0.5 A discussion about the mind and consciousness  (Page 13/3)

How does the mind decipher meaning?

Or I might ask another question - what exactly does that mean? What is meaning in the mind anyway?

An example would be an expression or any saying basically - say someone says 'red apples taste good'. That statement has a certain significance for both the listeners and the person making the statement. Depending on their experience and understanding of how red apples taste their understanding of the statement is going to differ.

That was just a verbal example, however. The mind also gets meaning from its surroundings and physical phenomena. The red apples by themselves, for instance, might give the person an experience from just seeing the apples but probably more of one when they eat one of the apples.

So there is verbal or intellectual experience and physical or phenomenal experience - the important question then is how do these two types of experience relate to each other - here Heil states Davidson's theory (Heil, J):

• Davidson argues that ... every mental token is identical with some physical token. Your being in pain at midnight is (let us imagine) identical with some physical (presumably neurological) event occurring in your body at midnight, although there is no prospect of translating talk of pain into neurological talk.

That theory received a lot of criticism, and I can see why. It doesn't seem like that would ever be literally true - as a guideline it might make some sense that mental events or states correspond with what is going on physically with the body at any time, however they probably aren't exact because different factors are going to be determining someones mental cognitions than the factors determining their physical biology.

Concepts

According to the classical theory of concepts, concepts have are complex mental representations that have a definitional structure (the concept fits properties according to its definition).

Other theories developed such as the prototype theory and the dual theory. The prototype theory suggests that concepts fit a stereotypical prototype (kind of like Jungian archetypes). The dual theory developed later and suggests that concepts have a 'core' and an 'identification procedure'. However 'Conceptual Atomism' suggests that concepts don't have any structure and they just correspond with what they represent - be that casual or historical.

In another article of mine m52492 I reference James Sully (1892) who points out that concepts have three parts - abstraction, comparison and generalization. That suggests that people go through a process of thinking for each concept - they compare the concept to other concepts, generalize the concept - but first just have an abstract picture of the concept.

His simple explanation basically just points out that concepts involve thinking 'more' about each concept - including generalizing it. The other theories of concepts all have valid points as well however. The prototype theory suggests generalization is involved (as prototypes are generalized). And the dual theory suggests that identification is involved (which is similar to comparison). While the atomism theory suggests that it is just a simple thought process - which would be the 'abstraction' phase of understanding the concepts.