Ossorio: This one also looks like it might be interesting but I might need some help. It says "Could you talk about the process of conceptualization vs. formalization and codification?" Could you say a little more about that?

Member of Audience: When you conceptualize something, it's like making it a thing. Also you use words in referring to things, and somehow that seems to be within the whole domain of conceptualization. I just wanted you to talk more about that.

Ossorio: Say some more.

Member of Audience: I have an idea of what formalization is. You have a formula and it helps you differentiate one thing from another thing. But when you conceptualize something, you know like, if you have the concept of verbal behavior... We talk about conceptualization all the time and I can never pin it down very well from something else. Because I think a formalization is also a conceptualization. Is it just more generic?

Ossorio: A concept is simply a distinction. Now if you've got a formalization, that will embody certain distinctions, and they are related to one another. Any time you have distinctions that are related to one another, you not only have a concept. You have a conceptual structure or a conceptual system. And a formalization is almost always a conceptual system. But it is not a simple contrast between formalism and conceptualization. Formalism has to do with the form that you put it in, whereas conceptualization has to do with the fact that it has to do with distinctions.

Member of Audience: So it is a different domain?

Ossorio: No. Like I say a formal system embodies distinctions so it is a conceptual structure. But not all conceptual structures have the same kind of, what would you say, structure as a formalism. For example, North, East, South and West are a conceptual structure but there is no formalism. Now with formalism you generally do something with it and generate new things. You know like with arithmetic, you generate new numbers out of old numbers. That's what formalisms are mainly for. Whereas conceptualizations may be totally static or they may be of that kind.

Member of Audience: So, therefore, formalization has a part-whole relationship to conceptualization.

Ossorio: No, it's a genus-species. It's a special case, namely a set of distinctions with a certain kind of structure.

Member of Audience: Okay, how would we put codification on that?

Ossorio: Codification is a little looser term. It implies that you have introduced system and order. When you codify something, you put it in an orderly systematic form. And explicit. So when you codify the laws of the land, you write them down. There they are. Explicit. Systematic. And that contrasts with the common law principles that everybody knows but nobody has ever written down. Those are not codified.

Member of Audience: You say a typology is an attempt to make sense of a codification...

Ossorio: Well, a typology is a codification of whatever the typology is about.

Member of Audience: Would it help to mention that in the SA formulation, a concept is a status category?

Ossorio: No, because a formal system is also a status category.

Member of Audience: In other words the nature of concept itself is not like an object or a process...

Ossorio: Right, but the same goes for a formal system, so you couldn't use that to differentiate the two. As I say, a formal system is a special case. There is one other possible important difference. Some formal systems allow you to make or represent statements that have truth value, whereas a distinction is merely a distinction and couldn't possibly have any truth value. You think of the English language as a formal system because there are rules for what you can combine with what. You can use that to generate sentences that are statements and those have truth values. That's more than just a mere distinction, because distinctions per say have no truth value. Like the difference between saying "a cup" which has no truth value, and saying "The cup is on the table" which does have truth value. Okay.

Member of Audience: So when you talk about the cognitive parameter as being something that you give value to, something as being specified as a distinction or as a conceptualization, the distinction then is out of the verbal behavior and then when we talk about specifying the conceptualization we are talking about verbal behavior.

Ossorio: No. What's in that parameter, the values in that parameter, are simply which distinctions are you acting on. They don't have to be structured; they don't have to be a formal system; they can be; they may or may not be. The only thing implied is that there is some distinction, distinctions usually, that you are acting on, whatever the form that they take. It's a very inclusive sort of thing. It is a very general and noncommital thing. And that's because behaviors come in all sizes. I can have lots of different things up there but they are all distinctions.

Member of Audience: What the next step is is to specify the value of the conceptualization?

Ossorio: You don't specify values of conceptualization. You simply specify the conceptualizations.

Member of Audience: Okay.

Ossorio: And when you talk about conceptualization as against concept, you almost have to mean a conceptual structure. Because if it's just a single distinction, why talk about conceptualization instead of this concept? There is a usage in Descriptive that that's relevant to. One reason you talk about conceptualizing -- conceptualizing a phenomenon -- is that your conceptualization of something is what you take it to be. And that contrasts with a theory of it, because to have a theory of it you first have to have a description of what it is that the theory is about and that description is your conceptualization. You start from that. Then you can do other things with it. But your conceptualization of it is what you take it to be. And part of the history of Descriptive is to contrast with theories. With theories you always have to have something else there first, in order for there to be something for the theory to be about whereas with a conceptualization you don't. That's where you start. You might say that's another version of "Here I stand." "This is how I conceptualize things, and I am going to act on it."

Member of Audience: You mention that in science what we see is increased sophistication. Do you feel the same way about mathematics?

Ossorio: Yeah. You have a lot of new inventions but by and large mathematical language is more sophisticated than it was. Let me just give you an example. I am old enough so that I can remember the days when mathematicians were actively embarrassed by the existence of imaginary numbers. I laugh when I think of it because I remember sitting in a college classroom and the prof was talking about imaginary numbers and you could see he was embarrassed. Why? Because these are very peculiar sorts of things. They are very unlike any other numbers that we have. It was obvious and so that was an embarrassment to him, because it was a dangler. And the only reason they kept them was that they had certain value. Well, nowadays they have more sophisticated mathematical systems and language that can incorporate what used to be a dangler. Now it's simply part of the system. Now that's an example of increasing sophistication.