The Structure of the Concept

THE STRUCTURE OF THE CONCEPT SINCE Locke wrote his Essay Concerning Human Understanding philosophers have struggled with the problem of conceptual structure. Does the concept have a structure? And if it does what are the parts involved and how are they derived? What is the cause of their union in knowledge, and the plan according to which they combine? To resolve these questions is to determine the limits of human knowledge and the extent to which it attains the real. Locke was led to pose the problem by a suggestion of Descartes : "The second (rule) was to divide each of the difficulties which I examined into as many small parts as possible and as would be required the better to resolve them." 1 A problem may be looked upon as a whole containing many parts. The first step toward its solution is the division of the whole into its parts. Once these elements of the problem are known the whole can be understood by reconstruction. The whole is intelligible in the architecture of the parts. If division is taken in the logical sense, the resolution into genus and species, then this suggestion cannot be considered a new idea. Philosophers had, from time immemorial, known and used it. Classical logic had fully unfolded its nature and function . But Descartes did not have this logical division in mind. He intended to translate into the framework of philosophical thought the methodical division of mathematical analysis., The geometrician sometimes proves a property of a figure in virtue of the knowledge of its essence. This supposes the division of the figure into genus and species to form the definition. But the analytical geometrician (to whose method of procedure Descartes contributed the fundamental concept) begins by dividing the figure into quantitative parts and then proceeds to define the object as the sum of those parts. A curved line 1 Discourse On Method, Part Two. THE STRUCTURE OF THE CONCEPT 229 may be considered in its genus and species, or it may be divided up into indefinitely many small parts whose addition reconstitutes the original figure. It was this second method of proceeding which Descartes proposed for philosophy. He wished to resolve the object of philosophical thought not into genus and species but into " integral components." The analogy between the method of geometrical analysis and the philosopher's way of division was vague in the thought of Descartes. He did not advance it substantially beyond the initial intuition nor purify it of its mathematical point of origin. But it was sufficiently suggestive to the mind of Locke to lead him to apply it to the problem of the concept. * * * It occurred to Locke that no thinker of the past had applied Cartesian analysis to human concepts. Philosophers had always divided the concept into genus and species as a prelude to definition. And from the definition of the object they had proceeded to deduce its properties. But they had never thought to dismember the concept in the image of the geometrician dividing the mathematical figure thereby the better to know it. The undivided·figure is a puzzle to his mind. But when he has reduced it to 'its fundamental parts and rebuilt it out of them, it is totally intelligible to him in their relations. Just as the intricate works of a watch are a mystery to the layman until he has taken it apart and successfully reconstructed it, so it is with all intued wholes. So it may very well be with concepts. Locke, just as Descartes before him, was acutely aware of the vast confusion of contradictory philosophical opinions. It now seemed to him that their resolution might fundamentally hinge upon the application of this new analysis to conception. If we approach this problem with Locke's conviction that conception has a structure we are naturally led to seek confirmation of our belief in the finding of likely parts. This is not a difficult task. For the qualities of external things presented to us by our senses seem clearly to act as the passive elements of combination and the relations of the mind seem to play the role 230 KEVIN A. WALL of the principle of...