Further Thoughts on Conceptualism vs. Empiricism as a Paradigm for Knowledge

In an effort to preserve an interesting exchange I had with some others on the academia.edu website, I have imported the gist of the give and take of that discussion here. It concerns the role played by competing knowledge paradigms of empiricism and conceptualism, the first, elucidated originally by the British empiricists, most prominently David Hume, and the second the idea of shaping forces in our thoughts which give rise to so-called distinct ideas of things in our world from the mass of inflowing sensory inputs in which we, as living beings, are awash through our sense organs.

This latter "shaping" phenomenon first found expression in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in which he posited that a number of intuitive forms we have in our mental capacity enables the shaping of the inchoate flow of sensory experiences into a world of things of various types which we then go on to categorize. Kant's claim of inherent forms or shaping capacities in our intellect as being somehow given aside -- a disputable claim at best -- I think it does offer the best means of explaining how we humans make a world from our experiences. As Kant proposed, more is needed than Hume described in his empiricism.. Nevertheless, empiricism is not dispensable either. It is just insufficient to explain how we get from the stimuli and responses of other creatures we share this planet with to the capacity to conjure up a world from the environmental inputs we confront every day of our lives. I would suggest that the best name for this, an alternative paradigm for what we recognize as knowledge, is conceptualism, replacing the now somewhat hoary empiricist paradigm first effectively formulated as a philosophical explanation for what we count as "knowledge."

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Explaining Conceptualism - Contra Kant

The point of "conceptualism," at least as I have presented it here and elsewhere, is to move us away from Kant's notion of innate forms that shape our ideas (ideas which are developed in response to the inflow of sensory inputs). It's not that we aren't constrained by what the physical reality of our bodies are capable of taking in and making use of. Of course we are. It's that an idea, like Kant's idea, that we have certain intuited forms (e.g., of space, time, causation and so forth which somehow enstructure our inputs and so produce concepts) is misleading on my view. Of course we have and use concepts and of course they matter. But they aren't inherent in us but a function of how we respond to the world.

In other words, it's not that we have the "intuitions" Kant names, but that we have the tools to formulate the structures that grant us the capacity to form and utilize mental images, as a result of our sensory inputs, in getting about in the world and these look like "intuitions" to us . . . .

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The Case for Conceptualism

Philosophy abounds in “isms,” theories of what is and of how what is can be what it is. One of these “ism” questions revolves around the real vs. fictivist debate or Realism vs. Anti-Realism. This dispute asks us how we know when something is real as opposed to when it’s just made up in some fashion or other, a concoction of our language, there to serve a purpose that is not based on denotation, as in pointing to something discernible in the world, but rather to express or stand in for some other, less concrete idea. When is an ascription of a thing a real ascription of something that actually exists and when is it just doing some linguistic duty in order to simplify how we speak with one another?

In the case of the Realism vs. Anti-Realism dispute we want to know when is the name of something really of something and when is it a case of pretend, however convenient for our interlocutory purposes. Is reality only to be found in what we can put our hands on, see with our own eyes, smell, taste or hear? Do our senses alone determine what's real and if something we speak of is not sensible in this way, is it then not really real? Or must we expand our universe of allowable ontological elements to things that are intangible, unobservable, as well, to things not subject to sensory-conditioned experience? Are abstract ideas real? Numbers? Thoughts? Beliefs? Attitudes? Hopes? Fears? Are there really minds or just dispositions to behave? . . .

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The Role of Sentiment in Moral Judgment

Some brief thoughts on how the moral mechanism operates in creatures like us to highlight the link between sentiment and judgment . . . and show, thereby, that, at the level at which moral valuation kicks in, the two are tightly intertwined:

The place of ethics in our lives remains an important question in philosophy. Dealing with what is right or wrong in our dealings with others, ethical judgments seem to hinge on whether or not this or that claim of what is right or wrong can be true or false. If our conclusion is that such valuational claims cannot be, then nothing can be definitively characterized as right or wrong and pretty much anything goes. Of course, this is the way some of us sometimes approach the world, especially when we lose faith in the moral claims we’ve been taught from youth onwards, deeming these no more compelling than anyone's particular preferences. If my preferences are just as good as yours, or yours no better than mine, then why should I be guided in the choices I make by any preferences but my own? Or others be guided by mine? . . .

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Knowledge and Truth: Between Russell and Wittgenstein

. . . . Russell’s effort to remake language in purely logical terms by creating an "ideal language" that would squeeze the ambiguities out of natural language and so provide the sciences with a better tool for doing their work, failed to grasp language as a phenomenon of human life in its fullest and richest sense and to give us a basis for explicating the human tendency to believe without warrant—or when the warrants on offer are insufficient. . . .

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About Belief

What is "belief" and why is it so easy for us to believe what is false or doubt what isn't? Why is it so hard to "prove" the facts in a way that definitively settles belief questions? Isn't it just a matter of looking at the facts and comparing them to the words we use to express our beliefs? Isn't it just a simple activity of looking and seeing what is really there or what isn't? Why isn't it right to deny the gorilla in a room if there is none there to be seen, or a rhinoceros whose presence the young Wittgenstein famously insisted to his mentor, Bertrand Russell, he was not prepared to deny? What is it about belief and truth claims that allows us so much room to dither about when we suppose that getting the truth is really such a simple matter as checking the facts?

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Intelligence and Minds

What is intelligence? We humans often think of it as being able to recognize changes and plan our actions accordingly. We have language so we talk to ourselves, too, tell ourselves stories about what’s going on. We can conceptualize our situations. At a deeper level though intelligence begins to look like something else, maybe even something that is not brain dependent in the usual sense that we understand it at all . . .

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