Intellectualism or Conceptualism?

I have struggled for some time to find the thread that connects a number of divisions that I’ve brought up on this blog.

For example, there is the division of the context of discovery from the context of justification. This anti-psychologistic position originates with Frege and is carried forward by Wittgenstein, the logical positivists, and Popper.

Then there is the division between logical positivism and naturalism. This division could be described as a dispute between those who banish psychology from epistemology and those who embrace the interaction of psychology and epistemology.

In the next few posts, I intend to introduce another, similar division: those who eliminate induction from their account of science in favor of deduction and those who find space for both in their account.

But in this post I intend to discuss the division which I take to underlie all of the aforementioned.

McCarthy identifies the divide

No surprise, but McCarthy is a proponent of Lonergan’s project. I’ve discussed parts of his book The Crisis of Philosophy here and here, to which I turn once again.

McCarthy identifies the basic divide between those philosophers who locate meaning exclusively in the signs we create and those who contend that our signs are endowed with meaning by the cognitive intentionality which gives rise to them.

Animal knowing appears to be essentially intuitive in nature; but properly human knowing, although it has an intuitive component, is deeply discursive. It advances through asking and answering questions. Human beings know the world not through their immediate experience of it but through the intelligent generation and reasonable affirmation of intentional signs…

Once the discursive nature of human knowledge is recognized, a basic question confronts the philosopher. Shall we start our analysis of cognitive intentionality with those mediating signs or can we go behind them to their originating source and ground in the intentional subject? (1)

McCarthy specifies that conceptualists choose the former option while intellectualists choose the latter. To avoid ambiguity, the conceptualist states that philosophers cannot, or should not, go behind our intentional signs to their originating source and ground in the intentional subject.

Conceptualists include the Frege, Wittgenstein, the logical positivists, and Popper.

But I should be more precise about what the terms intellectualism and conceptualism amount to. Or allow McCarthy to be.

Intellectualism

McCarthy’s description of intellectualism is as follows:

What does it mean to be an intellectualist in cognitional theory? It is to hold that logical concepts, propositions, and judgments depend for their existence on acts of understanding; that they emerge as the immanent intentional term of intelligent and rational inquiry; that they emerge in concordance with the acts of insight that are their prior causal ground; that they express the intelligible content of what has been actively understood; and that the more perfect the act of understanding, the more numerous are the propositions in which its content finds expression.

For the intellectualist, concepts and judgments are the term and product of an intelligent and rational process. They are the answers offered by human subjects to their emerging questions about experience. It is in the nature of the human intellect to express its discoveries in intentional signs. The most important signs of cognitive meaning are the truth-bearing propositions affirmed in the act of judgment. Their epistemic function is to provide true answers to the exploratory questions that guide the process of inquiry. The core of intellectualism is its contention that these logical propositions and the sentences that express them are the intelligible products of acts of understanding that are not only intentional but intelligent. (2)

Conceptualism

Historically, the major rival to this philosophical theory [i.e. intellectualism] has been conceptualism. The conceptualist strongly affirms concepts and propositions, and intentional signs generally, but neglects their source in direct and reflective insights. For the conceptualist, human understanding is preceded by the formation and acquisition of concepts. Because the possession of concepts is treated as the defining condition of rationality, the process by which they are generated and revised is not understood to be intelligent or rational. (3)

There is more to McCarthy’s description of conceptualism, but I pause here in order to provide an example a philosopher treating the possession of concepts as the defining condition of rationality and thereby failing to see their generation or revision as either intelligent or rational.

The following passage is from Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery:

I said above that the work of the scientist consists in putting forward and testing theories.

The initial stage, the act of conceiving or inventing a theory, seems to me neither to call for logical analysis nor to be susceptible of it. The question how it happens that a new idea occurs to a man – whether it is a musical theme, a dramatic conflict, or a scientific theory – may be of great interest to empirical psychology; but it is irrelevant to the logical analysis of scientific knowledge. This latter is concerned not with questions of fact (Kant’s quid facti?), but only with questions of justification or validity (Kant’s quid juris?). Its questions are of the following kind. Can a statement be justified? And if so, how? Is it testable? Is it logically dependent on certain other statements? Or does it perhaps contradict them? In order that a statement may be logically examined in this way, it must already have been presented to us. Someone must have formulated it, and submitted it to logical examination.

