Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  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 ...

From Dewey to James: his authority in these matters.  In this and the next post, I'll talk about William James' view of concept formation.  Starting with Principles , Volume I, Chapter XII, Conception Some conceptions are of events, some of things, some of qualities.  Any fact, be it thing, event, or quality, may be conceived sufficiently for purposes of identification, if only it be singled out and marked so as to separate it from other things. Simply calling it 'this' or 'that' will suffice. To speak in technical language, a subject may be conceived by its denotation, with no connotation, or a very minimum of connotation, attached. The essential point is that it should be re-identified by us as that which the talk is about, and no full representation of it is necessary for this, even when it is a fully representational thing. In this sense, creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception.  All that is required is that they should recogni...

  So ... continuing our line of thought into a third day: why is this idea of individually specific concept acquisition (about "dog" or "life-bearing planets" or whatever) important for the philosophy of education?  The answer is that it emphasizes that educators have to meet a child where he is -- where, conceptually, he lives.  The temptation, given the old Baconian view of concepts, might be to fill a child's mind with facts and then start showing him how to draw inferences from these facts, in effect drawing up a chart of similarities and differences.  Dewey gives an example from geography, "The first thing to do" on a Baconian view, may be to give a definition of geography itself.  Then to define "the various abstract terms ... pole, equator, ecliptic, zone -- from the simpler units to the more complex which are formed out of them; then the more concrete elements are taken in similar series: continent, island, coast, promontory, cape.......

  As we discussed yesterday: a child will begin working with a concept of dog with only one data point: Fido. Nobody waits, or should wait, for enough material to build up a table of similarities and contrasts. The building of assumptions and experimentation begins immediately.  Meeting the neighbors' dog is simply an early experiment in one's life. The neighbors' dog may be much larger than our own family dog: I may have to revise my view that dogs fit naturally on human laps, like Fido.   Ah, but what does that have to do with us? One might ask. "There are only adults in this room."  Still: there are matters on which we have only one datum. Consider life on Earth. We know as of yet of only one planet that hosts life.  We have hypotheses about others, and a huge body of fiction on the subject. But we have no reliable information about any other such planet.  This is NOT an example of Dewey's.  [He was writing How we think only a few years after ...