands the concept independent of events that occurred when the person was awake. This explains why imaginary events shape the understanding of existing concepts.
Mathematical Platonism and Abstract Object
In 1981, Edward Zalta used mathematical platonism to develop a theory known as the abstract object theory (AOT). In this theory, any physical object has properties that can be observed and studied using empirical means. For example, a yellow bean bag chair has the property of being yellow in color.
According to AOT, for this property of (color) yellow to exist, there must be an object in the realm of platonic forms that exemplifies all the qualities of color yellow. Because this object only exists in the mind and cannot be found in the material world, it is called an abstract object. It is this abstract object that comes into the mind of a person when (s)he thinks of color yellow, and then compares the color of the aforesaid chair with the “true” yellow of this abstract object, thus allowing him/her to conclude that the chair is yellow (and can even grade the intensity[or chroma] of yellowness of the chair).
In AOT,
