To think conceptually is not the same as to be concept-bound.

One decisive difference is in one’s interpretation of sequence: are the conceptualized elements that constitute the concept understood to precede and produce the meaning of the concept; or do the conceptualized elements follow and attempt to account for the spontaneous meaning of the concept?

To make this concrete: Let’s say that a wife is angry with her husband. He asks her why. She begins to explain, listing reasons. However, each time she lists a reasons her husband calls it into doubt, pointing to an assumption she’s made about his motives. According to him it is these unsubstantiated assumptions that have caused her offense – not his actions as he meant them. He points out to her that since the reasons are faulty, her anger is unfounded. Here’s the crux: the assumption is that her anger is founded on the assumptions.

In this example if the husband actually believes his own argument, he is concept-bound – and this is true even if the wife has in fact misinterpreted the meaning of his actions. And if the wife is not genuinely emotionally persuaded but is no longer confident in her assessment of her husband’s behavior she is also concept-bound. She has been bound-up by her husband’s argument, and made unable to act on her interpretation, not relieved of a painful conception and enabled to act according to a less painful and more persuasive truth. If the wife were brought to see what happened from a shifted perspective and found that her offense has simply vanished this would have been thinking conceptually without succumbing to conceptualization.

The conceptualization of facts preceding meaning is itself one of our deepest concept-binding conceptualizations.

Derivative conceptualizations are sometimes conceived to to relieve a thinker of unwanted conceptualizations. Examples are: 1) Skepticism, the belief that calling all individual elements of a way of seeing into doubt will weaken the sense of an unwanted interpretive or pre-interpretive meaningful whole; 2) the notion that conceptual thought is the root of unwanted interpretive or pre-interpretive wholes, so avoidance of clear thought is avoidance of concept-boundness; and 3) a favorite of moms everywhere, that we can decide to conceptualize individual elements and the whole in a way that suits us in order to feel how we wish to about life.

The way out of concept-boundedness is to be faithful to one’s full experience and to reflect on this experience conceptually.