Is a Concept in the Head?
Is it meaningful to say that our concepts are in our minds–my concepts in mine, yours in yours, etc.–and that my concept of whatever I’m talking about has nothing to do with any of your concepts? And given whichever being the case, what happens to the subjective-intrinsic thesis, that a concept is not in a mind, but neither is it in reality?
In discussing concepts, we have to be cognizant of two important terms: “product” and “content.”
When you observe concrete existents, and if you choose actively to focus on their similarities and differences, then you act to understand more about them; that is to say, you choose to abstract from your perception. The volitional cognitive action by your mind, when successful, enables you to become aware of reality in a more abstract and universal perspective. You become aware of a category of existents which may be various in variety (abstract) and numerous in quantity (universal).
The awareness from this cognitive action is very temporary and tenuous. It ceases when the action is disrupted, as when your mind is occupied with other actions. But unlike the experience of perception whose percept is also transient and in the moment, you have the ability to retain this awareness.
At this volitional, conscious level, the what that you are aware of is the content. The action that enables you to be aware of it, is abstraction. And the one-time action to retain the awareness of the content beyond the present moment over time, is concept-formation.
The product of cognition is the way/method/means/instrument of retaining the resulting object of conceptual-level cognition; i.e., the receipt or resulting byproduct of [1] detaching the content of a cognitive action (e.g., the category or the type of existents) [i.e., the objective content] as a content of a cognitive action occurring at a specific moment, and [2] retaining it as a cognitive content over time [ITOE 256-258].
So, is a concept a product or a content? In one context, it is a product of your action. In another, it is the content that you are aware of.
From an internal perspective, the one-time action of concept-formation, if valid, yields once and for all a product, a concept. This is a private achievement by the conscious mind doing the action. Before having the product, you would have had to perform the elaborate process of abstraction every time you want to identify some category of existents. Thereafter, you merely have to call up to consciousness the product, a mental unit [ITOE 256-257], and, voilà, you become aware of the abstract and universal category of existents. This is the context in which the concept is a product: a new instrument of consciousness that is exclusively yours to enable your willful, conceptual awareness of reality.
From another perspective, reality exists independently of you and me the knowers–this is the thesis of epistemological realism, or, simply, the primacy of existence. My or your awareness of reality does not change reality one bit. So in the same way that you and I may see perceptually the same glass vase on the table, we may each be aware of one and the same concept as a cognitive structure defined by its content of reality.
To put it in another way, while our actions of awareness may be individual, separate, private, and unique, we can become aware of the same abstract and universal category of existents; that is to say, we can come to share the same concept. You may form this concept of cars, for instance, and index it internally (and instrumentally) as “car” while I index it as “voiture”; but the concept as the content of which we are both aware, is the very same. We are, as it were, on the same page, on the same wavelength, etc.
Therefore, whenever we want to talk carefully about a concept, we have to make a further distinction. Are we talking about the concept as a product of the one-time concept-formation action? Or are we talking about the concept as some content of awareness that all men can come to discover individually? In the first sense, a concept is indeed in the head; but in the second sense, a concept is out there.
How out there is it? A concept is out there objectively–just not really, really out there. After all, only concrete things exists ontologically. The abstract and universal categories of things only appear to us through conscious, volitional, cognitive actions, and remain eternally for us only through further cognitive (and linguistic) actions.
Concepts are neither subjective nor intrinsic; they are objective. Objectivity in this sense means [1] the categories are based on similarities and differences that do exist independently of us, in the concrete things themselves; and [2] we act to abtract these similarities and differences in accordance to the nature of our conscious faculties.