This is Jimmy Stephens thoughts about human Conceptualism:

We have to give him credit for avoiding saying abstracta are just labels.

At least he’s only as stupid as to say universals are the map of them, instead of saying universals are the names on the map.

Here’s a few objections.

1.) The Homunculus

Conceptualism falls victim to a simple regress problem. Concepts are representational. Whatever else we say of them, minimally, they are mental representations. So a concept is always a concept of something, evoking a subject-object relation.

On conceptualism, what are concepts of univerals concepts of? Concepts, naturally. But what is the content of those concepts? In order to be universals, on this view, it will have to be a further third set of concepts. Those too will need a further set of concepts. Repeat ad infinitum, never answering us what content the concept pertains, contains, etc.

Conceptualism misses the sign for the signified. In so doing, signs no longer point to anything but an endless run of buck-passing signs. We are left in the darkness of a series of mirrors turned in on themselves.

2.) Bradleyan/Russellian Regress

What relates a concept to its associate particulars? There is no answer on conceptualism. In the case of conceptualism, Paulman faces two interlocked problems. (It’s unclear to me whether these should be taxonomized as two or one, but whatever.)

Let’s be practical. Suppose you come across a tree. We want to say you have a concept of the tree; the concept involved in recognizing the tree. What explains how you have a named concept, “tree,” that demarcates trees from all the rocks, Lynyrd Skynyrd songs, dreams, people, and the rest of the non-tree category. How did you draw that circle around – at least in principle and approximation – trees and not over a random set of objects?

Something must tell us how these two relate – in the object, the subject, or in some third thing.

Can it be concepts? Not unless Paulman wants to take up a radical, not to mention unworkable, form of idealism.

It cannot be the objects for the very reasons Paulman invokes to exalt universals to explain classification of particulars. In other words, he’s granted us this by being a conceptualist in the first place. If that one tree is reducibly the universal, then there are alternatively no universals or only 1-member classes. So Paulman has to turn to the third option.

Unfortunately, by rejecting Calvinism, to say nothing of the Vantilian notion of the universe as a concrete universal vestige of the Trinity, Paulman can only produce relating principles from the creation that multiply the original question: what relates our concept of that to that?

3.) Magical Realism

(My own term for Aristotelian bull crap.)

We already know from Paulman’s horendous take on epistemology that his conceptualism is knowledge-less. If it were true, skepticism about universals occurs. Global skepticism follows.

This is not a one-way-street though. Observe:

On conceptualism, there are no universals. There is, therefore, no extramental abstracta causally connected to knowledge of universals, which are mere concepts. Whence concepts?

Paulman has three options. (1) He can take Aristotelian realism, attributing some causal force to the particular, that it originates via sensation or general object-consciousness the relevant concepts. However, not only is there nothing about (i.e. no reportable property of) the created numenal that will track (i.e. explain/justify our expectation that it will reliably produce) the associate concept, but also, there’s nothing about the created numenal to produce concepts at all!!!

So this conceptualism results in subjectivism.

(I’m using numenal above to refer to a created object or state of affairs apart from a Vantilian conception of them as revelatory media.)

(2) He can say the mind originates in whole or part the concept. This results in subjectivism on this observation alone.

(3) He can recapitulate to a fatalistic mysticism, similar to Clark, where God bypasses any organic causal chain of creation, treating this or that as the excusing occasion to import concepts into the mind.

4.) Simping Because He Kant

An ironic similarity exists between post-Kantian phenomenalism and Paulman. It is the rift between the divine order of creation and that within our conceptual schemes.

On Paulman’s view, because there is no universal order to the creation itself – such as God’s imbued wisdom according to the concept of His divine plan – that “order” we attribute to it is only in the mind. (Remember Kant’s noumenal-phenomenal distinction?) Paulman has to at least partly agree with Kant that the mind is ordering the basically unordered universe around us, transforming mixed paint into a socially exchangeable painting.

