How Do We Know Concretes?

To the layperson the title of this post must seem strange.
 
To academics, especially philosophers, the issue for a couple of millennia has been a big deal.
 
Of course we know concretes, says the layperson. We open our eyes and look out at the world—to see specific, individual, concrete people, animals, plants, and things. Reminiscing about our childhood, we can recall many specific, individual concrete events, ranging from games we played with relatives or next door friends to vacations taken with the family to the years spent in various schools.
 
And historians specialize in reporting the concretes of the past, do they not? Well, throughout the nineteenth century, and still today, historians, along with psychotherapists, medical doctors—and anyone working in applied fields—are said not to be true scientists. Only theoreticians are scientists. This is the dispute over theory versus history.*
 
To put the issue in more philosophical terms, we live in a world of particulars, yet with the exception of proper names our knowledge consists of universals.
 
Theories, science, and principles are all expressed in terms of universals. How do we use those universals to know particulars?
 
The problem arises from the theory sometimes called naïve realism—Aristotle’s improvement on Plato—that says universals are external to our minds, lodged, so to speak, in the things of reality, “out there,” but not in Plato’s separate realm.
 
Aristotle said that the form is embedded in the matter, form being his word for what in more modern terms we call essence or essential distinguishing characteristic. Matter, as in the stuff that something is made of, is what makes the thing a unique, concrete individual entity.
 
How can we know concretes when nearly all knowledge is universal? The glass on my desk, so the theory goes, contains “glassness,” the universal essence that we grasp and understand as a thing we drink liquids out of. The glass, or in my case, plastic, that the container is made of is its matter, and this includes its color and the number of ounces of liquid it can hold.
 
The matter of the glass, we could say, is that the glass on my desk is plastic, its color is blue, and it holds twelve ounces. Does that mean we have understood the concreteness of this glass?
 
No, say the critics of Aristotle’s common sense realism, because we are using universals in every word (“plastic, blue, twelve ounces”) to describe this individual concrete. We fail to get to “the thing in itself” (the thing as it really is, its identity), a problem that led John Locke, in exasperation, to conclude that the individuality of a thing is “something I know not what.” Further problems led David Hume to fail to find a “necessary connection” between cause and effect, heading us down the road to Immanuel Kant who said we can never know true, noumenal reality (where the “thing in itself” is presumed to reside).
 
And that is where we are today—reality is unknowable, concepts are arbitrary, and nothing is universal—with bad consequences in ethics and politics: values are subjective and there is no objectively valid, justifiable political or economic system.
 
Thomas Hobbes said we need a strong “public sword” to keep the peace among warring groups, each with its own arbitrary values, but today’s postmoderns want to crush any group with different values, especially those who advocate capitalism.
 
In other words, dictatorship follows from philosophy’s failure to solve the so-called problem of universals.
 
But let’s go back to our layperson who looks out at the world and sees a myriad of concrete things and their attributes. Although such a layperson may still think in Aristotle’s realist tradition by saying, “I just look and see glassness in the glass,” the conclusion is not correct, because there is in fact no essence of glassness in the thing out there. The layperson’s mind is doing more than he or she thinks.
 
What Aristotle called abstraction—mentally separating the form from its matter—is a more complicated process than he knew.
 
Concept formation, or conceptualization, is the human being’s method of turning percepts into universal concepts. How does this occur?
 
All knowledge begins at birth with perception, by observing concrete particulars. Later, when we begin to talk, we learn to form concepts, which become our universals.
 
Ayn Rand’s theory (ch. 1 and 2) holds that concepts and essential distinguishing characteristics are in our minds, not “out there” in the thing, but if we correctly identify what’s “out there,” the essences and concepts are objective, in an epistemological sense, not intrinsic or metaphysical as both Plato and Aristotle thought.
 
The process proceeds as follows. We perceive many similarities and differences among the things of the world. When we focus on one group of similar things that are somewhat similar to, but also different from, another group, we have isolated something we want to identify with a concept and word.
 
To form the concept, we focus on the characteristic(s) that explains and causes most of the others, then omit its measurements. Measurement omission in the process of abstraction is what enables us to identify the essence of the concept.
 
Using Rand’s example of forming the concept “table,” we isolate (from chairs and beds) those objects that have flat surfaces and are designed to hold smaller objects. Individual, concrete tables differ according to their measurements, but the measurements of their height, length, width, color, oval vs. rectangular top, etc., are omitted to make the concept of “tableness.”
 
The omitted measurements are still there, in reality and in the concept formation process, but they are not used (or necessary) to form the concept. Identifying that tables are flat and hold other objects is all we need to know to distinguish tables from chairs and beds and to give us the essence or essential distinguishing characteristic of tableness. Particular height, width, weight, color, shape of top, etc., are left out. A word and definition are finally assigned to complete the process of concept formation.
 
All the varying aspects of each entity in the world, including the varying measurements of all its qualities, and including its location and time of existence, are what give each entity its unique individual, concrete identity.
 
How do we know the entity as a concrete? To say it one more time, initially through perception.
 
We then identify it with a concept and word. Then, our ever expanding accumulation of concepts—our increasing knowledge—enables us to know and describe the concretes in their extensive variety, their attributes and actions and their myriad differences according to their varying measurements.
 
Assuming our concepts accurately describe the concretes they represent, that is, their referents out there in reality, and are not detached or floating, we have objective knowledge.
 
And that objective knowledge can be theory or history, basic science or applied science, general knowledge or personal knowledge. In all cases, it is knowledge of the concretes of reality.
 
Our minds are not “mirrors of nature,” as critics of “naïve” Aristotelian realism often say. They are active processors of it. Rand’s recognition of the mind’s active nature and her incorporation of it into her theory provides a major improvement on and defense of Aristotle’s epistemology.
 
We might, although she may not like it, even call Ayn Rand’s theory a “mature” realism about knowledge.
 
 
* Ludwig von Mises clarified the issue by rejecting the Hegelian-Marxist view that there are laws of history. Rather, Mises recognized that there is a valid science of individual historical events using the theories of basic sciences, especially psychology and economics, to understand and describe those events. Psychotherapists and medical doctors, in addition, use the theory of basic sciences to identify and treat their patients’ problems, which to the therapist and doctor are de facto historical events. This is called applied science.