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The Confusion of the Concept
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
Extract
The words “idea” and “concept” have been, and still are, the source of so much confusion in psychology that we shall do well to banish them from the vocabulary of that science. I have urged this reform and have endeavoured to promote it by writing a psychology without ideas.It has seemed to me that the word “concept” plays a no less pernicious rôle in logic. But it was not until I began to look into the matter with a view to writing this article that I became aware of the desperate degree and extent of the confusion obtaining in all that pertains to the concepts of logic.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1928
References
page 427 Note 1 My two volumes, Outline of Psychology and Outline of Abnormal Psychology.
page 427 Note 2 In his Formal Logic and elsewhere.
page 432 Note 1 Recently published by the University of California Press, 1926.
page 434 Note 1 It is cited (from The Principles of Mathematics, 1903) by Messrs. Ogden and Richards (The Meaning of Meaning) to illustrate their contention that modern philosophers are not immune to the primitive superstitions regarding words.
page 435 Note 1 Though, as we have seen, Mr. Russell, while ascribing immutability to all objects, distinguishes two kinds of objects, things and concepts.
page 432 Note 2 As by several of the seven Californian philosophers cited above.
page 438 Note 1 Psychology of the Moral Self.
page 440 Note 1 To make the particles of the verbs denoting these activities into substantives is the first step of the process by which the act of conceiving has been made, first, into a conception, then into “a concept.” To say that an idea means this or that or has meaning is as tautological and far more confusing than to say that a meaning means, or a concept conceives.
page 440 Note 2 Holism and Evolution, London, 1926.
page 441 Note 1 Italics mine throughout.
page 442 Note 1 Plato's Doctrine of Ideas, Oxford 1909.