Stolen Concepts All the Way Down

Much philosophical and theological confusion reigns because people unwittingly engage concept-theft. It consists of using a concept to which one is not epistemologically "entitled" because the speaker denies its logical foundation. Thus the user has "stolen" it."

For example, if you were to deny the legitimacy of the concept parent--say, you believed new human beings came into existence way other than commonly thought--you would not be entitled to use the concept orphan since orphan logically depends on the concept (biological) parent. Our concepts, constructed as they are from our identification of things in the world, exist (or ought to exist) in nonarbitrary, often hierarchical relationships with other concepts. The higher the level of abstraction (for example, animal), the more a concept subsumes other, lower level concepts (dog, cat, etc.). A little thought shows this to be true.

The term stolen concept was coined by the philosophical novelist Ayn Rand. The idea is something like question-begging. With question-begging, one smuggles one's conclusion, the thing to be proved, into one's premises--cal it concept-smuggling. With concept-stealing, one tries to use the concept one is denying against itself, much like using the law of identity to refute the law of identity. That's an "illegal" move. 

A similarly illegal move is to deny free will while using concepts that entail willful activities like reasoning, deliberating, discoursing, and justifying--all undeniably purposive activities aimed at discovering the truth about the world. (Why do determinists constantly ask us to think about things?) In the argument against free will, it's stolen concepts all the way down. 

Interestingly, Descartes identified a stolen concept when he said that he could not doubt anything without existing. Thus doubt logically presupposes faculty of consciousness. Unfortunately, he committed his own act of theft: consciousness presupposes existence. As Rand put it, consciousness is consciousness of something; a consciousness that was conscious of itself alone is an absurdity; it could not identify itself as consciousness before it was conscious of something other than itself. Hence, "existence exists." We can take this further and say that since consciousness refers to a kind of action--say, paying attention, minding this or that, or thinking--it's not just consciousness that exists but conscious beings, since action presupposes actors. Disembodied consciousness is a meaningless idea.

So contrary to Descartes existence not consciousness is primary. "I think therefore I am" becomes "Existence exists therefore I, conscious being, am."

This is from philosopher Neera Badhwar's supplement to her article on Rand in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:  

Judgments that deny their own conceptual presuppositions are ... invalid. The possibility that all of our experience is a dream, for example, is rejected as what Rand calls a “stolen concept” fallacy, since possession of the concept “dream” presupposes the ability to distinguish dreaming from waking. This is because genuine possession of a concept requires both the ability to derive an abstraction from concretes and the ability to go on to apply it to new concretes; if all our experience were a dream, the concept of waking could neither be derived from nor applied to any concretes. Those who claim to have grasped a concept but are unable to recognize instances of it “have not performed either part of the cycle: neither the abstraction nor the translating of the abstraction into the concrete”. As with an electric circuit, “no part of it can be of any use, until and unless the cycle is completed.”