Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

In fact, this applies to all abstract entities and their structures - in contrast to concrete entities like minerals.

A mineral does have its structure independently of (the existence of) any other minerals (at least independently of those which are not its spatial parts) - it is enough to use a microscope which would enable us to identify it. The structure of an abstract entity, on the other hand, is always the matter of the entity's position within the web of other abstract entities of the same category - there is no "mental microscope" to examine it in isolation and penetrate inside it. This has become especially clear with the development of the mathematical theory of categories (see, e.

So the semanticist must talk about some nonparticulars - be they construed as intersubjective identities of particulars, or some abstract entities borne by these identities.

Conceptualism seems to claim that, first, the particulars which are relevant in lingustics are mental entities (or contents of consciousness, or the internal wirings of our ‘language faculty’), and, second, that the theoretician of language has no use of abstract entities whatsoever.

It is, of course, a severe error to construe linguistics to be about abstract entities in the former sense of "about" (i.e., roughly speaking, in the sense of having abstract entities as the ultimate source of evidence).

However, the sagest abstract philosophical conception of language is empty if it does not reflect the facts of how language really works; and the most detailed atlas of the landscape of language is impotent if it is not clear which questions it purports to answer.

To show this, we must consider the very role of abstract entities for our comprehending our world.

There are 'real' objects we perceive, and there are abstract objects we posit.

The simplest situation of positing an abstract object is that of grasping a similarity between 'real' objects as something they have in common.

Philosophers of diverse provenance claim that the hierarchical structure of abstract entities which are the means of our comprehending 15 our world arise from some kind of associations .