Nowhere Man. Language, Concepts, and Geach s Argument against Abstraction

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1 Nowhere Man Charles W. Johnson PHIL4780: Kant and Transcendental Idealism 18 March 2002 Language, Concepts, and Geach s Argument against Abstraction When in the course of human events we are called upon to use language, we inevitably employ concepts in our experience, and by employing these concepts we are able to make judgments about states of affairs. This ball is red asserts that ball and red apply to our experience in a particular way. In general: it is the case that the world is thus-and-so, that is to say, this concept and that are rightly employed in our experience. All very well, but whence these concepts? How is it that we come to be able to mean something by words, and to employ words in making judgments which pick out possible states of affairs? An account that seems to have long suggested itself to inquiring minds is the account which Peter Geach dubs abstractionism, which is the doctrine that a concept is acquired by a process of singling out for attention some one feature given in direct experience abstracting it and ignoring the other features simultaneously given abstracting from them (18). However, in chapters 6-11 of Mental Acts, Geach argues that this is not how it is with certain concepts, such as those employed in logic, arithmetic, or talk of relations. Indeed, Geach argues, it could not be how it is with any concept, because the very picture of human learning suggested by abstractionism is incoherent, and based on a particular sort of error about the way in which language works.

2 The abstractionist view paints a certain picture of how we come to have the ability to use words in the language. As the good Bishop George Berkeley summarized the process in his famous Introduction to the Principles, Again, the mind having the mind having observed that in the particular extensions perceived by sense, there is something common and alike in all, and some other things peculiar, as this or that figure or magnitude, which distinguish them one from another; it considers apart or singles out by itself that which is common, making thereof a most abstract idea of extension, which is neither line, surface, nor solid, nor has any figure or magnitude but is an idea entirely prescinded from all these. ( 8) In general, the abstractionist pictures the matter as follows. Ever so many undistinguished things come before my experience, and I happen to notice that certain of those things have something in common (a differentia) which sets them apart from the rest (a genus). By selectively attending to that feature I had noticed, I can now pick out all and only those things that share that feature, and I have thus formed a concept which unites all and only those things sharing the abstracted feature to which I attended. I attending to what Peter, Paul, and Mary have in common I acquire the concept human, neglecting all in which they differ, such as physical location, sex, complexion, weight, personal opinions, and so on. Using this Nowhere Man 1 as a cognitive placeholder I can find a cognitive handle by which to grasp all and only humans. With these first-order concepts I can develop higher-order abstractions by attending carefully to what these abstracted features have in common. I hold together my concepts of human and fish and so on, and by picking out what they have in common I acquire the concept animal. With animal and plant and protozoan and so on, I abstract the uniting feature life. And so it goes, onward and upward, until at last I have developed the broadest abstractions at all, such as being or substance, which apply to and provide a ground for all of the more concrete determinations that fall under them. There is, then, a hierarchy of abstractions: being names a 1 He s a real nowhere man / Sitting in his nowhere land / Making all his nowhere plans for nobody... / Doesn t have a point of view / Knows not where he s going to / Isn t he a bit like you and me...

3 concept under which many beings fall, some of which are animal. Animal names a concept under which many animals fall, some of which are human. Human names a concept under which many humans fall, some of which are Peter, Paul, and Mary. And now that I have got concepts for picking out things in such a way, I can nicely account for judgments. To make a judgment, I arrange the concepts I have developed in various ways, combining and dividing them to frame particular possible objects of experience. Thus I may maintain that all acts of judgment are to be accounted for as exercises of concepts got by abstraction (Geach 18). I judge correctly if and only if I would be right to recognize the subject of the judgment under the abstract concept or concepts employed, i.e., if the feature or features I abstracted out are to be found in the thing or things identified by the subject term. This is all a very nice story, but we will quite rightly begin to wonder whether this is in fact how it is with concepts and judgments. In particular, it seems to be a fairly natural account as long as we talk about qualities which we perceive in outer experience for example, colors, shapes, sounds, and so forth. However, there does not seem to be nearly so natural a fit when abstractionism is turned towards the employment of logical concepts such as negation, arithmetical concepts such as number, or relational concepts such as small and large. In each case, no possible abstraction is fruitful enough to develop a concept: the situations in which the concepts are employed are radically different from one another in such a way that there is not a unique perceptible feature which can serve as the datum abstractandum for the purpose of acquiring a concept. The case of logical concepts is illustrative. Geach argues that nowhere in the sensible world could you find anything, nor could you draw any picture, that could suitably be labelled or or not (23). If we were to explain the concept negation in terms of abstraction, we would

4 need to be able to isolate some sensible quality of nottishness to which our word not corresponds. Yet what sensible quality does every case of, say, no cat, have in common? None at all there are no cats here, and there are no cats there, and there are no cats in Pluto or in the center of the Earth, and there are no cats in a universe where no matter exists but none of these have any sensible qualities in common with one another which set them apart as experiences without a cat. They share a lack in common, to be sure otherwise we would not pick them all out as being situations without a cat. But the lack is just that the lack of certain sensible qualities, not the sensible quality of a lacking. Some abstractionists attempt to shore up the problem by making logical concepts the result of abstracting from certain inner experiences. Thus or gets its meaning through our performing abstraction upon experiences of hesitation, and not is similarly related to experiences of frustration or inhibition (23). No cat becomes a complex concept, which is based upon combining the features by which we would recognize a perceptible thing under the concept cat, with the inner experience of inhibiting ourselves from making the attribution of it to anything in the situation under consideration. But this surely is a maneuver of desperation rather than reason, as in the living use of such words... such feelings may be wholly absent, without the words being in any way deprived of meaning by their absence (24). At the most, as Geach puts it, such attempted explanations are based upon the feelings that happen to be aroused in a particular writer when he says a logical word over and over to himself a magical rite of evoking its meaning (23). They make no progress towards finding a common feature of which all uses of not are recognitions. Thus it seems that abstractionism cannot provide an account of all the concepts we put to use in our use of language. It goes systematically wrong with regard to concepts other than

