ON CONCEPTS AS HISTORICAL FORMS

Peter de Bolla

History and Theory 64, no. 4 (2025)
“Philology Now” Theme Issue

What are the consequences of holding fast to the axiom that words are not the same thing as concepts? This article explores some of them in relation to the tensions between two different but overlapping approaches to the history of concepts: philology and computationally informed historical semantics. The methods utilized were developed in the Cambridge Concept Lab and essentially comprise a measurement for word associations that can then be exported into comparative frameworks for tracking the evolution of concepts over time. Some examples are provided using the dataset Eighteenth Century Collections Online that are intended to demonstrate the fecundity of computational approaches to the history of ideas and concepts. Throughout the article, a distinction is held between two interconnected terms: meanings and concepts—or to put that more pointedly, the hard case of distinguishing between a change in meaning of a word and a change in conceptual form is addressed. Although the article comes to the conclusion that hard-and-fast distinctions between words and concepts are extremely difficult to maintain, it nevertheless insists on the benefit of supposing that such distinctions can be held. This enables one to characterize concepts in terms of their functions rather than their meanings, and some examples of these functions are provided. In conclusion, the article returns to the issue of historical approaches to words and concepts and suggests that a conceptual history formulated through the lens of conceptual function complements philological accounts of how words and meanings inform us about the past.