The Anatomy of Concepts

The Anatomy of Concepts

According to empirical rationalism, concepts have a dual architecture, consisting of both an innate component and an acquired component. They are part instinctual and part experiential, part genes and part history. Here I will offer a more detailed account of how they are structured, introducing some technical terms.[1] First, the innate component: it isn’t yet a concept but only a precursor of one, a kind of template or blueprint. I will call it a character, meaning by that what biologists mean, i.e., a heritable feature of an organism (morphological, behavioral, or biochemical). But I also want the reader to keep in mind David Kaplan’s concept of character in his study of indexicality, roughly the meaning of a context-dependent word (“I”, “here”, “now”, “that”, etc.). So, we can say that every concept has an innately fixed character, genetically programmed. This character is potentially a concept, but it requires a triggering condition in order to reach that status, typically a sense experience. When this happens, the character becomes expressed in the form of some sort of conscious experience, say seeing red or thinking a “red” thought. Before that it was merely latent.

The conscious expression occurs in a context—a life history—which typically involves a causal transaction, like a physical stimulus. The character thus finds expression in a context. The context is not innate, so that the concept has an acquired component as well as an innate component. As a result of these factors, the concept comes to have a reference, i.e., a real-world correlate, say the property of being square. Thus, the character combines with the context to generate an expression that has a reference. The genes find themselves in an environmental context that leads them to be expressed in a mental state that has a reference in the external world. All this is involved in the formation of a concept out of an innate component and an empirical component—the inborn and the historically contingent. The two mesh together to produce a mental item that refers to something determinate. This is the basic form of an empirical rationalist theory: a dual component theory that borrows from both the empiricist and the rationalist traditions. A conscious conceptual thought is the upshot of these interacting factors, one located in the genes, the other in the environment. Concepts are Janus-faced and hybrid—all of them. They are partly Descartes and partly Locke, intimately joined. There is no such thing as a purely empiricist concept or a purely rationalist concept. The apparatus sketched here provides us with a coherent account of their manner of combination.[2]

[1] This paper follows on from and supplements my “Quasi-Empiricism”.

[2] It doesn’t purport to solve mysteries regarding the mental operations sketched; it merely provides a format for thinking about the structure and natural history of concepts conceived in the hybrid way indicated.