Q&A: Change in Concepts in a Conventionalist Approach
Change in Concepts in a Conventionalist Approach
Question
As you’ve probably noticed, lately I’ve been dealing with things you wrote about definitions and concepts, and with your permission, a question:
According to the distinction you presented in several places, it follows that within the conventionalist approach one cannot really speak of a change in the definition of a concept, since any change in effect creates a new convention, and therefore a new concept as well (as Pantam presented his principle of continuous change in concepts). By contrast, in the essentialist approach, which sees definitions as an attempt to capture an existing essence, one can understand changes in definition as correction or approximation to that same essence, rather than the creation of something entirely new.
However, I wonder: even within the conventionalist approach, can concepts not be seen as containing a range of essential properties, such that a change in definition is not the creation of a new concept, but only a shift in emphasis among components that were already included in the concept’s established field of meaning? In other words, perhaps even within a conventional framework one can speak of development or movement in concepts, not as a change in their identity, but as a reorganization of their agreed-upon properties.What do you think?
Answer
Of course, within the framework of social agreement one can define different properties of a concept at different levels of essentiality. But it is still all convention. The same mouth that agreed on the concept can also agree on different levels of necessity/essentiality. I don’t see any importance in such a discussion. It’s semantics.
Discussion on Answer
There isn’t really a change in the concept here, since the “new” definition actually falls under the previous one.
By divine providence (?…) I came across the following things you wrote:
“In the meantime it has become clear to me that even within the analytic-conventionalist picture it may be possible to change the definition of a concept, if we accept that properties are not divided in a sharp binary way into essential on the one hand and accidental on the other, but rather that every property is essential to the concept to some degree. The definition of the concept is also not sharp, since there is no defined set of essential properties. In such a situation, we can change the definition by raising or lowering the level of essentiality of certain properties. Here it is no longer clear that we have created a new concept, or that we have not touched the definition. Among other things, I will deal with this in my third book. There we will talk about the possibility of categorical revolutions in a person’s outlook, and about the relation between the innovating type and the conservative type. There too we will raise a similar claim, according to which a person believes in certain principles at levels of confidence that are not binary (yes or no), but continuous. In modern logic such a framework of judgment is called continuous logic. See also my first book, in the discussion of the heap paradox (in chapter 4 of the eighth section).”
But it is still a matter of convention, and therefore not really interesting. As I wrote here.
Right, I accept that. But in the end, there is still meaning to the claim that one can speak of a “change” in the definition of a concept even in such a worldview. Although I agree that we still remain in the world of convention, and in that sense there is no especially significant claim here.