The definition of the word concept

Concepts are defined as abstract ideas. They are understood to be the fundamental building blocks underlying principles, thoughts and beliefs.^[1]
They play an important role in all aspects of cognition.^[2][3] As such, concepts are studied by several disciplines, such as linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, and these disciplines are interested in the logical and psychological structure of concepts, and how they are put together to form thoughts and sentences. The study of concepts has served as an important flagship of an emerging interdisciplinary approach called cognitive science.^[4]

In contemporary philosophy, there are at least three prevailing ways to understand what a concept is:^[5]

• Concepts as mental representations, where concepts are entities that exist in the mind (mental objects)
• Concepts as abilities, where concepts are abilities peculiar to cognitive agents (mental states)
• Concepts as Fregean senses, where concepts are abstract objects, as opposed to mental objects and mental states

Concepts can be organized into a hierarchy, higher levels of which are termed «superordinate» and lower levels termed «subordinate». Additionally, there is the «basic» or «middle» level at which people will most readily categorize a concept.^[6] For example, a basic-level concept would be «chair», with its superordinate, «furniture», and its subordinate, «easy chair».

Concepts may be exact, or inexact.^[7]
When the mind makes a generalization such as the concept of tree, it extracts similarities from numerous examples; the simplification enables higher-level thinking.
A concept is instantiated (reified) by all of its actual or potential instances, whether these are things in the real world or other ideas.

Concepts are studied as components of human cognition in the cognitive science disciplines of linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, where an ongoing debate asks whether all cognition must occur through concepts. Concepts are regularly formalized in mathematics, computer science, databases and artificial intelligence. Examples of specific high-level conceptual classes in these fields include classes, schema or categories. In informal use the word concept often just means any idea.

Ontology of concepts[edit]

A central question in the study of concepts is the question of what they are. Philosophers construe this question as one about the ontology of concepts—what kind of things they are. The ontology of concepts determines the answer to other questions, such as how to integrate concepts into a wider theory of the mind, what functions are allowed or disallowed by a concept’s ontology, etc. There are two main views of the ontology of concepts: (1) Concepts are abstract objects, and (2) concepts are mental representations.^[8]

Concepts as mental representations[edit]

The psychological view of concepts[edit]

Within the framework of the representational theory of mind, the structural position of concepts can be understood as follows: Concepts serve as the building blocks of what are called mental representations (colloquially understood as ideas in the mind). Mental representations, in turn, are the building blocks of what are called propositional attitudes (colloquially understood as the stances or perspectives we take towards ideas, be it «believing», «doubting», «wondering», «accepting», etc.). And these propositional attitudes, in turn, are the building blocks of our understanding of thoughts that populate everyday life, as well as folk psychology. In this way, we have an analysis that ties our common everyday understanding of thoughts down to the scientific and philosophical understanding of concepts.^[9]

The physicalist view of concepts[edit]

In a physicalist theory of mind, a concept is a mental representation, which the brain uses to denote a class of things in the world. This is to say that it is literally, a symbol or group of symbols together made from the physical material of the brain.^[10][11] Concepts are mental representations that allow us to draw appropriate inferences about the type of entities we encounter in our everyday lives.^[11] Concepts do not encompass all mental representations, but are merely a subset of them.^[10] The use of concepts is necessary to cognitive processes such as categorization, memory, decision making, learning, and inference.^[12]

Concepts are thought to be stored in long term cortical memory,^[13] in contrast to episodic memory of the particular objects and events which they abstract, which are stored in hippocampus. Evidence for this separation comes from hippocampal damaged patients such as patient HM. The abstraction from the day’s hippocampal events and objects into cortical concepts is often considered to be the computation underlying (some stages of) sleep and dreaming. Many people (beginning with Aristotle) report memories of dreams which appear to mix the day’s events with analogous or related historical concepts and memories, and suggest that they were being sorted or organized into more abstract concepts. («Sort» is itself another word for concept, and «sorting» thus means to organize into concepts.)

