This chapter begins by providing an overview of the key features of early chemical subject matter, namely that it was fickle, empirically based, and rapidly changing. After outlining the problems this created for patent law, I look at the way that patent law dealt with one of these problems. This was how to reconcile the way that chemical inventions were created with a mechanical understanding of invention that dominates in patent law.

Chapter 5 is the first chapter of the second part of the book and focuses on abstract concepts – more generally, on abstractness. I first define abstract concepts and illustrate their main characteristics, comparing them with concrete ones. I contend that there is no major opposition between concrete and abstract concepts and that many concepts have both abstract and concrete components. In addition, different varieties of abstract concepts exist. Thus, the different kinds of concrete and abstract concepts can be conceived of as points in a multidimensional space, defined by various features and dimensions. I then focus on the different subkinds of abstract concepts, including emotions and mental states, numerical and spatiotemporal concepts, self and social concepts, and spiritual and philosophical concepts. Finally, I outline the central tenets of the Words As social Tools (WAT) theory on abstractness. According to the WAT view, abstract concepts evoke perception and action but especially activate inner bodily experiences, including interoceptive, emotional, and metacognitive ones. Crucially, the WAT view ascribes a unique role to language and social interaction for abstract concept acquisition and use. Finally, it underscores the flexible and context-dependent character of abstract concepts.

Basic principles of generative phonology, as codified in SPE, and later developments within this framework, including metrical phonology, lexical phonology, autosegmental phonology, and underspecification theory. The role of cyclicity. The rise of Optimality Theory and the difficulties encountered in this framework in accounting for opaque relationships.

The previous chapter argued that intuition allows us to indeterminately represent a continuous manifold of space. On the other hand, this possibility appears to be inconsistent with Kant’s characterization of intuitions. He contrasts them to concepts by stating that the former are singular and immediate representations. Singularity seems to commit Kant to the view that, by its nature, intuition must represent an individual object, and many have understood him in this way. That would directly contradict the previous chapter. Chapter 5 addresses this problem. It argues against a quick solution to this problem and for a deeper account. Examining the generality of concepts suggests a distinction between representing and represented, and the singularity of intuition is explained as a mode of representing singularly. The chapter argues that representing singularly is compatible with the indeterminate representation of a continuous manifold; moreover, it is what makes possible the cognition of singulars in intuition. This new reading of the singularity of intuition solves the extensive magnitude regress and also has important implications for understanding mathematical cognition as well as the current Kantian nonconceptualist debate. It also allows us to give a clear account of Kant’s views of concreteness and abstractness.