5 concepts which subsume sensible qualities, because there is no perceptible common feature of situations which can be picked out by abstraction. There will need to be some other account given of these concepts. For example, logical concepts may be explained in terms of the relationships between judgments in the space of inferences. However, so far the abstractionist can still happily rest in the realm of sensible concepts, such as cat, book, or red. These are, after all, the everyday sorts of terms of which she was likely thinking when she developed the term in the first place. A number of concepts are out to be sure, but can t we account for these in terms of abstraction? Geach argues that such an account, though an abstractionist takes it to be the most natural and reliable basis for her doctrine, could never be sufficient. Indeed, abstractionism fails here for the same reason that it fails to adequately account for logical concepts: abstraction cannot provide sufficient grounds for recognizing all and only things which fall under the concept. Surely there is a common sensible quality to all and only red things, redness, by which I can recognize all of them as red. However, Geach points out, this story does not go equally well for all simple sensible concepts. In particular, he counsels, Let us consider chromatic colour, i.e., colour other than white, grey, and black (37). If we carefully attend to our sensible experience, we will see that there is no common sensible bond between all and only chromatically colored things. We are inclined to seize upon the quality of their various colors, but In looking at a red window-pane I have not two sensations, one of redness and one barely of chromatic colour (37). The abstractionist, consistent with her view of concepts falling under one another in strict hierarchy, seems to think that there must be two separate characteristics annexed to the two abstract concepts: first, redness to red, and a distinct (though underlying) quality to the concept chromatic color. Yet the chromatic color of a sensible object is not a separate or a

6 separable feature from its redness (or blueness, or greenness, or whatever the particular case may be). Rather, if x is red, then it is by one and the same feature of x that x is made red and chromatically coloured (39). And thus, If I abstract from what differentiates red from other chromatic colours I am abstracting from red itself (37). If we try to pin our cognitive hopes on Nowhere Man, then we will end up as blind as we can be. On examination, the attempt to locate features in experience corresponding to such concepts as chromatic color, substance, being, and so forth seems like a rather fanciful and ill-conceived attempt. How could the abstractionist have argued herself into seeing conceptformation in terms of selective attention and isolation of particular features? Since it does not successfully explain any of our concepts, the claims of Locke et al. to have derived abstractionism from introspective psychology cannot be taken seriously. Rather, abstractionism is the result of a peculiar view towards language and how it relates to the world. Geach s references to hearing the word red uttered ceremonially in the presence of a red object (34) instructively recalls Augustine s account of the acquisition of words quoted in Wittgenstein s Philosophical Investigations 1, and so also Wittgenstein s analysis of the passage: These words, it seems to me, give us a particular picture of the essence of human language. It is this: the individual words in language name objects sentences are combinations of such names. In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands. Our old nemesis, the philosophical conception of meaning, turns out to be lurking behind the abstractionist s error. Individual words in a language name objects in the case of general words, they name abstracted features. Thus chromatic color names one feature of things, and since not all chromatically colored things are red, red names a different feature of things. The advocate of the philosophical conception of meaning drives one to give an account on which we can point to these things, chromatic color and redness, and only those things, in order to

7 employ the concepts, and here selective attention seems to be the only way to do the pointing. Thus also its account of judgment as merely the throwing together of concepts higgeldypiggeldy, as the content of a statement can only be in the way that the objects named by it stick together. But as Geach points out, this framework rests upon a false Platonistic logic; an attribute is being thought of as an identifiable object (39). And as far as judgments go, it is of course not enough, even when language is being used to describe the immediate situation, that we should utter a lot of words corresponding to several features of the situation (35). Once we resist the perennial philosophical temptation to think that if a thought is to be true of reality, then it must copy it feature by feature, like a map (41), then we come to see how judgments must be more than merely a list of objects which corresponds to the features in rebus before our awareness. And we also see how it is that while not all chromatically colored things are red, when they are red, their chromatic color just is their redness. Attribute-concepts do not play the same role in logical space as names of objects, and abstractionism s story about the hierarchy of abstract qualities only makes sense on the assumption that they do. How is it, then, with concepts? If Geach s arguments are accepted, then it seems that the mind makes concepts, and this concept-formation and the subsequent use of the concepts formed never is a mere recognition or finding (40) of recurrent features in the things around us. Though this may play a role in some (sensible quality) concepts, it does not fully explain any concepts. Just what does, Geach leaves mostly unanswered, except that whatever it is, it must constitute a process of learning both how to use words within a language, and how to bring language to bear on the world.

8 What is most important is that in fitting a concept to my experience rather than picking out the feature I am interested in from among other features given simultaneously (40), the conceptualization of experience in no way falsifies it. It seems natural to think otherwise. Whereas abstractionism keeps us right in the thick of sensible experience, since we have nothing in a concept but what we found in the world around us, Geach s framework seems to set conception at least one degree of separation from reality. Where, for example, we have argued that there is but one color characteristic the redness and chromatic color of a red thing being one and the same feature of the thing the mind distinguishes two separate concepts. So haven t we represented the world otherwise than it is? Geach points out that this is only a confusion of understanding with the object understood: When our understanding understands things that are simple, it may understand them in its own complex fashion without understanding them to be complex (40). The mind is not diaphanous, and conceptualization consists in more than merely the object conceived, and so the way it is with our understanding when we understand is different from the way it is with the thing we understand, in its actual existence (40). But this is not an unfortunate distance between mind and world; rather, it is the distinction between representing and represented that makes a connection between mind and world possible at all.