Robert Brandom writes in his „Reason in Philosophy“ (2009) that classification could be understood as an act of thought par excellence, or even the description of what it means to think at all. He says that, for the early modern thinkers:
„…the paradigmatic cognitive act is understood as classifying: taking something particular as being of some general kind. Concepts are identifid with those general kinds.“
„Reason in Philosophy“ p. 200
He says that one major thing to clarify about our concept use is the distinction between concepts that merely label (which we could call ‘names’) and concepts that describe what their talking about or their subject matter. He says:
„The reason ‘grivey’ is merely a label, that it classifies without informing, is that nothing follows from so classifying an object.“
Ibid. p. 203
What does saying of an object that it is (an) „x“, where x is a word for a certain kinds of thing, tell us about that object? According to his inferentialist conception of understanding or thought, we understand something if we can reason about it, make inferences involving that thing.
„Description is classification with consequences, either immediately practical (“to be discarded/examined/kept”) or for further classifications.“
Robert Brandom
„Reason in Philosophy“ p. 203
So, also according to the theorizing in some of my previous articles, we can divide all of our language use or concept use into two parts: labeling, or naming, or putting sign on a thing or a kind of thing, where the relation of the sign to the signified is merely external, accidental and conventional, and actually deploying meaningful concepts with an inner sense, or semantic content that is not merely referential or denotational.
The main difference between proper names (or labels as Brandom calls them here) and general concepts (which we could also call common or general names) is that the former have a merely significational function of relating a linguistic sign to a particular (kind of) thing, while the latter involve also an ascription of a predicate or attribute to that thing (merely naming something is not an informative predication; it tells us nothing substantive about that thing).
One further difference between these exhaustive (only) parts of our language use is that merely naming something cannot be evaluated as true or false, if that thing has not been named already in some official way which precludes it having more than one name (with what Austin would understand as a performative speech act or Kripke would call an ‘initial baptism’). On the other hand, a substantive predication or using a concept to describe a thing makes a commitment to that thing’s being a certain way, which the judgement itself can faithfully represent, or fail to match up with.
It is also interesting to note that proper names cannot grammatically be used with an ‘a’ or ‘an’ in front of them, because they do not have a general or universal sense that we could have instances of. Also, in quantificational logical notation, one cannot quantify over individuals using a proper name, since those are not predicates properly speaking, but can still serve in our systems of communication to get across ideas about individuals whose names are already known.
Thanks for reading. Is this sufficiently clear? I welcome all comments that are not mean or ill-intended.
Author: Miodrag Vujaković
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