Concepts as abstract objects[edit]

The semantic view of concepts suggests that concepts are abstract objects. In this view, concepts are abstract objects of a category out of a human’s mind rather than some mental representations.^[8]

There is debate as to the relationship between concepts and natural language.^[5] However, it is necessary at least to begin by understanding that the concept «dog» is philosophically distinct from the things in the world grouped by this concept—or the reference class or extension.^[10] Concepts that can be equated to a single word are called «lexical concepts».^[5]

The study of concepts and conceptual structure falls into the disciplines of linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science.^[11]

In the simplest terms, a concept is a name or label that regards or treats an abstraction as if it had concrete or material existence, such as a person, a place, or a thing. It may represent a natural object that exists in the real world like a tree, an animal, a stone, etc. It may also name an artificial (man-made) object like a chair, computer, house, etc. Abstract ideas and knowledge domains such as freedom, equality, science, happiness, etc., are also symbolized by concepts. It is important to realize that a concept is merely a symbol, a representation of the abstraction. The word is not to be mistaken for the thing. For example, the word «moon» (a concept) is not the large, bright, shape-changing object up in the sky, but only represents that celestial object. Concepts are created (named) to describe, explain and capture reality as it is known and understood.

A priori concepts[edit]

Kant maintained the view that human minds possess pure or a priori concepts. Instead of being abstracted from individual perceptions, like empirical concepts, they originate in the mind itself. He called these concepts categories, in the sense of the word that means predicate, attribute, characteristic, or quality. But these pure categories are predicates of things in general, not of a particular thing. According to Kant, there are twelve categories that constitute the understanding of phenomenal objects. Each category is that one predicate which is common to multiple empirical concepts. In order to explain how an a priori concept can relate to individual phenomena, in a manner analogous to an a posteriori concept, Kant employed the technical concept of the schema. He held that the account of the concept as an abstraction of experience is only partly correct. He called those concepts that result from abstraction «a posteriori concepts» (meaning concepts that arise out of experience). An empirical or an a posteriori concept is a general representation (Vorstellung) or non-specific thought of that which is common to several specific perceived objects (Logic, I, 1., §1, Note 1)

A concept is a common feature or characteristic. Kant investigated the way that empirical a posteriori concepts are created.

The logical acts of the understanding by which concepts are generated as to their form are:

1. comparison, i.e., the likening of mental images to one another in relation to the unity of consciousness;
2. reflection, i.e., the going back over different mental images, how they can be comprehended in one consciousness; and finally
3. abstraction or the segregation of everything else by which the mental images differ …

In order to make our mental images into concepts, one must thus be able to compare, reflect, and abstract, for these three logical operations of the understanding are essential and general conditions of generating any concept whatever. For example, I see a fir, a willow, and a linden. In firstly comparing these objects, I notice that they are different from one another in respect of trunk, branches, leaves, and the like; further, however, I reflect only on what they have in common, the trunk, the branches, the leaves themselves, and abstract from their size, shape, and so forth; thus I gain a concept of a tree.

— Logic, §6

Embodied content[edit]

In cognitive linguistics, abstract concepts are transformations of concrete concepts derived from embodied experience. The mechanism of transformation is structural mapping, in which properties of two or more source domains are selectively mapped onto a blended space (Fauconnier & Turner, 1995; see conceptual blending). A common class of blends are metaphors. This theory contrasts with the rationalist view that concepts are perceptions (or recollections, in Plato’s term) of an independently existing world of ideas, in that it denies the existence of any such realm. It also contrasts with the empiricist view that concepts are abstract generalizations of individual experiences, because the contingent and bodily experience is preserved in a concept, and not abstracted away. While the perspective is compatible with Jamesian pragmatism, the notion of the transformation of embodied concepts through structural mapping makes a distinct contribution to the problem of concept formation.^{[citation needed]}

Realist universal concepts[edit]

