As mentioned last month, I'm slowly re-reading Robert Sokolowski's book Phenomenology of the Human Person with a friend of mine. When I first wrote about this book four years ago, I noted that Sokolowski "explains the epistemology of reason in the context of human conversation: by embracing the back and forth of speech ... he sidesteps the ever present dangers of solipsism and mental representationalism." As a point of comparison, in her book Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, Ayn Rand says that a child independently formulates the concept of, say, a tree in his or her own mind by observing trees in reality. However, on this account we need to add communication as a separate capacity on top of concept-formation so that we can explain how the child associates the word 'tree' with the concept.
By contrast, Sokolowski says that we English-speakers simply use the word 'tree' to talk about the trees we encounter and the child naturally learns to use the word because that's what other English-speakers say. As a result, we don't need the concept of a concept, which is merely another kind of mental representation - and, according to Sokolowski, such representations don't exist. Thus philosophical parsimony might lead us to strike concepts from our talk about how we understand what we know. I see quite a bit of sense in what he says, so I've been trying the idea on for size.
Ironically, Sokolowski goes on say that words serve to focus the mind on reality, yet it seems to me this assumes that somehow there is a thing called the mind inside us - and I've previously noted that I have my doubts about that position.
Yes, reification is hard to avoid...
(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)
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