Maybe there is nothing, part II

My other obsession has been "concept analysis", "conceptual modelling" or whatever you'd like to call it. As a hobby I have been reading various accounts about concepts, including Quine's From a Logical Point of View (LPV).

Quine's position is that of a moderate nominalist's, and some people have claimed that despite his skilled analysis of opposing views, he fails to give a credible account of what concepts really are. Here, I'd like to propose something, not entirely adopted from Quine but probably quite close. But we need to start from a bit further.

1. Quine says "universals do not exists", LPV p. 10: One may admit that there are red houses, roses and sunsets, but deny [..] that they have anything in common. The words 'houses', 'roses' and 'sunsets' are true of sundry individual entities which are houses and roses and sunsets [..] but there is not, in addition, any entity whatever, which is named by the word [..] 'househood', 'rosehood', 'sunsethood'.

and a bit later p 12: "The explanatory value of special an irreducible intermediary entities called 'meanings' is surely illusory.

2. In his popular article "The World of Universals" (in collection Problems of Philosophy, PP), Russell stated that it is exactly this "sameness" of individual houses that would be called a universal. Here, he uses 'whiteness' as an example, PP p. 95.

Since there are many white things, the resemblance must hold between many pairs of particular white things; and this is the characteristic of a universal. It will be useless to say that there is a different resemblance for each pair, for then we shall have to say that these resemblances resemble each other, and thus at last we shall be forced to admit resemblance as a universal.

3. So, are we really forced to admit universals on the basis that we observe similarity in individuals? The title of this entry was "Maybe there is nothing", so let's simply say NO. Why should we assume that there is anything conceptual in the way we as humans recognize things? A computer can be programmed to classify images based on almost any criteria, or by a random-but-reproducible criteria. Why would we find anything conceptual in that?

Does this mean that concepts as such do not exists? Surely not, but hopefully more about that once I manage to find a new copy of "Situations and attitudes" by Barwise and Perry. I managed to misplace my copy somewhere in Switzerland, Finland or Japan..