Platonist views of the mind construe concepts as abstract objects.^[14] Plato was the starkest proponent of the realist thesis of universal concepts. By his view, concepts (and ideas in general) are innate ideas that were instantiations of a transcendental world of pure forms that lay behind the veil of the physical world. In this way, universals were explained as transcendent objects. Needless to say, this form of realism was tied deeply with Plato’s ontological projects. This remark on Plato is not of merely historical interest. For example, the view that numbers are Platonic objects was revived by Kurt Gödel as a result of certain puzzles that he took to arise from the phenomenological accounts.^[15]

Sense and reference[edit]

Gottlob Frege, founder of the analytic tradition in philosophy, famously argued for the analysis of language in terms of sense and reference. For him, the sense of an expression in language describes a certain state of affairs in the world, namely, the way that some object is presented. Since many commentators view the notion of sense as identical to the notion of concept, and Frege regards senses as the linguistic representations of states of affairs in the world, it seems to follow that we may understand concepts as the manner in which we grasp the world. Accordingly, concepts (as senses) have an ontological status.^[8]

Concepts in calculus[edit]

According to Carl Benjamin Boyer, in the introduction to his The History of the Calculus and its Conceptual Development, concepts in calculus do not refer to perceptions. As long as the concepts are useful and mutually compatible, they are accepted on their own. For example, the concepts of the derivative and the integral are not considered to refer to spatial or temporal perceptions of the external world of experience. Neither are they related in any way to mysterious limits in which quantities are on the verge of nascence or evanescence, that is, coming into or going out of existence. The abstract concepts are now considered to be totally autonomous, even though they originated from the process of abstracting or taking away qualities from perceptions until only the common, essential attributes remained.

Notable theories on the structure of concepts[edit]

Classical theory[edit]

The classical theory of concepts, also referred to as the empiricist theory of concepts,^[10] is the oldest theory about the structure of concepts (it can be traced back to Aristotle^[11]), and was prominently held until the 1970s.^[11] The classical theory of concepts says that concepts have a definitional structure.^[5] Adequate definitions of the kind required by this theory usually take the form of a list of features. These features must have two important qualities to provide a comprehensive definition.^[11] Features entailed by the definition of a concept must be both necessary and sufficient for membership in the class of things covered by a particular concept.^[11] A feature is considered necessary if every member of the denoted class has that feature. A feature is considered sufficient if something has all the parts required by the definition.^[11] For example, the classic example bachelor is said to be defined by unmarried and man.^[5] An entity is a bachelor (by this definition) if and only if it is both unmarried and a man. To check whether something is a member of the class, you compare its qualities to the features in the definition.^[10] Another key part of this theory is that it obeys the law of the excluded middle, which means that there are no partial members of a class, you are either in or out.^[11]

The classical theory persisted for so long unquestioned because it seemed intuitively correct and has great explanatory power. It can explain how concepts would be acquired, how we use them to categorize and how we use the structure of a concept to determine its referent class.^[5] In fact, for many years it was one of the major activities in philosophy—concept analysis.^[5] Concept analysis is the act of trying to articulate the necessary and sufficient conditions for the membership in the referent class of a concept.^{[citation needed]} For example, Shoemaker’s classic «Time Without Change» explored whether the concept of the flow of time can include flows where no changes take place, though change is usually taken as a definition of time.^{[citation needed]}

Arguments against the classical theory[edit]

Given that most later theories of concepts were born out of the rejection of some or all of the classical theory,^[14] it seems appropriate to give an account of what might be wrong with this theory. In the 20th century, philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Rosch argued against the classical theory. There are six primary arguments^[14] summarized as follows:

