Concepts and experience

Those who have given little attention to the study of the human mind are apt to suppose that, when the infant opens its eyes upon the new world of objects surrounding its small body, it sees things much as they do themselves. They are ready to admit that it does not know much about things, but it strikes them as absurd for any one to go so far as to say that it does not see things—the things out there in space before its eyes.

Nevertheless, the psychologist tells us that it requires quite a course of education to enable us to see things—not to have vague and unmeaning sensations, but to see things, things that are known to be touchable as well as seeable, things that are recognized as having size and shape and position in space.

—George Stuart Fullerton, An Introduction to Philosophy

In philosophy, it is common to say that the data of sensation is “confused” before it is made determinate by concepts. This can be illustrated by contrasting photographs with cartoons. In cartoons, we draw boundary lines between each thing and the things that surround it. But these lines do not exist in real life: in real life, what we have are more or less contrasting colors, where the contrast does not always coincide with where we see the boundaries of things.

This is clear to anyone who has tried to trace photographs automatically and by hand. If there were a clear and obvious correspondence between color boundaries and boundaries between things, tracing photographs would be a relatively simple process, which could be defined in software by a simple mathematical rule. But simple processes like these produce poor results, drawing the boundaries at places that look illogical from a human perspective, since, while often right, they also often draw boundaries within things, and fail to draw boundaries between them.

The same photo, traced by artist Priyanka Kashib and by a simple computer “emboss” effect.

A different illustration, which was famously used by Wittgenstein, is the duck-rabbit illusion:

The duck-rabbit illusion.

Here, we know where the boundaries are – it’s a cartoon, after all – and even where an eye is supposed to be, but we can see the cartoon as either a duck or a rabbit, since the image by itself does not determine this.

A final example is the fictional language “Arunta” that W.V.O. Quine made up in his book “Word and Object”. Quine’s idea, which is known as the indeterminacy of translation, is in part that, if you are to translate a person who speaks an unknown language and refers to a rabbit as a “gavagai”, it may be correct to translate this as “rabbit”, but then again, given cultural considerations about this foreign speaker, it could also mean:

• an undetached rabbit-part, i.e., a part of a rabbit which is still attached to a rabbit. This is, of course, always present whenever a rabbit is present, and vice versa, so that you can’t tell them apart between languages just from usage.

• a manifestation of rabbithood, i.e., something by which the ultimate principle of rabbithood is made visible to humans. These manifestations always happen to be rabbits, and vice versa, so that you can’t tell whether the foreign speaker means to convey that or not.

• a rabbit time-slice, i.e., a single instant of a rabbit’s existence, which extends throughout time. Of course, in real life we only meet with instants of rabbits, never with the rabbit’s whole life at once, so similarly you can’t tell whether the speaker’s intent is our idea of “rabbit” or this more nuanced conception.

The “Arunta” speaker calls this a “gavagai”. (photo source)

I’m not defending Quine’s ideas about translation, but only the basic fact that what we get from the senses does not fully determine what we will experience. We are assuming, as we always would, that you and this “Arunta” speaker are getting more or less the same data from your senses, i.e., that you both see the rabbit. But because of your concepts, you may be experiencing somewhat different things in your mind.

In ordinary experience, objects are given to us as experienced through the concepts that we have of them, and we do not pay mind to other possible ways in which we could see them. But through philosophical reflection upon the fact that we can have different experiences of what must be the same world, we construct the abstraction of “sense data”, which must be what is given to us before we construct the objects of experience through the aid of our concepts. (“Data” just means “given” in Latin; “concept”, indirectly from con+capere, means “taken together”, since a concept is what brings the data together into an object.)

The typical idea in philosophy, then, is that the senses only give us confused jumbles of colors and sounds and stuff – the sense data – and it is the work of our reason (or intellect) to “put” these data “into” our concepts, so that we can have an experience, which is to say, an experience of things.

(Sometimes this is said as that our sense data is “fragmented”, and it is “unified” into experience by reason, but it is just the same to say that sense data is “united” or “tangled” and that it is “separated” by our reason into discrete objects. Similarly with “order”: The world may come to the senses “disordered” and “chaotic”, and then be “ordered” by reason into our experience, or then again it may come to the senses “in order”, but the conceptual order in which we actually experience it may struggle to catch up to this. Language about “order” and “unification” is merely poetical figure of speech, and matters nothing to the actual theory.)

Against this idea, it may be contested that some simple quantitative judgments, such as of whether a hole is too big for us to jump over, or of how much strength to apply to a hammer strike, are so quick and instinctive that they must be done with our sensations directly rather than with concepts, and nevertheless they may also deserve the title of reasoning, since they are, in a way, quite complex mental work to do correctly. This would mean that some of our “categories” belong to our senses directly, rather than to our conceptual reasoning, so that sense data is not completely confused. There may be some merit to this idea, though it still only goes so far.

A baseball batter makes a quick judgment of where the ball is going. (photo source)

In philosophy, we speak of (mental) concepts and judgments instead of (spoken or written) words and sentences because a single word can have many meanings. For instance, the sentence that “all bachelors are unmarried” is a typical example of a trivially true sentence, but it is only true if by bachelor you mean precisely “an unmarried man”, rather than “someone with a bachelor’s degree”.

mental	spoken/written	conventional
concept	word	term
judgment	sentence	proposition

The words “term” and “proposition” are on a level between concept/judgment and word/sentence. The best writers take “term” to mean a word which is taken, in a given context, as referring to a specific concept; and a “proposition” is a sentence which by convention represents a specific judgment. But a lot of confusion happens due to people seeing “term” and “proposition” as simply synonymous with “word” and “sentence”.

Philosophy deals with theories, which are sets of concepts associated with each other, expressed in conventional sets of terms, and used to understand particular domains of our experience. Philosophy, as a whole, is the most general theory, dealing with terms and concepts that must be used by all other theories, but are typically not studied in depth by them.