Conceptualism...Preejo V. J. (0924605)

Conceptualism

 

 

Conceptualism, as the word indicates, is coming from the word "concept." This concept has been very much discussed in the field of philosophy, art and literature. Here is the humble attempt to shed the light upon this concept, conceptualism. The term conceptualism is applied by the modern philosophers and writers to a scholastic theory of the nature of universals. This is to distinguish it from the two extremes of Nominalism and Realism. Realism asserts that the genus is more real than the species, and that particulars have no reality.

Nominalism can be understood as compatible with materialism, that is, only matter (stuff) which can be detected by the five senses, is real. , nominalism takes the model of meaning discussed above as the sole and sufficient model of meaning. That is, if a universal term as a name is to have meaning, it can only have meaning by way of reference.  Nominalism according to which genus and species are merely names. Conceptualism takes a mean position. The conceptualist holds that universals have a real existence, but only in the mind, as the concepts which unite the individual things.

Let us analyze the situation by a small example: There is in the mind a general notion or idea of boats, by reference to which the mind can decide whether a given object is, or is not, a boat. On the one hand "boat" is something more than a mere sound with a purely arbitrary conventional significance; on the other it has, apart from particular things to which it applies, no reality; its reality is purely abstract or conceptual. This theory was enunciated by Abelard in opposition to Roscellinus (nominalist) and William of Champeaux (realist). In other words, Conceptualism is a doctrine in philosophy intermediate between nominalism and realism. It says that universals exist only within the mind and have no external or substantial reality. What is universal is only in the mind of the perceiver.

Conceptualism was either explicitly or implicitly embraced by most of the early modern thinkers like René Descartes, John Locke or Gottfried Leibniz. Sometimes the term is applied even to the radically different philosophy of Kant, who holds that universals have no connection with external things because they are exclusively produced by our a priori mental structures and functions. However, this application of the term "conceptualism" is not very usual, since the problem of universals can, strictly speaking, be meaningfully raised only within the framework of the traditional, pre-Kantian epistemology. This is the mordern conceptualism.

The conceptualism in scholasticism is different. By means of the late scholastic terminology, conceptualism can be defined as belief in universal formal concepts and rejection of objective concepts. In other words, moderate realism and conceptualism both agree in admitting universal mental acts (formal concepts), but differ in that moderate realism claims that to such acts correspond universal intentional objects, whereas conceptualism denies any such universal objects.