• It seems that there simply are no definitions—especially those based in sensory primitive concepts.^[14]
• It seems as though there can be cases where our ignorance or error about a class means that we either don’t know the definition of a concept, or have incorrect notions about what a definition of a particular concept might entail.^[14]
• Quine’s argument against analyticity in Two Dogmas of Empiricism also holds as an argument against definitions.^[14]
• Some concepts have fuzzy membership. There are items for which it is vague whether or not they fall into (or out of) a particular referent class. This is not possible in the classical theory as everything has equal and full membership.^[14]
• Experiments and research showed that assumptions of well defined concepts and categories might not be correct. Researcher Hampton^[16]asked participants to differentiate whether items were in different categories. Hampton did not conclude that items were either clear and absolute members or non-members. Instead, Hampton found that some items were barely considered category members and others that were barely non-members. For example, participants considered sinks as barely members of kitchen utensil category, while sponges were considered barely non-members, with much disagreement among participants of the study. If concepts and categories were very well defined, such cases should be rare. Since then, many researches have discovered borderline members that are not clearly in or out of a category of concept.
• Rosch found typicality effects which cannot be explained by the classical theory of concepts, these sparked the prototype theory.^[14] See below.
• Psychological experiments show no evidence for our using concepts as strict definitions.^[14]

Prototype theory[edit]

Prototype theory came out of problems with the classical view of conceptual structure.^[5] Prototype theory says that concepts specify properties that members of a class tend to possess, rather than must possess.^[14] Wittgenstein, Rosch, Mervis, Berlin, Anglin, and Posner are a few of the key proponents and creators of this theory.^[14][17] Wittgenstein describes the relationship between members of a class as family resemblances. There are not necessarily any necessary conditions for membership; a dog can still be a dog with only three legs.^[11] This view is particularly supported by psychological experimental evidence for prototypicality effects.^[11] Participants willingly and consistently rate objects in categories like ‘vegetable’ or ‘furniture’ as more or less typical of that class.^[11][17] It seems that our categories are fuzzy psychologically, and so this structure has explanatory power.^[11] We can judge an item’s membership of the referent class of a concept by comparing it to the typical member—the most central member of the concept. If it is similar enough in the relevant ways, it will be cognitively admitted as a member of the relevant class of entities.^[11] Rosch suggests that every category is represented by a central exemplar which embodies all or the maximum possible number of features of a given category.^[11] Lech, Gunturkun, and Suchan explain that categorization involves many areas of the brain. Some of these are: visual association areas, prefrontal cortex, basal ganglia, and temporal lobe.

The Prototype perspective is proposed as an alternative view to the Classical approach. While the Classical theory requires an all-or-nothing membership in a group, prototypes allow for more fuzzy boundaries and are characterized by attributes.^[18] Lakoff stresses that experience and cognition are critical to the function of language, and Labov’s experiment found that the function that an artifact contributed to what people categorized it as.^[18] For example, a container holding mashed potatoes versus tea swayed people toward classifying them as a bowl and a cup, respectively. This experiment also illuminated the optimal dimensions of what the prototype for «cup» is.^[18]

Prototypes also deal with the essence of things and to what extent they belong to a category. There have been a number of experiments dealing with questionnaires asking participants to rate something according to the extent to which it belongs to a category.^[18] This question is contradictory to the Classical Theory because something is either a member of a category or is not.^[18] This type of problem is paralleled in other areas of linguistics such as phonology, with an illogical question such as «is /i/ or /o/ a better vowel?» The Classical approach and Aristotelian categories may be a better descriptor in some cases.^[18]

Theory-theory[edit]

Theory-theory is a reaction to the previous two theories and develops them further.^[11] This theory postulates that categorization by concepts is something like scientific theorizing.^[5] Concepts are not learned in isolation, but rather are learned as a part of our experiences with the world around us.^[11] In this sense, concepts’ structure relies on their relationships to other concepts as mandated by a particular mental theory about the state of the world.^[14] How this is supposed to work is a little less clear than in the previous two theories, but is still a prominent and notable theory.^[14] This is supposed to explain some of the issues of ignorance and error that come up in prototype and classical theories as concepts that are structured around each other seem to account for errors such as whale as a fish (this misconception came from an incorrect theory about what a whale is like, combining with our theory of what a fish is).^[14] When we learn that a whale is not a fish, we are recognizing that whales don’t in fact fit the theory we had about what makes something a fish. Theory-theory also postulates that people’s theories about the world are what inform their conceptual knowledge of the world. Therefore, analysing people’s theories can offer insights into their concepts. In this sense, «theory» means an individual’s mental explanation rather than scientific fact. This theory criticizes classical and prototype theory as relying too much on similarities and using them as a sufficient constraint. It suggests that theories or mental understandings contribute more to what has membership to a group rather than weighted similarities, and a cohesive category is formed more by what makes sense to the perceiver. Weights assigned to features have shown to fluctuate and vary depending on context and experimental task demonstrated by Tversky. For this reason, similarities between members may be collateral rather than causal.^[19]

