I think we maybe shouldn’t reify “concepts” at all. To some extent it seems to me like there are only patterns of internal and external behavior. Certain stimuli—experiences, feelings, trains of thought—lead to certain sequences of words being produced. The question should not be “what does the word mean?” but rather “what does this word having been used say about the internal state of the one using it, in this context?” Words don’t have fixed meanings—they are entirely contextual.
Concepts are not things that actually exist as stable units—our usage of a finite set of words makes us think that they do, but in reality every pattern of neural activations is unique and we reach for the words that seem the least far away in some vector space (generated by training on our past experience of the same words in other contexts) to the position of the thought we actually want to express. Every such action moves the positions of those words a little bit in other people’s semantic spaces, leading to semantic drift—something like a rise in entropy, a gas expanding through a room.
Probably I didn’t fully understand your position, but here are my thoughts and emotions about this topic:
Not reifying concepts may be boring: we miss the opportunity to think about new and interesting types of properties.
The dichotomy “either concepts have fixed meanings or they don’t exist” is false for me. At least for the most part.
You can argue that “vague concepts” objectively exist, that they just describe natural clusters of things.
I don’t think “only particular thoughts exist” is a justified level of reductionism. People are able to learn language.
There’re some “contradictions” in your reply. You say that concepts don’t exist, but then you’re talking about positions in semantic spaces, something “drifting” and etc. All those things you could call “concepts”. Why do you decide to not do this?
Some concepts I absolutely 100% want to fully “exist”. Those concepts are personalities of other people.
I think we maybe shouldn’t reify “concepts” at all. To some extent it seems to me like there are only patterns of internal and external behavior. Certain stimuli—experiences, feelings, trains of thought—lead to certain sequences of words being produced. The question should not be “what does the word mean?” but rather “what does this word having been used say about the internal state of the one using it, in this context?” Words don’t have fixed meanings—they are entirely contextual.
Concepts are not things that actually exist as stable units—our usage of a finite set of words makes us think that they do, but in reality every pattern of neural activations is unique and we reach for the words that seem the least far away in some vector space (generated by training on our past experience of the same words in other contexts) to the position of the thought we actually want to express. Every such action moves the positions of those words a little bit in other people’s semantic spaces, leading to semantic drift—something like a rise in entropy, a gas expanding through a room.
Probably I didn’t fully understand your position, but here are my thoughts and emotions about this topic:
Not reifying concepts may be boring: we miss the opportunity to think about new and interesting types of properties.
The dichotomy “either concepts have fixed meanings or they don’t exist” is false for me. At least for the most part.
You can argue that “vague concepts” objectively exist, that they just describe natural clusters of things.
I don’t think “only particular thoughts exist” is a justified level of reductionism. People are able to learn language.
There’re some “contradictions” in your reply. You say that concepts don’t exist, but then you’re talking about positions in semantic spaces, something “drifting” and etc. All those things you could call “concepts”. Why do you decide to not do this?
Some concepts I absolutely 100% want to fully “exist”. Those concepts are personalities of other people.