Concept Spheres
What is a concept? How are concepts shaped into judgments, and then communicated with sentences, and more importantly, with the juxtaposition of images, text, music, video, etc.?
One way to begin to answer the first question is to assert what concepts are not: they are not what you are experiencing. That is, concepts are not equivalent to your perceptions, even though concepts need perceptions, and ultimately refer to them for their truth value. Perceptions are highly particular; concepts are always general. It is this quality of generality in concepts that makes persuasion possible.
Indeed, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) grounds the possibility of persuasion in this peculiar property of generality that is inherent to concepts.
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Since concepts are abstracted from individual particularities in order for us to use them to communicate, each concept’s “sphere” of universality remains open for a communicator to connect it to other concept spheres, which connections happen because a communicator requires a particular set of connections, in a particular order, to fulfill her intention.
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Schopenhauer writes that:
Correct and exact conclusions are reached by our accurately observing the relation of the concept-spheres, and admitting that one sphere is wholly contained in a third only when a sphere is completely contained in another, which other is in turn wholly contained in the third. On the other hand, the art of persuasion depends on our subjecting the relations of the concept-spheres to a superficial consideration only, and then determining these only from one point of view, and in accordance with our intentions, mainly in the following way. If the sphere of a concept under consideration lies only partly in another sphere, and partly also in quite a different sphere, we declare it to be entirely in the first sphere or entirely in the second, according to our intentions.
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For example, when passion is spoken of, we can subsume this under the concept of the greatest force, of the mightiest agency in the world, or under the concept of irrationality, and this under the concept of powerlessness or weakness. We can continue this method, and apply it afresh with each concept to which the argument leads us. The sphere of a concept is almost invariably shared by several others, each of which contains a part of the province of the first sphere, while itself including something more besides. Of these latter concept-spheres we allow only that sphere to be elucidated under which we wish to subsume the first concept, leaving the rest unobserved, or keeping them concealed…
The World as Will and Representation Volume I pages 48-49.
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