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3 O ne notable change in the philosophical literature of the last thirty years has been the extent of attention to the nature of concepts. Although philosophers have been concerned with “conceptual analysis ” and related issues since the early twentieth century (and in fact since Kant), sustained attention to what concepts are, to their “possession conditions ,” to their acquisition and—especially—to their epistemic role is quite recent. The problem of the nature of concepts is, of course, much more ancient, since the traditional problem of universals, today thought of as primarily a metaphysical issue, originally had as an important component the explanation of the universality of our knowledge. In this connection , I should say at the outset that I am using the term “concept” as Rand does, to refer not to an object of thought but to a retained grasp of objects of thought, where the grasp is of the appropriate unitary sort.1 Ayn Rand’s Theory of Concepts Rethinking Abstraction and Essence Allan Gotthelf 1. Compare, for example, Geach (1957, 18–19), who cites for the former “Russell’s use of [the term ‘concept’] in The Principles of Mathematics and again . . . the use of it to translate Frege’s ‘Begriff’; Russell’s ‘concepts’ and Frege’s Begriffe were supposed to be objective entities, not belonging to a particular mind.” As Geach and others have pointed out, viewing concepts as “mental particulars,” and thus your concept of electricity as a distinct existent from mine, does not preclude speaking of you and me as having the same concept of electricity. “Mental 4 ■ Allan Gotthelf A number of philosophers, including, for example, John McDowell in Mind and World (1994) (building especially on the writings of Wilfrid Sellars), have come to speak of the role of concepts in the justification of propositional knowledge.2 Now, if one thought of perceptual awareness as preconceptual, and justification of perceptual judgments as noninferential , one would need, it seems to me, a normative theory of concepts as the bridge. On this view, the proper application of the subject and predicate concepts in a judgment would be crucial to the justification of perceptual judgments employing those concepts. McDowell, of course, does not think such a picture is plausible, and views the relationship of concepts to perceptual experience quite differently. He speaks of the picture of concept-formation I have just pointed to as “a natural counterpart to the idea of the Given,” and argues that such a view would require the abstraction of “the right element in the presented multiplicity.” But, he writes, “this abstractionist picture of the role of the Given in the formation of concepts has been trenchantly criticized, in a Wittgensteinian spirit, by P. T. Geach” (McDowell 1994, 7; referring to Geach 1957, §§ 6–11). The view that Geach criticizes under the name of “abstractionism” involves, however, a crude, Lockean notion of abstraction.3 Those of us disinclined to think that the “Given” is a myth should consider the possibility that a more sophisticated view of abstraction could provide just particulars” is Jerry Fodor’s term (see, for example, Fodor 1998, 23); Rand speaks (with some reservation) of “mental entities” (ITOE 10, 157–58). Throughout this essay, I follow Rand in putting terms for particular concepts in quotation marks. 2. In McDowell 1994, see, for example, Lecture I, sec. 2, where he refers to Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” in Sellars 1963; see also the index in McDowell 1994, s.v. “Sellars, Wilfrid.” Both McDowell and Sellars acknowledge the Kantian source of their views on this topic (McDowell 1994, 1). Sellars is not explicit in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” about its Kantian roots, but, as McDowell observes at the opening of his 1997 Woodbridge Lectures, “In his seminal set of lectures, ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,’ Wilfrid Sellars offers (among much else) the outlines of a deeply Kantian way of thinking about intentionality—about how thought and language are directed toward the world. Sellars describes Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes (1967), his major work of the next decade, as a sequel to ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.’ (vii). The later work makes explicit the Kantian orientation of the earlier; Sellars now shows a conviction that his own thinking about intentionality (and, indeed, about everything) can be well expounded through a reading of Kant” (McDowell 2009b, 3). 3. “I shall use ‘abstractionism’ as a name for the doctrine that a concept is acquired by a...

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