Let's think some more about that James passage I quoted yesterday. For James, a concept is something quite simple. It may form directly from perception without benefit of any intermediary thinking. It, is accordingly, NOT an act of abstraction.
Consider an intestinal polyp again. We are already supposing it can perceive. Suppose it perceives visually, and in color. It 'sees' a certain orangey-patch pass by. [Part of a carrot that its host is consuming, we say as outside observers.] The polyp may just call this patch of orange to itself the thingumbob. Later, in the absence of the thingumbob, the notion of the patch of orange, a quite specific shade of orange, may pass through its polypy noggin. There doesn't have to be any abstractness here. It can be as particular a notion as you please. The polyp is think of the same as the same, and so it is internally encountering the thingumbob again. It is conceptualizing.
In general, and speaking now again of humans not any longer of polyps, James says that "the mind can conceive any quality or relation it pleases, and mean nothing but it, in isolation from everything else in the world."
James was concerned here, as so often, to take a stand against Hegel, and in particular against those he calls the "Hegelizers". The Hegelizers make out conception to be something mystical, in that for them concepts are always developing of a certain inward moving logic. They can turn into their antithesis etc. All this to James, writing here as a psychologist, seems absurd.
We entertain different concepts today than we did yesterday. They have complicated relations with each other. But creating fables out of their resemblance or otherwise does not advance ANY valuable cause. The conception of "6 + 7" does not generate the conception of 13 any more than it generates 14 or 12!
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But I'd like to engage in an act of meta-conceptualization. Both Dewey and James in the contexts in which we have quoted them speak of concept formation as something that does NOT require abstraction, I.e. that does not require any plural number of instances that it joins together. The only dog a child needs to know is Fido. the only orangey patch the polyp needs to encounter is its first one, in order for them to be "dog" and "thingumbob" respectively.
Dewey makes this point in order to contravene a Baconian notion of generalization/induction and in order to discourage a lot of boring and ineffective rote learning. James makes the same point in order to oppose the Hegelian notion of concepts as virtual organisms that evolve of their own accord. But both make it.
The point, we can recognize, is the same as the same. Thingumbob again.
I question whether a concept "may form directly from perception without benefit of any intermediary thinking [and] is accordingly, NOT an act of abstraction." Suppose I perceive a blue china dish. James (as you quoted in the previous post), says that it may "be singled out and marked so as to separate it from other things." What is "it" -- a dish or a blue object or an object made of china? We make the decision, or abstraction, if you will.
ReplyDeleteThinking of a screen shot of your visual field right ... NOW. And think of the whole of the contents of that visual field at that time as "THAT". I submit, with James, that THAT will suffice for a concept. With and without a blue china dish in the field. It is unlikely any very crowded visual field will ever be exactly repeated. But so long as you remained ready to say "that again" about it when if it ever did, you would have a concept without abstraction. A concept can be just a percept that is not at the moment present. Likewise with anything excerpted from that whole perceptual field. The blue china dish as a whole, with all particulars we might note about it, can be simply a cut-and-paste from that screen shot.
DeleteI think you're saying that a concept is a visual memory to which one applies no verbal description, such as "blue china dish." Is that possible? When I look around the room and see a picture on the wall, a light switch, etc., I think, "picture on the wall," "light switch," etc.
DeleteSuppose that a non-verbal animal has a visual perception. Will even he or she, in his memory, not identify individual aspects of the perception, analogously to verbalizing them, rather than remembering it in a gestalt fashion? I don't know; I'm just wondering.
ReplyDeleteI won't try to get any deeper into this. I'll just say: my dog knows me chiefly by smell. She loves to play with certain socks, because -- I gather -- they have the daddy-smell still on them. With odor perhaps more clearly than with a visual field we can think of this conceptualization of the same AS the same without abstraction. Some quite particular whiff becomes associated in doggy mind with the fellow who often pets her, feeds her, etc. THAT whiff she recognizes as the same as the one present when the sock is in her mouth. There may be abstraction arising out of this situation but I don't think the abstraction is a prerequisite to it.
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