They just come, unbidden, wordlessly and shockingly, usually lasting just a second or two, sometimes prompting a reflexive laugh or startled exhalation of breath, my mind suddenly empty of culturally-ingrained concepts that for most of the time keep it tightly constricted.
A further problem is that the neo-logicist construction of the natural numbers makes essential use of empty concepts.
Thus, Aristotle was wrongly accused of extreme formalism, irresponsible use of syllogisms consisting of empty or irrelevant concepts, a multiplication of pseudo-real entities, and the application of "scientific" methods to facts that could be vouched for only by faith.
Even so, there are two arguments in the literature suggesting that any externalist view of empty concepts must fail (Boghossian 1997 19988, Segal 2000, Besson 2012).
However, a compatibilist can counter this by offering a semantics of empty concepts that is consonant with EXT (Stoneham 1999, Sawyer 2003, Goldberg 2006b, Haukioja 2006; see also Pryor 2007, pp. 184 185).
Human beings cannot really take up the latter standpoint but can form only an empty concept of things as they exist in themselves by abstracting from all the content of our experience and leaving only the purely formal thought of an object in general.
Still, no Transformers film has been quite as objectionably stupid as The Purge: Anarchy (Universal, 15), the second chapter in what looks dismayingly to be an ongoing series of horror films laced with inept social critique, pinned to the empty high concept of government-sanctioned murder.
This may lead us to suspect that even in the case of non-empty natural kind concepts, our reasoning and action are best explained in terms of concepts whose content is not environmentally determined — in short, in terms of concepts whose content is narrow.
'Empty concept' for Kant does not mean either "bogus concept" or "wholly meaningless concept": rather it means "concept that is not objectively valid," and as we have seen in Section 1.3, for Kant there can be very different sorts of concepts that are not objectively valid, including rationally intelligible concepts of noumenal objects or noumenal subjects.
By understanding what empty things are supposed to be empty of we simultaneously gain a more precise understanding of the concept of emptiness.
