| | You have be careful with induction because to make inferences based on induction there is no mechanism to exclude other possibilites. Then again, I might be reading too much Karl Popper, but I think the issue of concepts and percepts here are two different things, at least for me.
Percepts are definitely neurological events in that the senses don't send what they detect into the nervous system, they generate an event like it within the nervous system. That would mean that we do 'see' the world around us, but not literally see as being seen in the direct realism sense. But, what must be pointed out with this view on percepts is that you cannot change them, you are detecting the world as the senses allow through their percept/neurological event. This would allow for a myriad of other possible means to 'see' the world. Imagine you were born blind with no memory of having seen with your eyes. Then consider how the perceptual order of a blind person might be like, being that it has no sense of sight within its perceptual field. Does this make the blind person's percepts more subjective? Or does it mean that percepts in themselves are not a matter of cognition? Personally, I go with the latter being that many sorts of animals have to operate and coordinate their actions to survive on their own. It would be an insane task if a bird or a cat had to think of their actions to execute them. I think the fact that perceptual events are easily divorced from cognition[or more specifically conceptualization], that an animal can have instincts that give them the tools of survival without the necessity of a memory to develop knowledge to be comparable[think of quadrapedal animals that have young which learn to walk within minutes of their birth, which by comparison is instant to how we humans learn to walk on our own]. So, by comparison concepts are something that have to be considered differently from percepts in this regard.
Concepts, on the other hand, are very pernicious things to pin point, but at least they are more simpler in form than percepts[since percepts emcompass sense ordering and neurological activity, which are both seperate fields of biological inquiry]. Concepts, as they are formed, are in some way compressed versions of percepts, in that a concept is the attempt to isolate particular qualities into general qualities. At face value, this seems like induction, but if one carefully examines the details of how concepts operate, it's clear that concepts are different in that one can produce deductive inferences which lead to other concepts or abstracts, meaning concepts must follow more from deductive reasoning than inductive. It may be true that our percepts act in a form of induction, but our capacity to formalize concepts into general principles, as those seen in science and particular fields of philosophy, suggest that percepts in this regard do not alter the structure of how concepts form. That would mean that concepts form with or without a perceptual event to parallel, which for me explains how many flawed concepts get formed in the first place[consider all the folks that believe in UFOs as government space craft trying to take over the world, or people that believe they saw ghosts when it may have been their over active imagination]. In this regard, concepts are the result of the attempt to produce predictive structures that can isolate particular behaviors or qualities of percepts which are detectable[being that they are of the percept and not of our preconception/schema of the percept] and logically consistent to their operation[meaning you don't see rocks flying unless someone or something propels them and you don't see birds crash in flight unless something or someone causes them to do so].
As for their 'certaintability,' I consider that they are in the degree that knowledge improves over time, but that there can be error in the formation of a concept if and only if certain assumptions are made on the part of the individual forming the concept. First, if they assume that what is perceived is all that is, which would be a logical error since no one can deduce that is so from any event or situation, unless all variables are isolated[meaning you already did your part to 'falsify' the certaintability of other events]. Second, if they assume that what is perceived isn't what is, thus treating the senses as some magical or illusionary device[which leads to all sorts of Idealist/Platonic banter]. Third, if they assume what is perceived cannot be deduced in any manner, which leads to assuming no concept about the percept is possible. This is my little list of how flawed concepts get started, but it doesn't exclude other possible sources such as flaws within the senses in themselves such as myopia, hearing loss, et al. But it does assume that the majority of the error is on the user-end of the issue in a similar fashion that computer errors are user-end[to be sure, people make mistakes for their damnest not to do so].
All in all, I think it's enjoyable to discuss this issue, since most of my own observations are not due to any Objectivist literature, but rather how neurologists are chattering about how learning happens as a neurological event and the like. That, and the fact that it's strange how uncommon wisdom about how perception works is often espoused by folks with no high school diploma[being that I've discussed this issue with a few of my co-workers at my job]. :)
-- Bridget
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