114 cosmos
words: a word does not have a single meaning through spacetime but has
developed and will continue to develop. Words vary in concreteness—from the
solid “beech tree” to the conceptual “democracy,” for example. They are also
seldom directly translatable into other languages, where connotations are dif-
ferent: compare “beech forest” withBuchenwald.My use of the term “concept”
is but one of many possible uses.^4
We all gradually form our own personal constructs, not only of such rel-
atively simple things as trees, but also, through interaction with others, of
much more complex things such as democracy, or witchcraft.^5 Constructs even
of concrete objects can vary widely. Consider “tree.” Trees are different to phys-
icists, poets, biochemists, taxonomists, painters, ecologists, loggers, and even
more different to birds, dogs, and any possible extraterrestrials.^6 Concepts vary
among societies in time and place and within societies. Further, there are a
vast number of subsets of concepts in any given society—depending on
whether you are on the baseball field, in corporate management, on the city
desk of a newspaper, or whatever context. Within any of the subsets, concepts
tend to be rigidified by social suasion, including force, propaganda, peer and
professional pressure, and ridicule. Such subgroups may vary so much as to
appear not even to belong to the same culture, yet there is something beyond
their economic and environmental situation that unites them, however tenu-
ously, and that is a tradition with ancient and pervasive roots.
Reasonable men and women may approximately agree on what a beech
tree is, but no such agreement can exist on words that lack clear, immutable,
external referents. Their meaning is best described in terms of their develop-
ment, their history. “History” itself has such a history: though often used as a
synonym for “the past,” it originally meant “investigation” and was applied up
to the twentieth century in this broad sense, as in the term “natural history,”
which meant something like “life sciences.” The word “history” used as a
synonym for “the past” gives an unwarranted impression of factual solidity. It
is best understood as “investigation of the human past.”
A number of things can happen to a concept: extinction; amalgamation
with others; diffusion to the point of losing its discernable shape and so break-
ing into separate concepts; exchange by contact with other societies; becoming
unchanging and mummified; encountering strong ideological opposition;
having a long, rich, and traceable life. I take terms such as “truth,” “reality,”
and “rationality” seriously, though I understand that their meaning is fluid,
like that of all concepts. Tradition is essential to meaning, whether one likes
that fact or not. Putnam points out that concepts are fluid and to be understood
in terms of “continuity through change,” and that “meanings have an identity
through time but no essence.”^7 The assumption of physicalism is that human
minds can grasp outside realities in themselves; actually, we can know securely
only what we have made ourselves—what is in our minds: our ideas and con-
cepts. That point was first clearly made by Giambattista Vico (1668–1744).^8