Conceptual Conservatism & Conceptual Liberalism

There are two kinds of philosophers: those who say that there are two kinds of philosophers, and those who don’t. Since I agree with the old saying that each of is at heart either a Platonist or an Aristotelian, I belong to the former category. There’s another, less general, binary categorization. There are, it seems to me, conceptual conservatives and conceptual liberals. Conceptual conservatives resist the revision of longstanding concepts, while conceptual liberals are open to revisions.

In modern times, the primary impetus for conceptual revision has been scientific discovery. In some cases, the contest between maintaining and revising concepts is long-since decided. In modern times, the existence of atoms has been widely acknowledged. However, the concept atom was, in virtue of its etiology, understood as the concept of something simple, having no parts, and not being capable of division. In that era, “splitting the atom,” was oxymoronic. The discovery that the entities labelled atoms had parts and, in theory—and in the 1930s in practice—could be split into component parts forced a choice. The conservative choice was to say we’ve discovered that the things previously called atoms are not, in fact, atoms. They do not fall under the concept, and perhaps nothing does. The conceptually liberal choice was to say that these things are atoms, but our concept needs to be revised, so things that are not simple, and which can be broken apart, can still count as atoms. In roughly the same period, say the early 20th century, those who understood physics announced that the ordinary material objects, such as tables, that we’ve always regarded as solid, in fact are not solid, but mostly empty space populated with tiny invisible particles. This manifests conceptual conservatism. The things we ordinarily call solid do not, in fact, fall under the concept solidity. The conceptual liberal in contrast, will contend that tables and the like are solid, but solidity is not what we took it to be. Note that “tables are not solid” is a rather surprising, we might say radical, claim, defying common sense. Thus, conceptual conservatism, unwillingness to accept the revision of our concepts, leads to radical claims. In contrast, it’s the conceptual liberal, who advocates changing concepts, that tends to leave things as they are. We go on saying that tables are solid and that there are atoms of carbon. We can keep our concepts as they are, at the cost of changing the world as we see it, or we can change our concepts, leaving the world as we see it unchanged.

The two examples just mentioned are now history. Conceptual liberalism prevailed. We know the things we call atoms are by no means simple entities, but we continue to call them atoms. We know that material objects are comprised of atoms in empty space held together by electrostatic forces, but we go on calling them solid. It was easier to modify the concepts than to change how we talk.

Let’s consider a contemporary instance. Darwin’s discovery of natural selection as the primary mechanism that accounts for the diversity, complexity, and adaptedness of biological organisms has been widely understood as revealing that while much in nature appears to be designed, in fact it isn’t designed. The denial of design in nature arises from the concept design involving intelligence and foresight, which Darwinism denies. (With this in view, the term “intelligent design” is pleonastic.)

However, Daniel Dennett, perhaps the most significant current proponent of the philosophical significance of Darwinism, contends that Darwin did not expose design in nature as merely apparent, but instead that our concept of design as involving mind needs to be revised. The products of natural selection are designed, but not the product of intelligence and foresight. Design does not imply a designer, unless natural selection, or ‘mother nature’ is called the designer. This coheres with the practice, one we find we cannot easily, and perhaps possibly, give up, of describing structures and behaviors of organisms as being there for a purpose. As in “the purpose of the lungs is to oxygenate blood.” We can say that the lungs were designed to oxygenate blood, but without crediting a designing mind. The design is due to blind, mindless natural selection. Dennett’s divergence from the mainstream on this matter is, I think, largely practical: what’s the best defense of the scientific account of the biological world from evolution’s deniers? Is it to banish talk of design from scientific explanation or, as Dennett, thinks, to co-opt talk of design. severing it from assumptions about a designing mind? In this case, as with the concepts atom and solid, there appears to be approximately nothing at stake beyond the most practical way to speak.

