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 A...