Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

170 J.J.C. Smart
22 The evolution of the conceptual is partly cultural, depending on the evolution of
language. Having the concept of, say, ‘electron’ is being able to use the word
‘electron’ in sentences intelligently. It is not an all or nothing matter. J.J. Thomson
and P.A.M. Dirac would have said many incompatible things in sentences containing
‘electron’, but since there was a great core of such sentences that they
both asserted we could say roughly that they had the same concept. Some concepts
do not consist of linguistic skills but may be skills at geometrical imaginings,
or of reading contour lines. ‘Concept’ is not a simple notion.
23 See Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (London: Bantam Press, 1988).
24 See my essay ‘Space–Time and Individuals’, in Essays Metaphysical and Moral.
25 See Huw Price, ‘A Neglected Route to Realism about Quantum Mechanics’,
Mind, 103 (1994), 303–20.