Exploring the Depths of Thought: Concept and Propositions.

Hey family, lets continue from where we left off in our previous blog-isode.

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The term concept, is generally used to describe a class or category that subsumes a
number, sometimes an infinite number of individual instances.

Let's take an example:

dwelling

which includes hut, house, tent, apartment, and igloo.

Other concepts designate qualities or dimensions.
Examples are length and age.

Still others are relational, such as taller than.

Relational concepts don't apply to any one item in isolation. One can't be taller than except in relation to something else to which
one's height is being compared.

Concepts describe classes of events or objects or relations between them. They are
what we generally think about. In so doing, we tend to combine them in various
ways.

The British empiricists emphasized one such mental combination: the simple associative train of thought in which one idea leads to another.

A more important way of relating concepts is by asserting something about them,

for example:
"dogs generally bite postmen."

Such statements are called propositions.

They make some assertion that relates a subject (the item about which an assertion is
made; e.g., dogs) and a predicate (what is asserted about the subject; e.g.. generally bite postmen) in a way that can be true or false.

That much of our thought is propositional requires little proof.

The propositions we entertain may be true or false, profound or silly, but what matters is that they are propositions, that they link mental elements in certain ways.

In what form do such propositions exist psychologically?

One possible hypothesis is that they are elaborate images. But as the philosopher Jerry Fodor has shown, this
cannot be.

Let's consider the proposition that is expressed by the sentence:

Napoleon is dead.

Can this be expressed by way of a mental image?

Well, a vivid imager might conjure up an image of the emperor in an open coffin, with weeping veterans of his wars passing by to pay their last respects.

But is this image equivalent to the

proposition?

By no means.

This image implies many propositions other than the one at hand:

• Napoleon was buried with his sword,

• Napoleon was rather fat when he died,

• Napoleon's veterans loved him,

and so on.

The trouble with pictures, whether real or imagined, is that one can say so many things about them.

The proposition is a way of singling out the aspects of the world that one wants to make some assertion about.

It appears that propositions cannot be based on images. But they are not equivalent to the sentences in which they are expressed either, as shown by the fact that the same proposition can be expressed in several forms.

People who speak both English and German know that

"The dog bites the cat" and "Der Hund beisst die Katze" mean precisely the same thing.

The same holds within the same language. Consider

"The dog bites the cat" and "The cat is bitten by the dog"

Again, the same proposition is asserted.

Something is being said and presumably thought about the hapless cat that does not depend upon the particular form in which this proposition is cast.

To sum up, it seems that there are two different thinking modes.

One involves thinking in mental images which, like pictures, resemble whatever it is they represent.

A second mode of thinking is more abstract and symbolic, and it involves mental structures such as concepts and propositions.

The Bus Stops Here for today:

Thank you, friends, for staying with me through these blogisodes. Your thoughts and opinions are always welcome and appreciated. I'd be happy to hear them. We will build on this in tomorrow's blogisode. Until then, stay safe, friends.

References and links:

https://myassignmenthelp.com/proposition-assignment-help.html

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Concepts%2C-propositions%2C-and-schemata%3A-what-are-the-Anderson/e562b3597dd9e963ece2db0bdc48b5480105cb82

https://iep.utm.edu/concepts/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/propositions/

https://brill.com/view/journals/gps/82/1/article-p129_6.xml

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