Chris is right to condemn this:
> "THE concept of.." rather than "A concept of.."
>
And Saul is right when he says,
" There are other notions of authenticity such as being true and
trustworthy,validated, genuine or that it corresponds to a given model, or
is of a given period, or that it is what it represents itself to be -"
Whenever anyone talks of "THE concept of authentic" or "THE meaning of
authentic" or "THE notion of authentic", you should immediately get suspicious
about
the clarity of his thinking.
The next step is to get suspicious whenever anyone talks about "THE
concept/meaning/idea/notion" of ANYTHING.
Most people are ready to concede that "notion", in the sense of a fleeting
bit of consciousness, obtains only in a mind. Granted, when I hear a given
word,
the notion that arises in my mind is likely to seem near-identical to what
arose the last time I heard the word (though less often than one might expect;
in my lifetime, the notion stirred by my hearing 'Stalin', 'Enron', 'Muslim',
'Islam', 'terrorism', 'cancer', 'liberal', 'Mel Gibson', 'Supreme Court',
'intelligence', and more has evolved a good deal).
But there is something about our brains that tends to "reify" a frequently
entertained notion, especially if we believe others are entertaining the
"same"
notion. Thus 'a' concept becomes 'the' concept of something.
And so it is that, in a not-throught-through, fuzzy way, we come think of
concepts and meanings as being extra-mental entities. Discrete, stable words
--
like 'authentic' -- are constant abetters to this confusion. So when I say
'authentic', I assume "THE meaning of" the word will arise in your mind just
as it
was in my mind when I spoke.
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