Ideasthesia[edit]

According to the theory of ideasthesia (or «sensing concepts»), activation of a concept may be the main mechanism responsible for the creation of phenomenal experiences. Therefore, understanding how the brain processes concepts may be central to solving the mystery of how conscious experiences (or qualia) emerge within a physical system e.g., the sourness of the sour taste of lemon.^[20] This question is also known as the hard problem of consciousness.^[21][22] Research on ideasthesia emerged from research on synesthesia where it was noted that a synesthetic experience requires first an activation of a concept of the inducer.^[23] Later research expanded these results into everyday perception.^[24]

There is a lot of discussion on the most effective theory in concepts. Another theory is semantic pointers, which use perceptual and motor representations and these representations are like symbols.^[25]

Etymology[edit]

The term «concept» is traced back to 1554–60 (Latin conceptum – «something conceived»).^[26]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

Further reading[edit]

External links[edit]

• Concept at PhilPapers
• Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). «Concepts». Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Concept at the Indiana Philosophy Ontology Project
• «Concept». Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• «Theory–Theory of Concepts». Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• «Classical Theory of Concepts». Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Blending and Conceptual Integration
• Concepts. A Critical Approach, by Andy Blunden
• Conceptual Science and Mathematical Permutations
• Concept Mobiles Latest concepts
• v:Conceptualize: A Wikiversity Learning Project
• Concept simultaneously translated in several languages and meanings
• TED-Ed Lesson on ideasthesia (sensing concepts)

A concept is a constituent of thought or generalized idea, that designates common properties and characteristics abstracted from a number of instances. While ideas, perceptions, and «representations» have psychological implications, concepts have logical implications.

Human beings understand the world by applying concepts and expressing them with language. Theories of concepts are thus closely tied to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and psychology, as well as ontology and epistemology.

Overview

A vast array of accounts attempt to explain the nature of concepts. According to classical accounts, a concept denotes all of the entities, phenomena, and/or relations in a given category or class by using definitions. Concepts are abstract in that they omit the differences of the things in their extension, treating the members of the extension as if they were identical. Classical concepts are universal in that they apply equally to everything in their extension. Concepts are also the basic elements of propositions, much the same way a word is the basic semantic element of a sentence. Unlike perceptions, which are particular images of individual objects, concepts cannot be visualized. Because they are not themselves individual perceptions, concepts are discursive and result from reason.

Concepts are important in understanding reality. Generally speaking, concepts are taken to be:

• Acquired dispositions to recognize perceived objects as being of this kind or of that ontological kind
• To understand what this kind or that kind of object is like, and consequently
• To perceive a number of perceived particulars as being the same in kind and to discriminate between them and other sensible particulars that are different in kind

In addition, concepts are acquired dispositions to understand what certain kinds of objects are like both when the objects, though perceptible, are not actually perceived, and also when they are not perceptible at all, as is the case with all the conceptual constructs people employ in physics, mathematics, and metaphysics. The impetus to have a theory of concepts that is ontologically useful has been so strong that it has pushed forward accounts that understand a concept to have a deep connection with reality.

On some accounts, there may be agents (perhaps some animals) which don’t think about, but rather use relatively basic concepts (such as demonstrative and perceptual concepts for things in their perceptual field), even though it is generally assumed that they do not think in symbols. On other accounts, mastery of symbolic thought (in particular, language) is a prerequisite for conceptual thought.^[1]

Concepts are bearers of meaning, as opposed to agents of meaning. A single concept can be expressed by any number of languages. The concept of DOG can be expressed as dog in English, Hund in German, as chien in French, and perro in Spanish. The fact that concepts are in some sense independent of language makes translation possible—words in various languages have identical meaning, because they express one and the same concept.

