The concept of a cat and the concept of a lion will share many features such as "feline", "mammal", and "fur", but they are not identical or else the words "cat" and "lion" would be exactly synonymous as in the case of the Spanish word "gato" and the English word "cat".
A concept exists both as a stored relation in memory and, in an individual's consciousness as the dynamic result of a causal trigger, such as reading the word "cat" or hearing a cat's meow.
The word "cat" may trigger, in one's consciousness, a mental representation of a cat. Or, for someone who has always been blind, the word "cat" may trigger memory of the warm and furry feeling of a cat.
Each aspect of a concept is related to another aspect in varying strengths, strengths that determine how the causal trigger affects an individual's conscious experience of the concept. A concept, then, is experienced as a series of mental representations retrieved from memory and displayed in one's consciousness.
A concept constantly changes with time, experience, and changes in the availability of memories.
People who have neurological problems may undergo, instantly or over time, a conceptual collapse, as their ability to retrieve representations from memory becomes impaired either because the connections have been interrupted or the memory itself has been destroyed.
Some simple representations, such as color and pain, do not, I think, qualify as concepts because they do not refer to anything else. We can have a concept of pain that includes things like suffering or intensity, but our perception of pain itself is simple and self-contained.
From 2000: A Priori Analysis of the Concepts of Mind and Body
___________________________________________________________________
It may be impossible to deny that our a priori concepts of mind and of body are conceptually distinct. But, what does this mean for the ontological nature of the mind-body?
Conceptual distinctions are merely conceptual; such distinctions in the way we think about the world need not correspond to any actual distinctions of the mind and body; though they certainly could correspond to actual distinctions of the mind and body. The question at hand, then, is where does this leave us in deciding upon the nature of the mind-body?
There is one certain option. We can make the claim that (1) the conceptual distinction between the mind-body is not necessarily a real distinction but it may be indicative of a real distinction. But this doesn’t help at all to take us farther from where we started.
So, there are three main options from this point, each with a number of sub-options. We may want to make the claim that (2) the conceptual distinction is only conceptual, there is no actual distinction, and that nothing has been 'left out' of the picture (this 'leaving out' will be discussed in more detail later). In case (2), we are left with various forms of monism.
We may want to make the claim that (3) the conceptual distinction is an actual distinction, and this will leave us with a form of dualism. Another option, not too often considered, is the claim that (4) the conceptual distinction is an actual distinction and is not limited to those concepts which we can form about the actual nature of the mind-body.
Option (4) will leave us with a kind of pluralism, including, but not limited to, dualism. It could be argued that (4) is merely an open-ended version, or non-exhaustive version of (3), but let’s say that (4) is just such an open-ended form of dualism and (3) is more strict form of dualism, i.e. there are two and only two substances that make up the mind-body.
Let's consider the options, beginning with the last and working our way back to the first. Option (4), that the mind-body consists of at least two distinct substances, two of which are mind and body, is a view that makes a claim about the limitations and capacities of our conceptualization of what actually exists.
On one hand, (4) assumes that our concepts correspond to actual distinctions, but, that our concepts do not necessarily correspond to all that there is involving the mind and body.
A stronger version of this is (3), in which it is assumed that our concepts correspond to actual distinctions and that our concepts exhaust the possibilities of what exists concerning the mind-body.
In both (4) and (3), the key is the assumption that our concepts correspond to the ontological nature of the mind and body.
Option (2), that the mind-body consists of exactly one substance (by substance, I mean the 'stuff' that shares fundamental properties), is a view that assumes (2a) our concepts do not correspond to actual ontological distinctions and (2b) there are no ontological distinctions concerning the mind-body that we (2b') have not conceptualized or 'left out' and (2b'') there are no actual ontological distinctions that we can not conceptualize.
|
|
|
In other words, those who hold (2) must assert that (2a) there is no actual difference between the mind and the body (although there is an a priori conceptual difference), and (2b'-2b'') that we have not missed anything or left anything out of the picture.
What would it be to violate (2b')? It could be the case that our concepts of mind and body do correspond to a single thing, but there could be further conceptualizations concerning the mind-body that actually correspond to an ontological distinction.
What would it be to violate (2b'')? The same as (2b') except that this actual ontological distinction would be one that we are, for some possible reason, incapable of conceptualizing.
By going through this analysis of our concepts, I hope to have demonstrated, without entertaining issues of causality, that we have little reason to assume to existence of one, two, or many distinct modes of existence in the world.
Each view makes assumptions about what we can know and how we can know it. If we consider possible arguments for various ontological views at this point, the monist and the dualist would be bickering merely over matters of intuition about realism concerning their disparate concepts.
Our concept of the mind includes a number of features not shared by our concept of the physical- this, I think, is rather universally agreed upon. What is not agreed upon, is what this conceptual distinction yeilds. It seems as though there is no epistemic justification for assuming any of the positions considered. We are left in a rather agnostic position concerning the reality and relation of the two conceptually distinct realms that we experience.
Just how conceptually distinct are the physical and mental realms of experience? Upon closer inspection, I think that the distinction becomes much less distinct than Descartes would have us believe.
