Comments from Jimmy Stephens:

On my view, there are mind-independent affairs. Not that I’m committed to all universals explanatorily reducing to such an affair, but at least some universals seem to be patterns or principles of God’s activity in the world. They are patterns of design that derive from the uniformity with which God makes things.

Then, a human mind, which God has designed to receive communication of that mind-independent affair, comes upon the right occasion to acquire knowledge of that fact. Part of knowing this mind-independent affair of God’s design is having an idea or mental representation of it. That is, a concept.

So there is a direct bridge between universals and concepts. It is the fact that there is this mind-independent affair, God’s design, that makes it possible for me to have any such representation. And on that factual basis, we can begin analyzing our concepts for error and veracity. They can be in or out of accord with the universals they aim to represent.

On your view, we take away the universal. There is no state of affairs to which the concept now corresponds. Instead, there are just bare factoids that can be aggregated without any alethic criterion to be found in the things by which to commend or criticize those aggregations. They become entirely arbitrary.

But the problem is that literally – literally ALL of our thoughts make use of universals. All predication requires concepts. So if concepts are arbitrary all our thought is arbitrary. If concepts have no alethic aim at mind-independent states of affairs, so that we can then check for veracity, then those same concepts we use in all of our thinking makes all our thinking nothing but arbitrary, random, unrelated fairy tale-making.

The only lie, at that point, was that there is anything called “truth” to begin with

Simple example time.

I have a concept of man. This is a rough picture or mental grasping at a nature. It’s some real thing all men share in common. That means it’s numerically one thing they all share in common; by referring to it as “nature” I hint at taking an immanentistic view. There is something it is to be a man, it’s a single reality, and it’s presented to our experience of any individual human in virtue of its teleological ground in God’s creative decree.

God has concept of man. But where God’s conceiving of manness makes it what it is and makes it accessible to minds generally, should God share the concept, I cannot do that. I do not nilly-willy come on the scene and start aggregating this or that as man and not-man according to my fancy. Rather, I am held accountable as the image of God to classify and individuate things, to name things, in a way that honors God’s original names for things. While there is some great degree of freedom in that, nevertheless there is an equally great degree of duty to get it right and stay within the bounds of God’s divine concept.

So we have a sort of triangle here. God has the first concept of man, and that grounds manness (this He does not have independent of but in the midst of individual humans; so not Augustinian conceptualism). Then, that manness is instantiated again and again, captured in every human God speaks into being, so that every human is like a divine word spoken that we, the audience, cannot but hear and by the same causes of usual language come up with the corresponding concept. And because we, the human audience of creation, are designed to hear God’s communication in the music that is the nature of things in the world, it is impossible that the human mind not be elevated to learn how to name after God names, to conceptualize in the style of God’s divine conceptualization. God, His revelatory world, and His God-imaging audience form a nice little trivium in which concepts are beholden to creation under God.