This is a good summary. It sounds like brmckay bailed before this. It reminds me of conversations I’ve had with people who insisted that a word that represents a thing, is a thing itself. There is a lot of philosophical discussion of that, it could be said that the neurons firing that makes up the thought of the word are a thing, but there’s something about that I don’t like. I start saying things like “we need the concept of a concept” so we can discuss what’s real.
It’s about language. Wittgenstein dealt with it, but his work is too dense for me to tackle. I can only lay out some of the limits, as the article below does, with questions like this;
For example, the questions “Can there be concepts without language?” is typically understood on the mental representation view as asking whether a pre-linguistic or non-linguistic agent can entertain mental representations of a particular kind. If one adopts the view that concepts are abstract objects, the corresponding question might be whether a pre-linguistic or non-linguistic agent can stand in the concept possession relation to concepts understood as abstract objects of a certain type. And if one adopts the view that concepts are abilities, the corresponding question might be whether a pre-linguistic or non-linguistic agent can have the abilities that are constitutive of concept possession.