Accordingly I shall distinguish sharply between the process of conceiving a new idea, and the methods and results of examining it logically. As to the task of the logic of knowledge – in contradistinction to the psychology of knowledge – I shall proceed on the assumption that it consists solely in investigating the methods employed in those systematic tests to which every new idea must be subjected if it is to be seriously entertained. (4)

This passage is from Popper’s chapter entitled “The Problem of Induction.”

(Bonus points go to the reader who can discern the connection between Popper’s advocating conceptualism and eliminating induction from one’s account of science before I can get a post up about it.)

Returning to McCarthy’s description of conceptualism, it is useful to see it at work in the linguistic turn.

Contemporary linguistic theories of cognition trace their origin to Kant by way of Wittgenstein. Like Kant, their proponents begin by rejecting the myth of epistemic immediacy. To the many versions of the spectator theory, they oppose an account in which intentional signs play a critical mediating role. Although often distancing themselves from Kant’s critical idealism, they share his refusal to reduce propositional knowledge to an immediate, intuitive confrontation of the given. The influence of Wittgenstein is evident in the reconception of the mediating signs. Inheritors of the linguistic turn have substituted publicly observable sentences for the private ideas of Descartes and the abstract logical judgments of Kant. Since they conceive of epistemic practice as a communal activity, they emphasize the publicly shared language in which it is conducted.

In the early stages of the linguistic turn, Carnap defined epistemology as the logical analysis of the language of science. But in the intervening period, syntactical analysis has been incorporated into a comprehensive theory of speech acts, and the range of acceptable epistemic discourse has been enlarged. What logic had treated simply as truth-bearing propositions, the theory of inquiry views as answers given to questions. A new metaphor for intentional activity has replaced the older models of confrontation, correspondence, and construction. Intentional episodes now are conceived as irreducibly linguistic, and epistemic practice is pictured as a disciplined discursive exchange between members in a common language game. Philosophers like Sellars who were inspired by the early Wittgenstein continued to emphasize the syntactical and semantical dimensions of epistemic language; whereas others like Rorty who draw their cues from Dewey’s pragmatism stress the instrumental and functional uses of discourse. Both wings of analytic thought agree that human cognition is an essentially linguistic affair. (5)

The primacy of linguistic analysis in recent and contemporary philosophy emerged as a result of treating human signs as the exclusive bearer of meaning. There is also a corresponding dismissal of intentional subject as the source and ground of the meaning of those signs.

Either/Or Thinking

Notice that in the passages above Popper rejected the psychology of knowledge in favor of the logic of knowledge as he defined them. In order to identify meaning with the logical analysis of intentional signs, he chose to dismiss the process by which those signs were generated. More specifically, Popper did not think the process by which signs were generated, or discovered, was susceptible to logical analysis and therefore, he had no place for it in his epistemology.

The nature, scope, and capacities of logic led Popper to eliminate the logic of discovery from his philosophy.

This either/or attitude is, I contend, fundamental to the conceptualist position. However, there is no such attitude for the intellectualist. The intellectualist does not designate the process by which signs are generated as meaning while designating the signs themselves as meaningless. Rather, he asserts that the signs are meaningful because of the meaning inherent to the processes which produce them.

Both are meaningful; therefore, there is need to insist upon an either/or approach.

The top six rows of the chart below shows the locations of meaning for the intellectualist vs. those for the conceptualist. The bottom three rows show how philosophical positions or thinkers map according to McCarthy’s distinction.

Relating all of this back to my dissertation, notice that naturalism and logical positivism stand on opposite sides of the divide. The fact that they do demonstrates, I believe, why Ladyman and Ross’s scientism and epistemology is fundamentally flawed. However, I’ll need to spell that out in subsequent posts.

Notes:

1. Michael H. McCarthy, The Crisis of Philosophy, p. 12.
2. ibid., p. 314.
3. ibid., p. 314.
4. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, pp. 7 – 8.
5. The Crisis of Philosophy, p. 316.