Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2001 01:41:34 -0500 Subject: Re: HAB: conceptual thinking (concept vs. notion) From: Martin Blanchard <tintamar-AT-club-internet.fr> Thank you, Gary, for your long reply. I must say that we agree on so much that I wonder what I can add. There were indeed some misunderstandings, you noticed, and I can blame my too brief interventions. I have made some seriously ambiguous interventions, and that may be because english is a second language for me. What is being a concept of some x? Let me call a particular concept DOORKNOB (and let's say that many types of doorknobs are contained in the set). I definitely think that a concept of this type (and most, maybe not all) has some definitional properties. I can have a different concept for a particular doorknob that I cherish fondly... But, we strive to put definitions in the concept DOORKNOB so that we may use it for whatever we find is good enough for us. So, what is it being a concept X may in part be answered by what is it to possess one. I say in part, because I might be partially convinced by a story where the emphasis is on some problems posed by learnability. For example, it's hard to explain learnability if you rely too heavily on hypothesis-testing. You always do hypothesis with something. You form a kind of concept which you can test in the world. You can't do hypotheses testing with a pack of furry balls. You need concepts. It might not be just a "concept-ability" that's innate. But I stop here to reaffirm that I do believe in definitional properties for concepts, which can be called standard definitions, stereotypes, prototypes. Nevertheless, wouldn't it be also possible that we are born with some innate protoconcept of, say, "numeral"? In a highly cognitive operation, this is a concept that we use with its definitions, but in a protoexperience we might just need the protoconcept. So this is just one problem for a definitional theory. There are others, but I don't mind there being problems. They are not totally insoluble. I didn't express myself clearly. I think that most chances are on the side of a conceptual-role semantics. It's just that I performed some fallibility-tests in a not-so-explicit way, about a conceptual-role theory implicitly assumed... And Apel? I queried if it was right, that for him the FALLIBILITY concept contains something like "infallibly sure that our way of thinking requires it" as one of its properties. Let's assume that he accepts that concepts are definitions; if I understood you well, you would reply by saying that this definition itself is fallible. By introducing the idea of a concept becoming a notion, I messed things up. I just wanted to point at a distinction between what *must* be a definition as, ideally, a perfect property-naming entity in a set of definitions of a concept (the concept itself referring to the thing t), and the definition itself as how we use it (that I idiosyncratically called a "notion"). I mean, if Apel is right, that the concept FALLIBILITY has the property "infallibly, humans have a fallible practice", and that this fact proceeds from our way of thinking, we have something like a transcendantal argument taking some place occupied by the protoconcept story I just told. All this has some sense to me, but I might be explaining it really badly. And I think you're right: there would be some point in testing a theory of concept in Habermas' work. This would be a highly speculative enterprise. But... Misunderstandings can be creative! Regards, Martin B --- from list habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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