A term labels or designates concepts. Several partly or fully distinct concepts may share the same term. These different concepts are easily confused by, mistakenly, being used interchangeably, constituting a fallacy. Also, the concepts of term and concept are often confused, although the two are not the same.

The acquisition of concepts is studied in machine learning as supervised classification and unsupervised classification, and in psychology and cognitive science as concept learning and category formation. In the philosophy of Kant, any purely empirical theory dealing with the acquisition of concepts is referred to as a noogony.

Origin and acquisition of concepts

A posteriori abstractions

John Locke’s description of a general idea corresponds to a description of a concept. According to Locke, a general idea is created by abstracting, drawing away, or removing the common characteristic or characteristics from several particular ideas. This common characteristic is that which is similar to all of the different individuals. For example, the abstract general idea or concept that is designated by the word «red» is that characteristic which is common to apples, cherries, and blood. The abstract general idea or concept that is signified by the word «dog» is the collection of those characteristics which are common to Airedales, Collies, and Chihuahuas.

In the same tradition as Locke, John Stuart Mill stated that general conceptions are formed through abstraction. A general conception is the common element among the many images of members of a class. «…[W]hen we form a set of phenomena into a class, that is, when we compare them with one another to ascertain in what they agree, some general conception is implied in this mental operation» (A System of Logic, Book IV, Ch. II). Mill did not believe that concepts exist in the mind before the act of abstraction. «It is not a law of our intellect, that, in comparing things with each other and taking note of their agreement, we merely recognize as realized in the outward world something that we already had in our minds. The conception originally found its way to us as the result of such a comparison. It was obtained (in metaphysical phrase) by abstraction from individual things» (Ibid.).

For Schopenhauer, empirical concepts «…are mere abstractions from what is known through intuitive perception, and they have arisen from our arbitrarily thinking away or dropping of some qualities and our retention of others» (Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. I, «Sketch of a History of the Ideal and the Real»). In his On the Will in Nature, «Physiology and Pathology,» Schopenhauer said that a concept is «drawn off from previous images … by putting off their differences. This concept is then no longer intuitively perceptible, but is denoted and fixed merely by words.» Nietzsche, who was heavily influenced by Schopenhauer, wrote, «Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal. No leaf ever wholly equals another, and the concept ‘leaf’ is formed through an arbitrary abstraction from these individual differences, through forgetting the distinctions… » («On Truth and Lie in an Extra—Moral Sense,» The Portable Nietzsche, p. 46).

By contrast to the above philosophers, Immanuel Kant held that the account of the concept as an abstraction of experience is only partly correct. He called those concepts that result of abstraction «a posteriori concepts» (meaning concepts that arise out of experience). An empirical or an a posteriori concept is a general representation (Vorstellung) or non-specific thought of that which is common to several specific perceived objects (Logic, I, 1., §1, Note 1).

A concept is a common feature or characteristic. Kant investigated the way that empirical a posteriori concepts are created.

The logical acts of the understanding by which concepts are generated as to their form are: (1.) comparison, i.e., the likening of mental images to one another in relation to the unity of consciousness; (2.) reflection, i.e., the going back over different mental images, how they can be comprehended in one consciousness; and finally (3.) abstraction or the segregation of everything else by which the mental images differ. … In order to make our mental images into concepts, one must thus be able to compare, reflect, and abstract, for these three logical operations of the understanding are essential and general conditions of generating any concept whatever. For example, I see a fir, a willow, and a linden. In firstly comparing these objects, I notice that they are different from one another in respect of trunk, branches, leaves, and the like; further, however, I reflect only on what they have in common, the trunk, the branches, the leaves themselves, and abstract from their size, shape, and so forth; thus I gain a concept of a tree (Logic, §6).

