How Philosophy Becomes Possible: XXIX. When Concepts Become Instruments

If philosophy participates in changing the conditions from which new questions become possible, then concepts are not merely descriptions.

They can become instruments.

This possibility has a long history. Aristotle's concepts of potentiality and actuality did more than classify kinds of change; they provided a vocabulary in which change itself could be philosophically understood. Kant's categories did more than describe experience; they were part of an account of the conditions under which experience could become intelligible.

But the historical turn makes the instrumentality of concepts more explicit.

A concept can alter what its users are capable of seeing.

It can make a previously unnoticed distinction visible. It can connect phenomena that had previously appeared unrelated. It can expose a contradiction. It can allow a new kind of question to be formulated.

In this sense, conceptual change is not simply a change in vocabulary.

It can change the affordances of thought.

This possibility becomes especially clear in pragmatism. For William James and John Dewey, concepts are connected to inquiry and action. Thought is not merely a mirror held up to a finished reality. It is part of how organisms and communities find their way through problematic situations.

A concept can therefore be judged partly by what it enables us to do.

This does not mean that usefulness replaces truth.

A concept that helps us act effectively can still misdescribe what we are dealing with. But it does mean that the significance of a concept cannot always be captured by asking whether it corresponds to an isolated object.

We can also ask:

What does this concept allow us to discover?

Dewey takes this further by treating inquiry itself as a transformation of an unsettled situation. The problem is not simply that we lack information. The situation has not yet been adequately organised for action.

Inquiry changes that organisation.

New distinctions create new possibilities.

New possibilities create new forms of action.

Action changes the situation.

The cycle begins again.

This brings philosophy remarkably close to the relational picture we have been developing throughout this series.

A concept enters an existing ecology of practices and expectations. It encounters resistance. It changes some relations. Those changed relations make further concepts possible.

The concept does not stand outside the world and rearrange it from above.

It participates in the world.

This also changes the meaning of philosophical responsibility.

If concepts can alter possibilities, then producing concepts is not an innocent activity. A distinction can liberate, but it can also exclude. A category can clarify, but it can also freeze a contingent arrangement into something that appears natural. A theory can open possibilities while closing others.

Philosophical criticism must therefore ask not only whether a concept is coherent or defensible.

It must ask what follows from inhabiting it.

This is not a call to abandon abstraction.

Quite the opposite.

Abstraction becomes powerful precisely because it can travel between situations. A concept can reveal a structural similarity where previously only differences were visible. It can make a relation portable.

But portability also creates danger.

A concept developed in one context may become misleading when imposed upon another.

The philosophical task is therefore neither to find concepts that work everywhere nor to retreat into complete particularity.

It is to understand the conditions under which a concept becomes illuminating.

At this point the history we have been following comes full circle.

Philosophy began by questioning what the world is.

It learned to question how the world can be known.

It questioned the knower, the history that formed the knower, the society in which the knower lives, the language through which the knower thinks, and the interpretations through which the world becomes intelligible.

Now the concept itself has become an active participant in that history.

A concept does not merely tell us what is possible.

Sometimes it helps make something possible.

And if that is so, then the history of philosophy is not simply a history of changing descriptions of the world.

It is also a history of new possibilities becoming thinkable, and therefore potentially enactable.

The question with which we began can now be turned around.

Not only:

How did the possibility-space of philosophy change?

But:

How does philosophy change the possibility-space in which it finds itself?