Sunday, April 04, 2010

Logic

Q: What is the difference between a concept and a mere word?
A: Logic, a certain rigour of usage.

4 comments:

Justin said...

Is the difference the rigour, an understanding of that rigour, or a consciously created rigour. Because our use of any word has a logic to it.

Thomas said...

It's the actual rigour of the usage. Interestingly, many words are sometimes merely words, and sometimes (the names of) concepts. There are contexts in which words have strict criteria for their application, and others that are not so strict.

But I agree that this is a relative notion. All usage is logic. But some uses are more logical than others.

Perhaps we can say that there nothing is ever a "mere word" (a mere word, at its limit, is just a set of marks or sounds), just as nothing is ever a "pure concept" (at the limit: a random image?). But there are tendencies.

Presskorn said...

Hmmm... Remind me again; why would a pure concept be anything like a random image?

Thomas said...

I wasn't sure at the time, and I'm not actually sure now. But here's a stab at what I was trying to get at: a word stripped of meaning is just a mark or a sound. That is, it's an image, whether visual or acoustic. The "pure concept", however, is going to be the meaning stripped of the word...