Kant’s description of the making of a concept has been paraphrased as «… to conceive is essentially to think in abstraction what is common to a plurality of possible instances… » (H.J. Paton, Kant’s Metaphysics of Experience, I, 250). In his discussion of Kant, Christopher Janaway wrote: «… generic concepts are formed by abstraction from more than one species.»^[2]

A priori concepts

Kant declared that human minds possess pure or a priori concepts. Instead of being abstracted from individual perceptions, like empirical concepts, they originate in the mind itself. He called these concepts categories, in the sense of the word that means predicate, attribute, characteristic, or quality. But these pure categories are predicates of things in general, not of a particular thing. According to Kant, there are 12 categories that constitute the understanding of phenomenal objects. Each category is that one predicate which is common to multiple empirical concepts. In order to explain how an a priori concept can relate to individual phenomena, in a manner analogous to an a posteriori concept, Kant employed the technical concept of the schema.

Conceptual structure

It seems intuitively obvious that concepts must have some kind of structure. Up until recently, the dominant view of conceptual structure was a containment model, associated with the classical view of concepts. According to this model, a concept is endowed with certain necessary and sufficient conditions in their description which unequivocally determine an extension. The containment model allows for no degrees; a thing is either in, or out, of the concept’s extension. By contrast, the inferential model understands conceptual structure to be determined in a graded manner, according to the tendency of the concept to be used in certain kinds of inferences. As a result, concepts do not have a kind of structure that is in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions; all conditions are contingent (Margolis: 5).

However, some theorists claim that primitive concepts lack any structure at all. For instance, Jerry Fodor presents his Asymmetric Dependence Theory as a way of showing how a primitive concept’s content is determined by a reliable relationship between the information in mental contents and the world. These sorts of claims are referred to as «atomistic,» because the primitive concept is treated as if it were a genuine atom.

Conceptual content

Content as pragmatic role

A concept may be abstracted from several perceptions, but that is only its origin. In regard to its meaning or its truth, William James proposed his Pragmatic Rule. This rule states that the meaning of a concept may always be found in some particular difference in the course of human experience which its being true will make (Some Problems of Philosophy, «Percept and Concept—The Import of Concepts»). In order to understand the meaning of the concept and to discuss its importance, a concept may be tested by asking, «What sensible difference to anybody will its truth make?» There is only one criterion of a concept’s meaning and only one test of its truth. That criterion or test is its consequences for human behavior.

In this way, James bypassed the controversy between rationalists and empiricists regarding the origin of concepts. Instead of solving their dispute, he ignored it. The rationalists had asserted that concepts are a revelation of Reason. Concepts are a glimpse of a different world, one which contains timeless truths in areas such as logic, mathematics, ethics, and aesthetics. By pure thought, humans can discover the relations that really exist among the parts of that divine world. On the other hand, the empiricists claimed that concepts were merely a distillation or abstraction from perceptions of the world of experience. Therefore, the significance of concepts depends solely on the perceptions that are its references. James’ Pragmatic Rule does not connect the meaning of a concept with its origin. Instead, it relates the meaning to a concept’s purpose, that is, its function, use, or result.

Embodied content

In Cognitive linguistics, abstract concepts are transformations of concrete concepts derived from embodied experience. The mechanism of transformation is structural mapping, in which properties of two or more source domains are selectively mapped onto a blended space (Fauconnier & Turner, 1995). A common class of blends are metaphors. This theory contrasts with the rationalist view that concepts are perceptions (or recollections, in Plato’s term) of an independently existing world of ideas, in that it denies the existence of any such realm. It also contrasts with the empiricist view that concepts are abstract generalizations of individual experiences, because the contingent and bodily experience is preserved in a concept, and not abstracted away. While the perspective is compatible with Jamesian pragmatism (above), the notion of the transformation of embodied concepts through structural mapping makes a distinct contribution to the problem of concept formation.

