Recent philosophers have given up the problem and, as a result, have given up philosophy as such. Ayn Rand challenges and sweeps aside the main bulwark of the anti-mind axis. Her historic feat is to tie man's distinctive form of cognition to reality, i.e., to validate man's reason. According to Objectivism, concepts are derived from and do refer to the facts of reality. What the something is he discovers on the conceptual level of awareness.
Conceptualization is man's method of organizing sensory material.
To form a concept, one isolates two or more similar concretes from the rest of one's perceptual field, and integrates them into a single mental unit, symbolized by a word. Similarity is the key to this process. The mind can retain the characteristics of similar concretes without specifying their measurements, which vary from case to case. In this sense and respect, perceptual awareness is the arithmetic, but conceptual awareness is the algebra of cognition. This site is produced by the Ayn Rand Institute .