We can illustrate these issues by discussing a version of conceptual idealism that has been presented in an admirably clear and explicit form: the ‘Conceptualism’ of Michael Morris^. This is the conjunction of two (related) claims:
(A) There can be interesting metaphysical explanations.
(B) The nature of the objects, properties, and facts to which our concepts correspond is not fixed independently of the nature of the concepts which correspond to them.^
What does the phrase ‘not fixed independently o f mean here? Morris rephrases (B) as ‘there would not have been those objects, properties, and facts, if they had not corresponded to those concepts’. And he expands this a little further with ‘It follows that the nature of the world we think about is at least partly determined by the thoughts we have about it.’ Someone who denies (B) is labelled Tlatonist’ by Morris, a term he borrows from discussions of Wittgenstein’s views on meaning (that is. Platonism, in Fregean guise, is one of the views of meaning that
3 See his The Good and the True, Oxford University Press, 1992. See especially chapters 1 and 2. Morris borrows the term ‘conceptualism’ from Wiggins, and though he stresses its Kantian nature, he avoids the term ‘idealism’.
Wittgenstein attacks in Philosophical Investigation^''). The third major position is the No-theory view, which denies (A) for non-Platonic reasons. Since the conceptualist proposes (B) partly because she does not see how metaphysics is possible given the assumptions of Platonism, claim (A) is an important part of conceptualism. Above all else, conceptualism is a starting point for metaphysical theorising.
A couple o f points about the dependence relation specified in (B) are worth stressing. Firstly, the connection between a concept and a fact is not to be seen as a completely deterrnining relation from the former to the latter. (B) allows for an extemalism that goes the other way. The natural kind that I refer to when I say V ater’, may partly determine what the word Svater’ means in my mouth. Secondly, there must be a gap between concept and object, on Morris’ account, in order to allow for interesting metaphysical explanations. He goes on to specify a condition for factual equivalence for expressions in order to constrain metaphysical reductions. If there was no ‘space’ between fact and concept (if two concepts could not count as concepts of the same fact), the only condition for factual equivalence could be conceptual equivalence. But this would not allow for interesting reductions. Morris therefore wants to allow for different concepts to count as concepts of the same thing.
5 See chapter 4. The term Tlatonism’ is not meant to imply all o f the doctrines that were advanced by Plato. It is important, however, that in order to maintain the distinction between conceptualism and Platonism, the timeless existence o f concepts is not conflated with Platonic forms. The latter, and not the former, are mind independent. Morris is committed to the existence o f abstract objects (i.e. atemporal concepts), though he reduces them to what is involved in having a belief involving them.
In order to avoid the charge of empirical idealism, Morris makes it clear that what he is talking about is not a connection between some psychological particular (a ‘concept’ or ‘thought’ that exists in some mind) and the nature of things. The world existed, and contained many of the things with which we are familiar (rocks, trees, etc.), long before anyone was around to think about it. Conceptualism avoids denying this truism by insisting on an atemporal notion o f concepts. A particular concept, for Morris, is that which is common to anyone who possesses that concept. Someone possesses a concept just in case they can have a propositional attitude that involves that concept in its contents^. The timeless existence of concepts is then explained as ‘a matter of there being something which it would be to possess that concept’.^ One important consequence of this notion of timeless concepts is that the sense in which (B) suggests that our concepts ‘determine’ reality cannot be an ''empirical sense’®. It should not be taken that (B) suggests that we ‘construct’ the world with our concepts, or that our concepts ‘carve up’ the world. But this way of putting the matter is not very informative. If ‘determines’ can be given a non-empirical sense, then why not ‘constructs’ and ‘carves up’? And it leaves open the question of what non-empirical sense we can give to ‘determine’.
^ Cf. Peacocke,^ Stut^ of Concepts, p. 5.
7 Morris, op. cit. p. 18: “the existence o f a concept is a matter o f there being some condition which would have to be met by anyone for her to count as having a belief involving that concept. And that there is such a condition in the case o f any given concept is timelessly true.” It seems to me that this unnecessarily commits Morris to the thesis that there exist necessary conditions for possessing a concept. Whether or not this is a contentious claim depends on what one takes as counting as a ‘condition’. The conditions o f meaning will be considered in detail in chapter 4.
One apparent answer to this question that Morris has to offer is a reformulation of (B) as the statement that there would not have been those objects, properties and facts if there had not been those concepts. Given the notion of concepts as timeless, however, Morris also concedes that conceptualism (and its denial. Platonism) is thereby committed to the view that there can be subjunctive conditionals with impossible antecedents that are nonetheless non-vacuously true. But this is controversial, to say the least.
Is it meaningful to claim, for instance, that ‘if 2+2 was not equal to 4, then not p \
for any filling in o f A good reason to think that this is not meaningful is that p,
it seems, is not going to affect the overall truth-value of the ‘statement’. It maybe that there is an analysis of subjunctive conditionals that admits of interesting cases of impossible antecedents, though Morris gives none^. In any case this way of expressing conceptualism remains obscure, to say the least^®. Is there not an alternative way of spelling out the difference between it and Platonism? One other formulation given by Morris is worth considering, since it illustrates more clearly what I mean by ‘conceptual idealism’:
[I]f the world is capable of being thought about at all, it must be essential to the world that it is such as to be thought about... it is essential to the world that the world can be made sense of.”
^ Though he does present some reasons why he thinks subjunctive conditional with impossible antecedents are not vacuous. In brief; in some cases, we entertain subjunctive conditions with impossible antecedents in order to convince ourselves that the antecedent is indeed impossible. The demonstrative power o f such conditionals depends on the meaning o fp, not just its truth-value. Ibid. pp. 62-67.
'0 One point that it obscures is that Platonism, at least as it is traditionally understood, holds that there are certain abstract forms that do have the dependence relation with objects, properties and facts that Mortis is struggling to spell out. In contrast to concepts, however, these forms may be unknowable.
Morris points out that this way of putting the matter suggests a link with (A) (the claim that there can be interesting metaphysical explanations) which he goes on to exploit. His understanding of (A) demands an operable condition of adequacy for metaphysical explanations. This operable condition is given in epistemological terms: different concepts of the same object, property or fact are distinguished by different ways of knowing about that object (different ‘modes of presentation’). All this is in line with the roughly Kantian nature of conceptualism that Morris emphasises^^. However, I wish to pursue a different line o f argument from (B) to (A) that replaces epistemological concerns with issues in the philosophy of language. This ‘linguistic turn’ is in line with the development of conceptual idealism in the context of twentieth century analytic philosophy, and it also brings us into line with the discussion of idealism in chapter 1. The idea that ‘it is essential to the world that the world can be made sense o f can be then put like this: ‘it is essential to the world that it can be described’, where describing something means to bring it under a public concept. That is to say that the determining relation in (B) (‘not fixed independently of) is to be taken in such a way such that the world (that we can think about at all) is limited by our possible concepts. All objects, properties and facts necessarily fall under some possible concept, since to be an object, property or fact just is to fall under the relevant concept.
'2 Although Morris is keen to distance himself from some aspects o f Transcendental Idealism that he associates with empirical idealism, for example that ‘die order and regularity in the appearances, which we entitle nature, we ourselves introduce.’ {Critique of Pure Reason, A125). He also rejects the idea that we cannot have knowledge o f things as they are in themselves. {Op. cit. p. 68.)