§ 07 Concepts and what they do
A thing is where our conceptual apparatus and the universe meet in a world. (See the section Things and what they do)1
A concept can be seen as the conceptual side of the thing, whilst the entity so conceived has been differentiated from the behaving manifold by our perceptual and conceptual apparatus.
As such a concept is a primary instrument to think with and in thinking express the thought. This is because concepts acquire a movement, shape, name, or numeral.
The name is the bare skeleton of the concept, which then needs to be dressed with other concepts that work as that concept’s properties.
A concept thus works with other concepts to establish a frame of reference, which is a personally held network of concepts whereby every concept helps construct the others in a grand tautology constructing a person’s logical space, the space in which each concept interacts with the other concepts.
The interaction of concepts, shaped by how each is dressed in conceptualised properties, can structure a space of implications within which legitimate (and illegitimate) inferences can be made.
These, in turn, help produce propositions aimed at generating useful knowledge that helps us fit well within our environment.
As I said earlier, concepts helping to construct other concepts are called properties. (See also the section on Properties beating inferential paths through the space of implications: how reasoning works)
So, for example, the concept ”black” might help qualify a chair with that colour, and ”chair“ might qualify a room in which a chair may be found.
Properties are referred to by concepts used to indicate, qualify and/or quantify the concepts they help construct in their implicatory richness.
Properties become reasons to be used in any game of giving and asking for reasons.
In analysis, we must limit ourselves to assigning semantic and logical values to things working together in a situation.
Those values must then describe the behaviour of things (entities) in their functioning without immediately and thoughtlessly placing them in relation to ourselves in terms of our use and in terms of their soundness towards a certain goal.
Analysis is thus a purely mereological activity [from the Greek μέρος (meros) or ‘part’] and therefore a metaphysical activity that tries to capture ontological or semantic values in a model of reality structured by concepts.2
Concepts are held in various media that can express the signified as a signifier. What the concept signifies can be held and expressed, for example, through meaning-bearing gestures and symbols; alternatively, it can be held and expressed in images and in special kinds of images, such as words, sentences, and numbers.
These conceptually constructed ‘things’, whose sole use is their expression of thought, must be considered to be wholes made up of working parts as well as parts of greater wholes.
The concept ‘orange’, together with a collection of relevant descriptions and narratives, could potentially hold everything a person might be able to know about oranges.
Each person’s personally held concept of an orange will always hold less than that. At the same time a concept can also hold a limitless fund of excess trivia or nonsense.
Concepts taken together become the working parts in greater inferential constructions (lines of reasoning in an argument) which we call a frame of reference.
In this way the concept ‘orange’ works together with other concepts in the making of sentences and narratives, driven by what we know and think about things in terms of their properties.
Conversations thus become possible, like: “Would you like an orange?” “Hm, no thank you, I find the oranges in this city too bitter, I prefer to make marmalade with them.” “Ah, but then why don’t you take the orange I am offering you and make marmalade with it?” “Well, it’s very sweet of you, but one orange isn’t really enough; you need about two kilos’ worth to make it worth it.” “Oh..”
With our frame of reference shaping the space of implications within logical space we have redesigned the great chain of being in the form of a rhizomatic fabric of interlocking parts unfolding and refolding itself and differentiating into patterns in our minds.3
Each concept, like everything in the universe, can in principle be brought into a meaningful relationship with every other concept we have. Together they make our world of thought.
Thinking is the constant construction, partial dismantling, and subsequent reconstruction of a virtual world of thought that tries, through the creating and elaborating of concepts and their inferential structures, to model the world we think about.
The challenge is to match the world of thought to the world we think about as closely and usefully as possible.
This challenge is met well when it is done accurately, i.e. when the world we think about allows us to develop causal and modal competencies that are both useful to us.
The more accurately our model represents the modelled, the more confident we may be of our inferential control over ourselves and our environment.