Much more seems at stake when the concepts at issue have a direct bearing upon the idea human beings have of themselves. Take, for example, the concept consciousness. Dualists believe that consciousness (at least human consciousness) is a very mysterious property that no physical thing could possibly have, and thus that it must be a property of something non-physical, of an immaterial mind or soul. This means we are essentially non-physical. Increasingly, the defense of dualism looks like a desperate rear-guard action against advancing science, which makes the materiality of the human mind, and thus human consciousness, evident. What we call consciousness is a property of the functioning, embodied, socially-located brain. And the brain possesses this property in virtue of its computational activity. Consciousness is an extremely complex, but not an utterly mysterious, property of human (and other) mind-brains. This sort of theory requires conceptual revision. The problem of consciousness seems inscrutably difficult mainly because it cannot be solved without revising our concept of consciousness. Obviously, if someone sees the concept as involving being necessarily non-physical, then she must see the scientific theory of what we call consciousness either as false, or as implying that nothing, at least nothing human, falls under the concept, i.e., consciousness does not exist. Similarly, if science reveals that access to one’s consciousness is not necessarily privileged and private, or that among the objects of consciousness are no properties, such as color qualia, that exist but not in the physical world. This explains why seemingly intelligent readers of Daniel Dennett’s 528 page book Consciousness Explained can assert that he says that consciousness does not exist, that he does not explain it but explains it away. Dennett, the conceptual liberal, certainly believes that consciousness exists, and in the book attempts to explain it, but his explanation implies that it’s rather different than we thought.

It’s worth noting that others, who like Dennett advance materialist, computational accounts of human consciousness, can be uncertain whether their theories imply that consciousness is very different than assumed, or that it simply does not exist, and that the belief that it does is an illusion. Thus, e.g., Michael Graziano, originator of attention schema theory, expresses ambivalence on the matter in his Rethinking Consciousness (2019). On reflection, it’s not obvious how far we can go, revising a concept, before we no longer have the original concept, before we must acknowledge that nothing falls under it. Concepts are neither completely immune to revision nor open to unlimited revision.

Dualists insist on the ancient, unmodified concept of consciousness, at the cost of denying its applicability in physical reality. Others can join dualists in refusing to accept the minds’ physical nature yet do not hold that what falls under the concept is beyond this world. A good example is Galen Strawson. Unable to accept current scientific theories of consciousness as arising out of the brain’s computational complexity, he embraces panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is a ubiquitous, irreducible, fundamental property of physical things in general. Thus, the concept is left unmodified, but at the cost of radically extending the range of objects that fall under it. As in dualism, it remains a mysterious, scientifically unexplainable property.

Human beings, of course, ascribe consciousness to themselves, to one another, and to various non-human animals. The adequacy of our traditional concept to reality, and thus what it is to be conscious, seems a much more significant matter than simply how to talk.

Even closer to home is the concept of freedom. Our concept of ourselves as falling under the concept freedom is an integral feature of our image of ourselves as purposive, responsible agents. Contemporary science leaves no space for the mind being immaterial, but identifies it as belonging to the material world, fully subject to its causal laws. For many, this immediately implies that we are not free, that our conviction that we are free and responsible is an illusion, a relic of pre-scientific times. Once again, the conceptual conservative can reason that science is mistaken, and that because we are free, we are not entirely physical. Or he can accept that we are entirely physical, and conclude that we are not free. In contrast. The conceptual liberal arrives at neither radical view; she believes that we are free, but that being free is not what we thought it was. As Dennett says, we have a variety of free will worth wanting, and it does not involve being the ultimate originators of our choices and actions. How we conceive ourselves as conscious, choosing agents, is at stake here, not just alternate ways of speaking. Whether in the long run we regard science as showing that we lack genuine freedom and responsibility, or as showing us more precisely what it is to be free and responsible, is a matter of the first importance.

On a deeper, theoretical level, all this leaves us with the question of what, exactly, concepts are: abstract objects, mental representations, cognitive dispositions, or something else? Do they have an existence independent of ways we find it convenient to describe our mental goings on and to categorize things in the world? What are the criteria for the identity of concepts; when do we have two versions of one and when do we have two distinct concepts? Are they somehow fixed, or can we revise them as conceptual liberals appear to?