Question

Hello Rabbi Michi, I listened to lesson number 5 on conceptual analysis and I have two questions:
1. What makes a definition from the world of ideas an existing one? As you said, not everything exists, otherwise every collection of characteristics, even unrelated ones, would be defined as a concept. A possible criterion is whether it has meaning. If so, what determines what has meaning and what does not? So is it the fact that it can be realized in the real world? Then would there really be such a concept as democracy on a beach? Seemingly I do not see a reason why that should count as a concept, but it does exist to some extent in reality. You did not define what the criterion is, or perhaps I did not understand.
2. At the end you briefly described your view that one can argue about the definition of a concept. The concept exists in reality and its definition can change, as you compared it to a person who grows up.
I was not convinced. It seems to me, as the American you mentioned who lectured at Ben-Gurion said, that once you change a definition or a set of characteristics, this is already a different definition. We use definitions with the same name for our purposes and argue about them, when in practice these are actually completely different concepts. We do this because it has practical implications and this is a way of relating and speaking, but in reality it is indeed a different concept. For example, you used the example of the argument over what a Jew is. The argument is not really over what a Jew is, but rather there are different definitions, and for convenience one may call them halakhic Jew and Israeli Jew. It seems to me that the argument is not over what the correct definition of the concept “Jew” is. The name is only semantics, and the argument is about practical implications—which definition of Jew we will want to use in practice, Israeli or Jewish. The winning definition will be only in our practice, and we will call the winner “Jew,” while in the world of ideas the two definitions will remain. If we speak of change, there was not really a change in the definition. It may be that in practice it was decided, for one reason or another, that for certain needs a different definition would be used. The fact that the new and old definitions were given the same name is technical and semantic. In practice this is a completely different idea, and the concept did not change, only the practice did. Sometimes we change a definition because we understand that we defined a concept incorrectly. In such a case, we did not really change the concept, but rather chose a different concept and called it by the name we used in the past. Both concepts exist, or perhaps the first one turned out retroactively not to exist. But the choice to use the same name is practical, revealing our current intention and its fit to practical needs. It does not change an existing and defined concept. I hope I managed to make my intention clear.