So according to your view, even simple concepts like table, chair, and rat—“a person or a group suddenly understands or grasps their idea”??
That sounds absurd to me. What idea is there in these concepts? They are just a description of a group of concrete objects.
I can agree with you regarding moral norms, whose precise content can be grasped and discussed by the mind’s eye as you described (and therefore one can discuss whether a democratic system of government is a good one), but when it comes to the thousands of simple concepts we use in everyday life, it is very hard to accept them as ideas that we need to uncover and define with the mind’s eye.

By the way, I of course agree that all primary concepts such as existence, space, time, etc., are ideas embedded in us, and with their help we create complex concepts like table and chair. But to claim that there is an idea of table and we labor to uncover and define it, and only then come to realize it in practice—that does not seem at all reasonable to me.

So in your opinion, is the similarity between one rat and another arbitrary? To the same extent, could concepts have been defined on some other basis, or with no basis at all?

1. All concepts are composed of prior concepts, and therefore with any concept one can go backward until uncovering the primary concepts of which it is made, and the way they are combined. So every concept must ultimately rest on primary concepts. Don’t you agree with that?

2. The similarity between rats is not arbitrary. Similarity is something real even without there being a concept that gathers them under one name. Besides, how does that refute my claim that a concept is an idea we created arbitrarily? After we created and defined the concept of rat, and before us are two objects that meet the definition we created, then both of them meet the definition we created.

3. You didn’t answer my question whether in your opinion table and chair are also ideas that need to be uncovered by the mind’s eye, or whether your remarks are aimed only at moral concepts or at primary concepts? (In those cases I agree with your claim.)

Complex concepts are certainly possible. My claim was that not all of them are creations of our spirit. At the base there are ideas.

There is some similarity between any two things. The decision to group two objects under one concept is not arbitrary. It is based on correspondence to ideas.

Again, you are not addressing my question: in your opinion, are table and chair also existing ideas that must be uncovered by the mind’s eye? Or are your remarks aimed only at moral concepts or at primary concepts? (In those cases I agree with your claim.) Whereas table and chair are ideas we invented in accordance with various objects, for reasons of use and efficiency, and not because of a need to match them to some lofty ideas.

I would be very happy to get a response to my last question; this is a subject that really occupies me (it seems to me that it is also fundamentally related to the ontological proof).

In my opinion, the question whether all the thousands of everyday concepts like chair and table (not primary concepts or moral concepts), and other similar concepts, are ideas that we try to aim our minds toward, or merely our way of generalizing groups of concrete objects according to one set of characteristics or another, is a foundational question in epistemology. I would be glad if you would answer this question of mine, or alternatively refer me to sources on the subject.

The last time I visited the world of ideas, there were so many there that I don’t remember whom I saw. I explained above that there are ideas that exist, and others that are built on the basis of those that exist. Which belongs where—that is a question (not at all an important one) that should be directed to whoever visited there recently.

Okay, then it seems to me that we don’t really have a dispute. The primary concepts, including moral concepts, are ideas that must be uncovered and defined by the mind’s eye, whereas every non-primary concept (that can be traced backward and shown from which concepts it is composed) is only our way of describing groups of concrete objects, and as such is not itself an idea, only the primary concepts of which it is composed.

(This is not exactly what you wrote at first. There you wrote that all concepts—for example democracy—are existing ideas, whereas according to what is being said here, the concept of democracy is not an idea; rather, only the primary concepts that make it up are. Or the claim that “democracy is a more moral form of government” is a claim that belongs to the mind’s eye because it belongs to the realm of morality, but the concept of democracy itself is only our way of describing some reality.

I don’t understand why this is not an important discussion in your eyes, but so be it; I’m not arguing with that.

By the way, I’m suggesting here a simple way to identify whether a concept belongs to the world of ideas even without visiting there.
Any concept that cannot be broken down into prior concepts is a primary concept, and its place is in the world of ideas, and one should discuss its precise boundaries; likewise moral concepts (at least the basic ones).
But all other complex concepts are only our convenient way of describing groups of concrete objects.
Do you agree with that?

We do have a dispute. I claim that the fundamental ideas exist, and the others are composed of them (and so they too exist, even if not on their own). It is similar to an organism composed of cells or molecules. Does it exist or not?
Therefore in my view the question is not important, because either way the ideas are something objective and not an arbitrary definition—whether it is something fundamental or an organism composed of fundamental things.
Beyond all this, there may also be ideas that do not exist, but are instead arbitrary definitions of ours. I have no general criterion for distinguishing between them.
I claim that the idea of democracy exists (at least as a complex concept), and is not an arbitrary construct. Quite apart from the question of whether democracy is good or bad. I am speaking about the concept itself and not about our value judgment regarding it. Moral values are also a kind of idea, but that is not what I am dealing with here. I am speaking about the existence of concepts, not of values.

But there is an enormous difference between the concept of space or time, which is a primary ideal concept that a person uncovers through the mind’s eye, and the concept of a cellphone or a car, which did not exist until a certain point in time, and only physical scientific developments made it possible to create and engineer such concrete objects. Only then did we as human beings coin (by means of a number of primary concepts) the concept of vehicle or cellphone.

In other words, discussion of the definition of primary concepts is purely a conceptual discussion, whereas we do not engineer complex concepts solely by contemplating the primary concepts with the mind’s eye and combining them (because the possibilities are endless, and they simply would not occur to us that way). Rather, their creation begins from some concrete inputs (= all sorts of objects and phenomena, some natural and some man-made, like a vehicle or a cellphone), and we decide to generalize from the collection of concrete things a concept with certain characteristics (which of course is fundamentally grounded in the primary concepts, otherwise it would be meaningless).

I just can’t see what kind of tableness or cellphone-ness you are seeing with your mind’s eye, but it seems to me that we’ve exhausted the discussion.

I do not accept your starting assumption that these concepts did not exist before they were invented. That itself is the point under dispute. In my view, the inventor of the cellphone did not generalize this idea from observing cellphones. On the contrary: he suddenly discovered this idea (which already existed beforehand) and realized it. That itself was his discovery. And again, the cellphone here is only an example. I have no criterion for when we are dealing with a subjective, invented concept and when not.