The Concept ‘Horse’ is an Object

JEFF

Once, when I was a teenager, I was hanging out with my brother Jeff and some of his university acquaintances. The conversation was meandering, in the solving the world manner that students have always loved. At some point, a girl made the very standard complaint,

“Women are being treated as objects.”

My brother, employing his famous Jeffersonian diplomacy, responded,

“But women are objects.”

And the fun ensued.

Both were correct, and importantly correct. Women were, and are, too often and too much treated simply as sparkly objects to be admired and, very optimistically, acquired. These sparkly objects have opinions on the matter, however, which is not true of non-human sparkly objects. But the “objectification” of women and – less so, but don’t sell it short – men, is not simply a callousing of human relations. It is part of who we each are, a sexual animal with a single consciousness, to see the objects of our sexual attraction, and our competitors for those objects, as, well, objects. It is also part of who we are to recognise that others can perceive us as objects in the same manner, and our opinions on this can vary from person to person, from perceiver to perceiver and from time to time.

Let’s leave sex and the women as objects thing, since my strong preference is to not be lynched. I will just emphasise the double point. The flattening of women and men as simply objects is, to say the least, throwing away a hell of a lot of understanding (and humanity). But, the glorification of women and men as not-objects is false, and false in a manner that can also screw us up.

 

FREGE

(Not to suggest that Jeff was in the same category as Frege …)

On to the duller but less lynchy world of philosophy. In my first year at university, I took a second year philosophy subject on logic. The subject was very good and, for me, very difficult. It covered the basic mathematics of modern formal logic: propositional and first order logic, and modal logic (which made a guest appearance on this post). This was a lot of work but it was all fine. What was much less fine was the philosophy side of the philosophy subject. I just have never been as good with ideas as with mechanics.

For my first essay in the subject, I chose the topic of “subject and object”, and it was a mess. Although I could gain glimpses of what the authors of the assigned papers were on about, I could never get a proper grasp on any of the subtleties, and the subtleties were the entire point. In the end, Peter Roeper, the excellent and very kind lecturer of the subject, awarded my essay a charity B.

I remember almost nothing of my struggle with that essay except for a little about one paper, by Gottlob Frege: that is Frege, pictured above. Frege was one of the founders of modern formal logic and the foundations of mathematics, and is perhaps now best remembered for having had his to-be seminal work torpedoed by Bertrand Russell’s paradox. Frege was primarily a philosopher, which one was required to be to formalise logic and mathematics out of natural language, and it was one of Frege’s philosophical papers that I was required to read: On Concept and Object.

Frege’s paper, which I still find very difficult to read, is part of the prehistory of first order logic. In brief, for Frege, objects were the things and concepts were the “predicates”, the properties that the objects might or might not have. So, for example, the proposition

Black Caviar is a horse.

is declaring that the object named Black Caviar is an instantiation of the concept of being a horse.

In his article, and others before and after, Frege fights with and tries to clarify various natural (German) language tangles. Some are easy enough: the connecting verb “is”, for example, can be used to either mean “is identical with” or “is an instance of”: how “is” is being used alters the manner of decomposing the proposition. Other tangles are less easy to untangle, however. Most famous is Frege’s declaration,

The concept ‘horse’ is an object.

It is a hilarious sentence, which has been stuck in my head for fifty years. The entire point of Frege’s concept-object framing is to distinguish things from the properties those things may or may not possess, and here is Frege declaring that a concept/property is an object/thing.

I don’t know that Frege’s horse puzzle is deep, although I don’t know that is not. Certainly, philosophers of language are still happily fighting over it. To me, similar to Tarski’s truth about snow, it feels as if the quotation marks are the likely key to the puzzle.* With the hindsight of set theory, we can think of Black Caviar being a horse as Black Caviar being an element of the set of horses. Or, to return to semi-natural language, we can interpret “is a horse” as possessing horsiness. The quotation marks are somehow moving from the property of being a horse to the set of objects with that property. Then, that set is an new object in and of itself. The property of horsiness is a new object, in and of itself.

Maybe not. Natural language philosophy is hard. So, if I got it wrong and end up with another charity B, this time from readers, I won’t complain.

 

ASHMAN

(Not to suggest that Ashman is in the same category as Jeff or Frege …)

My reminiscing on Jeff and Frege arose from pondering two recurring topics in Ashmanism. Initially, I had planned this post to segue from Jeff and Frege to a brief description of my loosely formed concerns with these Ashmanisms. While writing and continuing to ponder, however, these concerns moulded into solid disagreement. The post became very long and unbalanced, and I decided that it was best to split the post into three: the ignorable post here on my who-the-hell-cares reminiscing; and with two posts to come, one on each of the Ashmanisms.

To not be too teasing about, I will state that the first of these Ashmanisms concerns

 The meaning, if any, of conceptual understanding.

A few months ago, Ashman wrote a post with the pleasingly inflammatory title, Conceptual Understanding is a Myth. So, yes, Ashman does not have much time for the, um, concept.

I read Ashman’s post at the time, together with a subsequent back and forth with a mathematician, and I had, and still have, plenty of sympathy with Ashman’s position. In the end, however, I think Ashman, if not entirely wrong, is ignorant and is consequently being remarkably obtuse. It’s not exactly Jeff or Frege stuff, but it’s not exactly not.

Readers are, of course, welcome to chime in, either in response to Ashman’s posts or from their independent musings. I will read any such ponderings with genuine interest, and it could well shift my thoughts. In any case, I will return with the remaining 2/3 of the Ashmanism Series as soon as my slavedriver boss permits it.

 

*) Frege’s statement is sometimes written with italics instead of quotes:

The concept horse is an object.

In any case, the word ‘horse’ is always syntactically and semantically distanced in some manner.