Intraconcept Relations (Relation Concepts)

There are such concepts like “bigger”, “louder”, “brighter”, and other combinations of “more, less, most”, which seem to not have connection to sameness, but quite opposite they are concepts which refer to relation of some things as “not same”. So how it is possible for those concepts to be concepts in the sense of what was postulated previously?

 First we can note that similarly to other concepts those “relation” concepts can not be sets. The argument is same to what I used to argue that concepts can’t be sets in general. The example would be… if we “get” (understand) the concept of “louder” we can say that one sound is louder then other even we never have heard those sounds or their level of loudness before. Same with “higher” for example, if we understand what higher means, we can judge not just pairs of heights for which we were told that “A is higher then B”, but we can make judgment any two things having height.

 Second thing we can note is that the relations and comparing is done on the properties of the things which are of “same nature”, e.g. “louder” makes sense only when comparing two sounds, “darker” when comparing two colors and so on. Some of those words can be used to refer to other meanings, but that is outside of the scope of current discussion, and in any case when doing relations we would use just one meaning of the word, except in cases where we want to do little poetry (e.g. my soul was darker then black)

 Now if we have in mind that the intensity of the certain differentiation can be controlled, we can postulate a solution for this issue.

The solution would be that those concepts are not the differentiations which are done directly on the cognitive whole (which we can call base differentiation), but which are done on the “change of the intensity of the base differentiation through the time”.

Let’s say we hear a cognitive context CC₁ containing loud sound, and to determine it we first apply a sound differentiation D_s with intensity I₁ (in fact that would be the only thing that determines it as loud). After that we are presented with other cognitive context CC₂, and for determining the sound we must “increase the intensity” of differentiation D_s to the I₂.

The both sounds belong to a containing cognitive context CC, and in that context we can do additional differentiation D_more2less on the change of the intensity of D_s over time in which we comprehend the two sounds.

 This differentiation (D_more2less) now hold the two things needed to be concept for relation: it holds identity based on the oneness of the differentiation which can be applied in every comparing of loudness of sounds in our experience where the first one is louder then the second one, and it is by its nature “relational” differentiation, it requires also simultaneous differentiation of the two separate sounds.

 Of course D­_more2less would be just one possible differentiation, other differentiations would be for “rising intensity”, “swinging intensity” and so on.

So if on cognitive context CC containing sounds CC₁ and CC₂, a differentiation can be applied - D_s whose intensity in case of CC₁ relatively to the one for CC­₂ can be differentiated by the “rising intensity” differentiation, we can say that sound CC₁ is quieter then CC₂.

 Two additional notes here:

1. Those differentiation on the intensity doesn’t have to be simple one like rising and falling, they can be more complex which would “recognize” circular change of amplitude, triangular change etc. Also they can result in contexts which can further be determined on several levels.
2. It seems that this intensity in different kind of differentiations is really a scalar (one-dimensional intensity) value; resulting in possibility of applying of same kind of differentiation on intensity no matter what kind of context we started with. This gives possibility to explain concepts like “more”, “less” etc… which are very general, and can be applied on very different contexts and qualities.
3. The “more” and “less” can be used also to refer to a amount in which one differentiation can be applied successfully to determine one context. For example it is possible to compare colors red and magenta and say that the one is “more reddish” then the other. In the sense of differentiations it can be said that in the one case the differentiation of red would succeed in totally determining the color (e.g. if the color is red), and in other case the differentiation would just partially determine the color (e.g. if the color is magenta, the differentiation of red would just partially succeed in abstracting the perception). The differentiation over the amount of “leftovers” (I would not get in specifying the nature of this differentiation) in the two differentiations can be used by the differentiations of more2less or less2more in order to give judgment that one of the colors is more reddish then the other. Of course this can be also the meaning of “similar” – the magenta is similar to red, because the determination which is used for red can be applied to determine the magenta also, with the difference that it wouldn’t fully determine it (hold it under its concept)