How We Know #7: Higher Level Concepts

Chapter 4 is about higher-level concepts. First level concepts are formed directly from perception. Following Rand, higher-level concepts are formed by "abstraction from abstractions." For example, furniture is formed from the prior first-level concepts table, bed, chair, etc. The higher-level concept is a wider integration.

Binswanger contrasts his and Rand's view from that of Realists. The Realist "model implies that wider concepts have less cognitive content than the narrower ones from which they were formed. For the Realists, "table" abstracts the "universal" from individual tables by mentally subtracting away and discarding everything that differs among tables. Then, "furniture" discards even more" (141). In contrast "Rand's theory recognizes that concept-formation is integrative, which means that the wider concept contains more cognitive content than any of the narrower ones from which it was formed" (141).

His portrayal of the Realist view seems biased. He uses "subtract" and "discard" rather than "ignore" or "neglect." "For Realists, reaching a more abstract level means having a narrower "insight" into a universal embedded inside a given universal -- the "furniturehood" lurking inside of "tableness" and "bedness." For Realists, the wider concept, the emptier of cognitive content" (141). 

He says Rand's theory attributes more cognitive content to higher-level concepts. However, "more cognitive content" is ambiguous. Does it mean more units subsumed or a wider range of attributes? He says little or nothing about the former and sides with the latter. Clearly furniture subsumes more units (things or referents) than does chair. Based on more units subsumed, the Realist view adds rather than subtracts or discards. Of course, the criteria of inclusion into the higher level concept is less strict for the Realist view, and it is likewise for Rand's theory. For example, the criteria of inclusion for furniture is less strict than for chair. One criteria for chair, but not furniture, is that its purpose is for sitting, a criteria not met by table, dresser, etc., which have other purposes. 

While I agree with his portraying the Realist view as pursuing an "elusive phantom", I regard it as somewhat less mystical than he. What is elusive in the Realist view is the pursuit of something which is precisely identical in each instance or unit of the concept. In his and Rand's view the pursuit is of similarity. The ramifications of that difference are monumental. I give a hat tip to Peter Abelard. 

Is the Realist view that there is something precisely identical in each instance amiss for all concepts? I don't believe so. I believe numbers qualify, for example, the number 2 abstracted from all instances of pairs.

Some sort of "intuition" or "insight" is required for the pursuit of similarity of higher-level concepts. In his final chapter Binswanger writes about the concepts inertia, natural selection, and germ. In my view the developers of these concepts had some sort of extraordinary capacity, which for lack of a better term I call "intuition" or "insight." They grasped the similarity that other people had not.

Returning to his text, the second type of higher-level concept consists of subdivisions or "narrowings" of existing concepts. "Narrowings have virtually never been discussed in the history of epistemology" (142).  That agrees with my experience. 

"There are two ways of subdividing an earlier concept: 1) by narrowing the earlier concept's measuring range, or 2) by adding a new characteristic, a characteristic not used in forming the earlier concept" (142).