Concepts, percepts, feelings and actions

In Chapter 2 properties were presented as little fragments of ordinary English prose such as ‘flies’ or ‘has wings’, but this was just a temporary measure. Obviously we don't actually have little bits of prose in our minds; if we did, how would we understand them without getting into the infinite regress of using other little bits of prose, and so on and on? The question is, then, what is a property? If it's not a bit of English prose, what is it?

One possible answer is that our minds contain two different kinds of things: concepts and properties. In this theory, there would have to be cross-links between the concepts and the properties, but they would have fundamentally different characteristics; for example, concepts and properties might be organized differently.

This is actually very similar to the way in which a dictionary works. A dictionary consists of thousands of little paragraphs each of which is dedicated to one word, called its ‘head-word’, and head-words are organized alphabetically. These would be the dictionary's ‘concepts’, while its ‘properties’ consist of the material in the paragraphs – the pronunciation, the part of speech, the semantic definition and so on. In this arrangement, the list of concepts is completely separate from the properties, to the extent that in a bilingual dictionary the two are in different languages.