Making Sense of Conceptual Change

Abstract

Arthur Lovejoy's history of unit‐ideas and the history of concepts are often criticized for being historically insensitive forms of history‐writing. Critics claim that one cannot find invariable ideas or concepts in several contexts or times in history without resorting to some distortion. One popular reaction is to reject the history of ideas and concepts altogether, and take linguistic entities as the main theoretical units. Another reaction is to try to make ideas or concepts context‐sensitive and to see their histories as dynamic processes of transformation. The main argument in this paper is that we cannot abandon ideas or concepts as theoretical notions if we want to write an intelligible history of thought. They are needed for the categorization and classification of thinking, and in communication with contemporaries. Further, the criterion needed to subsume historical concepts under a general concept cannot be determined merely on the basis of their family resemblances, which allows variation without an end, since talk of the same concepts implies that they share something in common. I suggest that a concept in history should be seen to be composed of two components: the core of a concept and the margin of a concept. On the basis of this, we can develop a vocabulary for talking about conceptual changes. The main idea is that conceptual continuity requires the stability of the core of the concept, but not necessarily that of the margin, which is something that enables a description of context‐specific features. If the core changes, we ought to see it as a conceptual replacement.

Semantic Web for the Humanities

“…In Description Logics, ontology diff [3] can be used to determine meaning differences. The question has been discussed in Philosphy around the confrontation of history of unit-ideas versus a pure linguistic intellectual history [9].…”

“…A systematic comparison between unstable concept properties will tell whether a drift occurred, and its type. We consider discussions on history of unitideas [9] and theories of concept drift for the Semantic Web [14] as inspiration.…”

Mapping Conceptual Change: The Ideological Struggle for the Meaning of EFL in Uruguayan Education

“…This led most conceptual historians to address political concepts from a dynamic and diachronic ii perspective, mainly focusing on concept instability and change. Following Kuukkanen (2008), concepts can undergo three different processes: stability, change, and replacement. Conceptual stability refers to the actual absence of change, in which the meanings associated to a concept remain constant through time.…”

Experimentation and the Meaning of Scientific Concepts

“…What keeps together different uses of a term over time if the beliefs and practices associated with it change? If a concept does not retain its identity over time, what is its history the history of (Arabatzis 2006;Dear 2005;Kuukkanen 2008)?…”