display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
3 ideas
| 8781 | The mind does not lift concepts from experience; it creates them, and then applies them [Geach] |
| Full Idea: Having a concept is not recognizing a feature of experience; the mind makes concepts. We then fit our concepts to experience. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §11) | |
| A reaction: This seems to imply that we create concepts ex nihilo, which is a rather worse theory than saying that we abstract them from multiple (and multi-level) experiences. That minds create concepts is a truism. How do we do it? |
| 10731 | For abstractionists, concepts are capacities to recognise recurrent features of the world [Geach] |
| Full Idea: For abstractionists, concepts are essentially capacities for recognizing recurrent features of the world. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Abstraction Reconsidered [1983], p.163) | |
| A reaction: Recognition certainly strikes me as central to thought (and revelatory of memory, since we continually recognise what we cannot actually recall). Geach dislikes this view, but I see it as crucial to an evolutionary view of thought. |
| 8769 | If someone has aphasia but can still play chess, they clearly have concepts [Geach] |
| Full Idea: If a man struck with aphasia can still play bridge or chess, I certainly wish to say he still has the concepts involved in the game, although he can no longer exercise them verbally. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §5) | |
| A reaction: Geach proceeds thereafter to concentrate on language, but this caveat is crucial. To suggest that concepts are entirely verbal has always struck me as ridiculous, and an insult to our inarticulate mammalian cousins. |