In other words, Paulman’s conceptualism is at odds with all of realist(ic) talk about God’s creation, and more importantly, with all the Biblical talk of creation’s inherent order.

5.) Propertarian Problems

An analysis of our concept of universals problematizes conceptualism.

Are univerals unchanging? Presumably, but concepts are not. Our mental representations of things change, updating.

A conceptualist will have to bite that bullet or smuggle in covenantal anthropology. To bite the bullet here is to just accept that concepts are universals, vice versa, and those change. Paulman seems to be so arrogant as to forget the finite nature of human concepts.

They morph according to matters like acquisitions of nuancing beliefs, falsifying data, to intentional conflation removal, and so in general, change in individuation. They change according to acquisition of new explanatory principles, doctrinal beliefs, scientific models, theoretic relations, to new methodological beliefs and the novel content from their belief-forming processes and practices, and so in general, change in classification. There are vacillating emotive attitudes that influence belief formation generally and greatly. Human cognition itself is a temporally and logically discursive continuum, occuring in different degrees, levels, and scopes of conscious awareness. All of human cognition is contingent on a thousand-and-one extramental things accidental to conscious deliberation itself, and things like bodily injury, brain diseases, psychosis, or moral conditions of the heart can turn it all into a messy chimera on top of what was already “art more than science,” so to speak.

Paulman might attempt to bite that bullet, but it’s really intellectual cyanide. He has forthwith made dream-like fictions out of universals due to the incredibly precarious nature of the human heart.

As an alternative, Paulman can try to locate facts fixed by God that anchor the integrity of our conscious life where concepts are concerned, but he will have abandoned his conceptualist ship and capitulated to a Calvinist view.

In short, Paulman seems to be as retarded on the topic of psychology as he is on the topic of epistemology. I’m reminded of a Tool lyric:

Credulous at best, your desire to believe in
Angels in the hearts of men
Pull your head on out your hippy haze and give a listen
Shouldn’t have to say it all again
The universe is hostile, so impersonal
Devour to survive, so it is, so it’s always been

We all feed on tragedy
It’s like blood to a vampire
Vicariously, I live while the whole world dies
Much better you than I

Of course, both of us will reject evolutionary naturalism. That’s not how the lyric applies here. The point is that humans are hilariously incompetent villains constantly foiled by their own stupidity.

Paulman does not take seriously the finitude of man, the infinity of God, and he does not properly consider what it really means for God to renew our minds in Christ.

TL;DR: concepts cannot be universals lest all the ineptitude and villainy of the human mind invade our metaphysics of abstracta.

For added irony, consider who those are who would double-down, accept that the mind’s conceptual adequacy is null until, at least, the Spirit of God regenerates them:

hyper-Calvinists.

(The degree to which Paulman’s retardation indirectly supports fatalism is so glaring that we would be disrespectful to God not to consider it a providentially provided joke.)

6.) Postmodernism

As a cousin argument or follow-up to objection (3) Magical Realism, conceptualism has no verification principle. Or more precisely, there is no public criterion by which to adjudicate disagreement about concepts, whether their formation, content, or revision.

For whatever claim Paulman makes, the universal content involved will bottom out in his personal conceptual scheme. But not everyone shares the Paulman-concept of the universe. Why should they? To what can Paulman appeal beyond re-averring the doctrinal outpouring of his own concept?

This is the whole issue surrounding worldview and cosmonomic idea. Everyone has a universe-concept, a cosmonomic idea, a picture of reality as that widest sense of things. Unfortunately, Paulman has conceded that his metanarrative terminates in his own mind, his personal conceptual scheme. As such, any putative criterion he would employ to justify this world-concept will just reduce to a list of doctrines couched in his world-concept repeated as if a broken record.

That will not give an objective perspective. That will not justify expectations that any common ground is shared. That will, formally, not have any common ground (showing again the sloppiness of Paulman).