Concepts are held and expressed as gestures, images, words, and numbers. However, the meaning of a concept comes about by attributing properties to concepts whereby they relate themselves to other concepts through their inferential working, such as for example in the story about bricks told by Louis Kahn:
“You say, ‘What do you want, brick?’ and the answer came: ‘I like an arch.’ And you say to brick, ‘Look, I want one too, but arches are expensive, and I can use a concrete lintel.’ And then you say: ‘What do you think of that, brick?’ Brick says: ‘I like an arch.’”4
Bricks have a size suitable to be held by a builder’s hand, a heft that encourages certain movements and discourages others, a geometry suitable for stacking, and a material constitution able to hold compression, but not so great for tension.
Taken together, these properties make bricks suitable for certain kinds of construction but not for others. The most ambitious thing you can do with a brick is to form an arch, or a dome. That is what this story is about.
Gestures acquire meaning through what they do in the context of a particular situation and the intentional stance of the interpreter of the conduct shown.
Images form compositions that we then interpret within the context in which that image is made to matter.
Words in their grammatical constructions form phrases, sentences, paragraphs, chapters and books, that convey a message that the reader then makes their own on the basis of their knowledge of their vocabulary and the way that helps shape their taste and beliefs.
Numbers, through the inferential structures of calculation, form quantitative descriptions of the world, modelling mechanical and dynamic processes as well as much more.
At all scales, it makes sense to try to graspq and understand the parts in their team-like working relationship, so that it becomes possible to say inferentially meaningful things about them.
For example, ‘You might need to tighten the chain on your bicycle’. There is a great deal of causal and modal competence implicit in such a sentence, (also called tacit knowledge) some of which most of us could make explicit quite easily, namely, by explaining that there is such a thing as a bicycle and what such things are used for, how they are generally supposed to behave under certain circumstances and what is wrong when they do not behave that way; that the bicycle is divisible into working parts, each of which having a specific function within the whole.
The chain is linguistically privileged in the sentence, by being named, but cannot be separated from the other working parts it interacts with but that are left unmentioned, such as the sprockets, the axles with their bolts, the frame etc., with which the chain forms a working whole.
On the basis of the behaviour of the bicycle at the time of its being cycled on, something is noticed by someone with enough causal and modal competence and turned into advice.
If acted upon effectively, the bicycle might start behaving differently, and perhaps start behaving ‘better’ with reference to some good understood by adept users of bicycles.
In our everyday use of language, the conceptually sanctioned wholes and parts are brought together in their working relationship to each other with words, images, and numbers, through qualifications and quantifications, where much of what we mean is not said but left implicit or is even ignored.
Images, words, and numbers are products of abstraction; they select from the manifold that is reality, and do not cover that reality on a one-to-one scale.
Concepts focus on carefully or indeed carelessly selected and distilled essences. Essences, or that distilled quality that makes something that thing and not something else, generally form the main thrust of a definition.
A definition is a short, pithy description of a thing, bringing together those properties that we find analytically and critically important to highlight with reference to our use of the thing.5
The thing is a product of our conceptualisation of differentiated bits of the world we think about and engage with. It engages our causal and modal competences so that we can place the thing in inferential relations with other things in an event or situation.
Gestures, or any conceptualised behaviour, images, sentences, and calculations present reality to us in the form of signs that are assigned conceptualized properties referring to observed behaviour that have inferential value.
A property or quality just is an effect, observed and named, which then becomes a reason in discourse.
Our conceptual competence, which allows us to work inferentially with observed behaviour captured in images, language, and computation, works with abstractions of reality, that is, conceptual ‘distillations’ of the world we think about, captured in concepts and made to work through their inferential structures.
What we can say with respect to bicycle chains is no different to what we can say with respect to architectural wholes and parts, or indeed anything that presents itself to us in the form of things with working relations forming other things.
The logical, aesthetic, and ethical workings of architecture are subject to the inferential mechanics of the conceptual network brought to bear on the discussion.
