Thought and what we think about, a quick rehearsal of how we arrive at concepts

I find the working of concepts something so difficult to get my mind around that I cannot often enough rehearse my understanding of it to make sure I do not get any of its nuanced relationships wrong. So here goes.

1. A ‘thing’, that is something we might refer to as a thing in ordinary language, is an entity perceptually and conceptually wrested from the behaviour of the universe that can be recognized and mereologically constructed as an entity and is (often but not always) given a name and a definition (a short pithy description).
2. The name and the definition, as well as much of the appearance of the thing is what we bring to the thing.
3. The appearance we bring to the thing is however not only dependent upon the workings of our body but also very much on the behaviour the universe brings to the thing, within the environment and even the particular situation it brings it. The appearance is the product of the interaction of the universe with our perceptual and cognitive apparatus (which is of course also part of the behaving universe) under particular conditions environmentally determined.
4. What does the universe bring to the thing? Essentially all the physics, chemistry and biology at work in the universe including of course our body and its perceptual and conceptual functioning. For the sake of convenience we shall keep our bodies and what they do distinct from the rest for the moment, always acknowledging that this is a distinction of convenience and amounts to no more than a distinction. We are objects of nature and what we do is perfectly natural, however clever or stupid we find it.
5. The name and its definition is understood to refer to the thing, which means that when we utter the name it is understood through normative commitment that we thereby conjure up the conceptual presence of the thing, perhaps, through pointing, connecting it with the thing the name refers to.
6. If ‘a thing’ is where thought and the universe ‘meet’ to form twinned diads (thought and what is thought about) then concepts constitute the thought-part of that diad making up a ‘thing’.
7. What should we then call that which is thought about? We cannot use ‘the referent’ because we use the referent to refer to the thing as the compound construction made by us and the universe. For now I shall refer to that which the universe brings without our interference as ‘what is thought about’ and use that to mean ‘the entified part of the behaviour of the universe’.
8. Any concept is itself a compound assembly of things called properties allowing me, for example, to see and hear a thing behaving ‘over there’ whilst that over-thereness is in fact something I also carry with me conceptually. The image is something I hold in colours, sounds, smells, tastes, textures, shapes, spatiotemporal organizations, affordances, associations, technical information and such.
9. Through interaction I learnt to understand the working (or rather the behaviour) of things around me.
10. What there is ‘out there’ is something that ‘looks’ only because I have eyes to see, which together with my brain can encode the behaviour of electromagnetic waves reflecting on surfaces as colours and hues, shade and light. What there is out there sounds only because I neurologically encode vibrating air molecules as they interact with the surfaces they bounce against and the neurological activity this produces in my body as sound. The same is true with touch, taste and smell.
11. The behaviour of the universe is expressed in patterns whereby under similar circumstances we perceive and thus conceive of similar things. In other words there is a stability to the working of the universe that we can rely on and allows us to compare things.
12. This allows for the conception of universals and particulars. With these we are able to conceive of things at various levels of abstraction: all tables, some tables, this table. This allows us to spot family resemblance, which are constructs on the basis of analogies of greater or lesser degree.
13. This allows us to cut the universe up in sorts. We begin with all there is, this can conveniently be divided into mineral, vegetable and animal. (for the construction of categories see the relevant page) And then taking one of these to pursue our example, we have, for example, trees. Of the many trees there are, we can distinguish oak trees, but also ‘the oak tree near our house’. The oak tree near our house, has a name and a definition of what a tree and an oak tree is, but what makes it particular, is its context: it being near our house. It distinguishes itself as a particular instance of an oak tree, but perhaps we have not bothered to learn about trees and what they are called so that we hold it only in the recognition of a familiar image distinguished by a particularly shaped branch or scars of storm damage.
14. A concept then, is a weird and wonderful thing. It is a thought holding a widely dispersed, spatially and temporally organized assemblage of things such as further concepts and images of what those concepts are understood to refer to.
15. We may all hold a robust and stable idea of the notion of ‘tree’, but many of us would not be able to discern particular species of trees, never mind species of oak tree such as the black oak, the bur oak, pin oak, the willow oak etc. Without knowing the species of the tree, we may nevertheless be very familiar with the tree near our house: the way to climb it, what it looks like in spring and autumn. etc. All of it matters.

© jacob voorthuis, 2025. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.