What are things?

Thesis: Thought is performed with conceptions of things. Networks of linked and braided concepts twin our experience of the world and together with the inferential paths both allow, guide and evaluate our intercourse with our environment.

A necessary condition for this to go well is that our network of conceptions twins the universe of behaviour as accurately as possible.¹ If this is so it might be a good idea to have a thorough conception of how a ‘thing’ is constituted.

We use the word ‘thing’ all the time in our everyday language. The dictionary defines a thing as an object that one need not, cannot, or does not wish to give a specific name to. In other words it helps us indicate entities in the most generic way possible: any entity at all can be called a thing.

Personally I think the word ‘object’ used in the definition is already going too far, we even offer thinghood to relationships between objects, as in the sentence, “Do you to have a thing going?”, or events, “what is that festival-thing you are going to?”, phenomena and even situations, “here’s the thing…”. Once you start thinking about how things are actually constituted they become strange creatures populating our brain. Let’s take a closer look.

‘Things’

Concepts construct ideated entities we call things. The word ‘thing’ stands for any such entity. These entities are made of thought coming together with the stuff making up the behaviour of the universe. That coming together is brought about through reference.

The word ‘leaf’ refers to a type of thing, namely a leaf that has a range of possible appearances linked by family resemblance. This is a universal. A type of thing that can then be used as a template to indicate particular examples of leaves or the other way round that particular leaves can refer to the universal idea of leaf.

So, concepts like ‘leaf’ refer to things. Concepts are made of thought. Things on the other hand are not just simply objects in the world ‘out there’ to which concepts are ready to refer. Things are made up of at least two working parts: 1. what thought refers to in the world we think about and 2. what our perceptual and cognitive apparatus brings to, and helps shape what we think about.

Colours, sounds, smells, tastes, textures, conceptions of purpose and use, value and taboo, associations and characterizations are what we bring to the thing. The behaviour of the material-form compound in interaction with its environment that generates those colours etc. brings the rest.

Our perceptual and cognitive apparatus does not work in isolation in the generation of things. The world we think about is constructed by our own perceptive and cognitive apparatus but the work it does, rests for an important part on work done for us by the community we are part of and what that community over time has made of the world of our shared experience.

Working with things in our interaction with our environment is an activity whereby thought differentiates, indicates, describes and evaluates behaviour properly parceled into things, and tries to understand and evaluate the relations between those parcels bringing out the properties of things in interaction with other things (the way they behave under certain circumstances), and their change in events as well as their constellations in stable (seemingly static) or dynamic (eventful) situations.

This thinking about things constitutes the activity of reasoning. Reasoning generally takes the basic universal form: if p then q (or formally p → q) and all its many variations. (I don’t want to get to finnicky here)

Reasoning is made possible by the fact that concepts form networks with other concepts in sentences and paragraphs or visual compositions and experiences that have been made narratively coherent in some way to allow properties pertaining to the entities to be articulated.

This rose is red = Concept₁ {This rose} + Concept₂ {is} + Concept₃ {red} = This rose has under normal conditions the property of showing itself to being the colour red. For current purposes this will do as an accurate proposition.

Concepts form ‘things’ in our thought and hold them as names, images, numbers, patterns of movement or gestures (bodily movements) which then refer to that strange construction of our perception and cognition in interaction with the behaviour of the universe that is capable of placing a red apple ‘out there, whilst the redness of the apple is most assuredly only in our minds.

How do we picture this strange relationship? 1. A concept is the thing thought. 2. The thing perceived to be ‘out there’, or, the object, relationship, event or situation under scrutiny, is made up of a. what we make of it and b. what the world brings to it. 2.a may be further distinguished into a. what our community has made of it and taught me, and b what I myself make of it in interaction with the thing itself. A more detailed typlogical analysis is possible but would make the discussion a little tiresome.

How can we best describe 2.b., namely what the world, or as I am fond of calling it, the universe of behaviour brings to the thing? We have to understand that what physics and chemistry have been able to differentiate does not look without lookers bringing their looking to the thing, does not sound without listeners and hearers bringing their hearing to the thing, does not smell, taste or even feel without smellers, tasters and feelers bringing their smelling, tasting and feeling to the thing.

So what are we left with? We could call it substance. But I prefer to use substance for the stuff of the universe as a whole and that must include us and all we are capable of. I could use the word force or will, and they are good candidate but I shall settle, as much out of a sense of familiarity as anything else, for matter-form compound, with the understanding that matter may well be better described as force and that force and matter give form or organization to stuff..

That then makes the following sentence possible. The world offers behaviour; thought entifies that behavior into recognizable things. Each thing is thus consituted on the one hand by behavioural matter-form compound and the way that is perceived and conceived of + its further conceptual elaboration through the interaction of thought and experience. It is something that is both in the world and in our minds, keeping in mind that our mind is part of the behaviour of the universe. Things are constructed through interaction, perception/cognition and community interpretation. ‘Things’ emerge through behavioural interaction, recognition, naming, and conceptual elaboration.

To summarize, the core ingredients of a concept are:

1. Perceptual and Cognitive base: a distinguishable bit of the universe’s behaviour given in a spatially and temporally organized image of that behaviour to be recognized in my environment and held in memory.
2. Differentiation: that ‘bit’ being perceived as different can thus be conceived looking upriver, as a part of a greater whole (its environment) and downriver as constituting a whole in itself made up of working parts.
3. Integration: thus becoming a thing it is made into a cohering entity (the word ‘image’ refers to a coherent body of information composed, or brought together by any or all of the senses working together such that the image can be recognized when perceiving similar things) that interacts with its environment bringing change or being itself changed by that interaction. This behaviour we conceive of in the form of properties. Properties are effects that will become reasons for doing things intentionally.
4. Naming: a name, symbol or pattern with which to conjure up the universal referred to or indicate a particular instance of what the name refers to.
5. Intensional definition: an intensional definition of the entity is constructed, giving necessary and sufficient conditions for when and how the concept should be used in discourse and in how discourse should be related to interaction with the hing referred to by the concept..
6. Extensional definition: an extensional definition is constructed in the form of a list of particular examples, (including exceptions and examples needing qualification) that can be included under the name (something I can point at in recognition).
7. Indeterminate elaboration: The concept is elaborated in use whereby it becomes increasingly rich and/or accurate in its denotative meaning and increasingly rich in its connotative meaning. With rich is meant that it collects properties and memories in which those properties had certain effects.

1. This page is, like most of my philosophy, much influenced by analytical thinking from Frege and Wittgenstein (early and late) to ordinary language philosophy and the pragmatic branch of analytic philosophy for me best represented by Willard van Ormon Quine (especially his Word and Object (1960) and Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1957 & 1997) all brought together by Robert Brandom’s Oeuvre. ↩︎

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