KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA 32 (Herbert Müller)

Commentary 14

A VIEW OF CONCEPTS AND THEIR LINKS TO WORDS
by Ernst von Glasersfeld
28 December 2000, posted 16 January 2001

<1>
I am in basic agreement with Herbert Muller’s position as I understand it from his TA32. His paper is, I think, an excellent exposition of the constructivist attitude towards ontology. I might formulate certain things differently, but the changes would not make for much of a discussion. There is however, one point I want to bring up. It concerns concepts and their relation to words. HM defines: "a concept is the result of COUPLING A WORD TO AN EARLIER FORMATION OF SENSATION OR THINKING" (TA32, [5]). I am not happy with this definition because it deprives me of distinctions that I found to be useful in my work on language.

<2>
Among the items that HM calls "gestalt-formations" or "experience structures" there are differences that entail limitations on the way these items can be used. An example would be the following: we have all met quite a number of people whom we would recognize if we saw them again, but whom we are unable to visualize when they are not present. We clearly have some kind of "gestalt-formations" that can be triggered by such a persons entering our visual field, but cannot be called up spontaneously as a "re-presentation". I have called this kind of structure "recognition matrix", because I want to reserve the term "concept" for structures that can be freely re-presented at will.

<3>
Spontaneous re-presentability seems to me a more appropriate criterion for the application of the term "concept" than association with a word or name. It would seem odd to me to conclude for instance that I have lost the concept of a tetrahedron if I can visualize the geometrical structure but have for the moment forgotten its name. Given that I can visualize its shape and unfold the four equilateral triangles of which it is composed, gives me the confidence to say that I possess it as a conceptual structure, whether or not I know what it is called.

<4>
And there is another point I can mention. Although the majority of concepts are language-specific, there are quite a few - especially in the domain of technical terms - that are practically identical irrespective of what word has been attached to them. Thus the concept of screw driver does not change when it is linked to the German word "Schraubenzieher". Similarly an American’s concept of a car’s hood does not change when he learns that in Great Britain that part of a car is called bonnet. In contrast, the fact that the English words "consciousness" and "conscience" are both rendered by "coscienza" in Italian shows that conceptual differences need not be marked by words, for an Italian knows quite well that when he has a bad conscience (brutta coscienza), it is not his consciousness that is at fault.

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Ernst von Glasersfeld