At the same time, we might have to admit that the objective and subjective workings of a building are somewhat more complex than those of a loose bicycle chain, even if they are not categorically different. There are just many more factors involved.
In summary, then, critique looks downriver, subjectifying human being in its environment with reference to the useful and the good.
The activity places human being at the absolute centre of a world as understood in terms of a conceptual and inferential frame of reference, organised perspectivally in terms of that human being’s desires, concerns, values, interests, norms, and priorities.
Analysis, on the other hand, looks upriver to see what there is and how it can be usefully objectified by being dismantled into working parts, modelling things, situations and events by the thinking subject restricted only by their conceptual competence and sophistication.
However, in analysis, use values, concerns, interests, norms and priorities are carefully disentangled, bracketed and set aside for the benefit of a reliable semantic and ontological analysis, where the objective working of things is the focus, i.e. how a bicycle uses a chain to show specific behaviour, whatever that behaviour might be useful for.
This is no less useful, of course, but the use of analysis lies precisely in the objective accuracy of our understanding and as such it is good to see things only in relation to each other and not immediately in relation to us, unless we are part of the working whole, which, in the functioning of a bicycle, is the case. In that sense, our part in that whole can be properly and harmlessly objectified.
Analysis recreates the world in our brain according to a conceptual model. Critique places us in that model in terms of use and virtue.
A good analysis convinces on the basis of empirical confirmation together with the rational coherence and consistency of assertions, whilst a good critique convinces on the basis of an analytical understanding of a thing or situation and our capacity for affordance (seeing the possible use benefit of something). An analysis is objectifying.
A critique is subjectifying; it does not persuade on the basis of ‘facts’ but through realisation and recognition of the useful, the beneficial, the harmful and so forth. Realisation and recognition, in turn, require empathy.
Critique convinces on the basis of a concordance or harmony we feel when we realize and recognize some analytical truth to be good, or someone’s critical stance to be applicable to oneself.
Empathic recognition helps us become self-conscious through our interaction with things and people around us.
We have the cognitive apparatus ready, but it works and develops itself through the body’s interaction with its environment. I.e., Hegel’s notion that we become conscious of our selves through our consciousness of others and Heidegger’s notions that it is not just our interaction with others but our interaction with all things in a kind of team play, is in this sense very compelling.6
- A slightly older version of this paragraph was first published in Jacob Voorthuis, Theoria, use, intention & design, a philosophical reckoning; Analysis & Critique: Gardening in the metaphysics of the beautiful, the true, and the good, AHT, Tu/e (2024) ↩︎
- My approach to analysis rests upon the work of Kathrin Koslicki, The Structure of Objects (Oxford, 2008) and her Form, Matter, Substance (Oxford 2018). ↩︎
- Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minnesota press 1987; Original French publication 1980). ↩︎
- Louis Kahn, Essential Texts, ed. Robert Twombly (Norton & Company 2003) ↩︎
- There is a lot to be said about the act of definition. My favourite essay on definition is Richard Robinson, Definition, (Oxford 1952). G.W. Leibniz gives a wonderful definition of definition which is satisfyingly pragmaticist. For him a clear notion of something comes about from having a list of ‘marks and tests that are sufficient to distinguish the represented thing from all other similar bodies.’ From: G.W. Leibniz, ‘Meditations on Knowledge, Truth and Ideas,’ in: Philosophical Papers and Letters, Vol. 1, Leroy E. Loemker ed. (Chicago University Press 1946) p. 449. ↩︎
- See Robert Brandom A Spirit of Trust, A reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Harvard 2019) Part II. See also J.P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness in the new translation by Sarah Richmond (Washington Square Press 2021) originally published in 1943) Especially Part III, Being for the Other, pp. 306 ff. And Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit translated and introduced by Terry Pinkard (Cambridge University Press 2019) ↩︎
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