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. Concepts are the tools by which we concept users turn inchoate inputs into distinctive mental pictures. The mechanism which enables this, concept development and deployment, is not fixed by being innate in us but is developed by us because we have the neurological capacities for doing so. When these are activated by contact with the sensory inputs external to ourselves, they enable us to develop responsive systems that make use of these inputs by organizing them in useful ways and so enable us to respond more effectively to them because we can come to see them in broadly relational terms rather than as isolated stimuli.

Concepts of space, time, causation, etc., are thus caused by the way our inputs affect us, given the brains we have. They are a response to the way the world (that is our external environment) affects us and not, themselves, causal of what we see around us. As such, they improve our capacity to respond to what is external to us.

Foremost among our tools for this, for developing systemic means for responding are those capacities humans possess, specifically via the human brain itself and what it is capable of -- which includes using our inherent signaling capacities (shared with other creatures) for a new purpose: communication of our own interiority. Thus we are able to formulate and share what we see, hear, taste, smell, feel, believe, think and so forth. Unlike our fellow earthbound creatures, we can communicate more than just simple activating messages to our fellows.

Other creatures signal, of course, and do so in ways useful to themselves as a species. But we, because our brains are capable of constructing language (which uses the tools of signaling to depict, as in describe, refer, name, and, generally, talk about our inputs in ways that convert them into "things"), can also do something that works for ourselves, individually, as well as for our species. Evolution is a species improving process but it is also pertinent to individuals and it takes a conceptual mind to recognize and apprehend this.

Because of the capacity to conceptualize, we can, in fact, see ourselves as selves which other creatures, lacking language, cannot. Thus the concept of the self enters the picture through our language-enabled ability to distinguish between an outer and an inner world of experience. And this conceptual level of self-awareness fundamentally changes our nature, our way of being in the world .

Language is the critical tool for conceptualizing and concepts are the mechanism by which a world takes shape. Being able to "see" our environmental inputs as a world, as part of something greater than the immediate place and moment in which we stand, is the result of having the ability to conceptualize and that is a tremendous evolutionary advantage for creatures like us, thus helping explain our proliferation and dominance over other life forms on this planet.

Kant wasn't wrong to point out that concepts are key, but his idea of concepts was too limited. Concepts aren't intuited (that is to say they aren't inherent forms of understanding already in us) with which we are somehow endowed. They are linguistically constructed methods for sorting and getting about in our world -- something for which we have evolution to thank, if anything is to be thanked.

Developing and using concepts fundamentally changes the nature of the creatures that enjoy access to them. The thesis of conceptualism provides an account of how knowledge of things (i.e., claims and beliefs asserting "knowing that" statements -- rather than expressing "knowing how" performatives) is made possible.