Pluralistic conceptualization

Abstract

Because our phenomenological experience of the world is fundamentally a conceptual one, I posit a pluralistic view of concepts that attempts to account for their fluidity, flexibility and productivity. I claim that what appear to be discrete concepts are really instantial interactions with a single conceptual ability responsible for "formatting" or otherwise giving recognitional structure to what we describe as experiential content. Following this claim, I examine the implications of formatting and cognition through analogies in computation, considering the possibility that conceptualization - taken to be a kind of cognitive formatting - may be required in every case of subject-oriented conscious life.