The Status of Concepts

Abstract

As is well known, conceptual objects have been the undoing of traditional empiricism as well as of vulgar materialism, for they are neither distillates of ordinary experiences nor material objects or properties thereof. To be sure, the empiricist may claim that there are no conceptual objects aside from mental events. But he cannot explain how different minds can grasp the same conceptual objects and why psychology is incapable of accounting for the logical, mathematical and semantical properties of constructs. And the vulgar materialist (nominalist) will likewise discard conceptual objects and speak instead of linguistic objects — e.g. of terms instead of concepts and of sentences instead of propositions. But he is unable to explain the conceptual invariants of linguistic transformations (e.g. translations) as well as the fact that linguistics presupposes logic and semantics rather than the other way round. Therefore we cannot accept either the empiricist or the nominalist reduction (elimination) of conceptual objects any more than we can admit the idealist claim that they are ideal beings with an autonomous existence. We must look for an alternative consistent with both ontological naturalism and semantical realism.