Conceptual Idealism Revisited

Abstract

Idealism, broadly speaking, is the doctrine that reality is somehow mind-correlative or mind-coordinated.1 However, the specifically conceptual idealism which concerns us here stands in contrast to an ontological doctrine to the effect that mind somehow constitutes or produces the worl’s materials. Instead, it maintains that any adequate descriptive characterization of physical (‘material’) reality must involve an implicit reference to mental operations — that some commerce with mental characteristics and operations always occurs in any viable explanatory exposition of “the real world.” The central thesis of this position is that the mind is responsible for nature-as-we-understand-it, not, to be sure, by making nature itself, but rather through its role in the mode-and-manner determining categories in whose terms we conceive of it. On its approach, the constitutive role of mind in nature is thus to be thought of neither in ontological nor in causal terms, but hermeneutically by way of concept explication. It is not that mind produces nature, but rather that the way in which we conceptualize of nature involves the analogy of mind — that we conceive of the real in mind-correlative terms of reference.