Philosophical implications

Concepts and metaphilosophy

A long and well-established tradition in philosophy posits that philosophy itself is nothing more than conceptual analysis. This view has its proponents in contemporary literature as well as historical. According to Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? (1991), philosophy is the activity of creating concepts. This creative activity differs from previous definitions of philosophy as simple reasoning, communication, or contemplation of Universals. Concepts are specific to philosophy: Science has got «percepts,» and art «affects.» A concept is always signed: Thus, Descartes’ Cogito or Kant’s «transcendental.» It is a singularity, not a universal, and connects itself with others concepts, on a «plane of immanence» traced by a particular philosophy. Concepts can jump from one plane of immanence to another, combining with other concepts and therefore engaging in a «becoming-Other.»

Concepts in epistemology

Concepts are vital to the development of scientific knowledge. For example, it would be difficult to imagine physics without concepts like: Energy, force, or acceleration. Concepts help to integrate apparently unrelated observations and phenomena into viable hypothesis and theories, the basic ingredients of science. The concept map is a tool that is used to help researchers visualize the inter-relationships between various concepts.

Ontology of concepts

Although the mainstream literature in cognitive science regards the concept as a kind of mental particular, it has been suggested by some theorists that concepts are real things (Margolis: 8). In the most radical form, the realist about concepts attempts to show that the supposedly mental processes are not mental at all; rather, they are abstract entities, which are just as real as any mundane object.

Plato was the starkest proponent of the realist thesis of universal concepts. By his view, concepts (and ideas in general) are innate ideas that were instantiations of a transcendental world of pure forms that laid behind the veil of the physical world. In this way, universals were explained as transcendent objects. Needless to say, this form of realism was tied deeply with Plato’s ontological projects. This remark on Plato is not of merely historical interest. For example, the view that numbers are Platonic objects was revived by Kurt Godel as a result of certain puzzles that he took to arise from the phenomenological accounts.

Gottlob Frege, founder of the analytic tradition in philosophy, famously argued for the analysis of language in terms of sense and reference. For him, the sense of an expression in language describes a certain state of affairs in the world, namely, the way that some object is presented. Since many commentators view the notion of sense as identical to the notion of concept, and Frege regards senses as the linguistic representations of states of affairs in the world, it seems to follow that we may understand concepts as the manner in which we grasp the world. Accordingly, concepts (as senses) have an ontological status (Morgolis: 7)

According to Carl Benjamin Boyer, in the introduction to his The History of the Calculus and its Conceptual Development, concepts in calculus do not refer to perceptions. As long as the concepts are useful and mutually compatible, they are accepted on their own. For example, the concepts of the derivative and the integral are not considered to refer to spatial or temporal perceptions of the external world of experience. Neither are they related in any way to mysterious limits in which quantities are on the verge of nascence or evanescence, that is, coming into or going out of appearance or existence. The abstract concepts are now considered to be totally autonomous, even though they originated from the process of abstracting or taking away qualities from perceptions until only the common, essential attributes remained.

Notes

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Boyer, Carl Benjamin. The History of Calculus and its Conceptual Development. Dover Publications. ISBN 0-486-60509-4
• Damasio, Antonio R. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Avon, 1994.
• Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? European Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. ISBN 0231079885
• Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner. «Conceptual Integration Networks.» Cognitive Science. 22, 2 (April-June 1998): 133-187.
• Janaway, Christopher. Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004. ISBN 0198249691
• Kant, Immanuel. Logic. Dover Publications. ISBN 0-486-25650-2
• Laurence, Stephen and Eric Margolis. «Concepts and Cognitive Science» . In Concepts: Core Readings, MIT Press, pp. 3-81, 1999. Retrieved December 14, 2007.
• Mill, John Stuart. A System of Logic, University Press of the Pacific. ISBN 1-4102-0252-6
• Nietzsche, Friedrich and Walter Kaufmann. The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Penguin, 1976. ISBN 0140150625
• Paton, H.J. Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience. London: Allen & Unwin, 1936.
• Schopenhauer, Arthur. Parerga and Paralipomena. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-824508-4
• The Writings of William James. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-39188-4

External links

All links retrieved March 17, 2017.

• E. Margolis and S. Lawrence, Concepts, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Concepts, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

General philosophy sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Paideia Project Online.
• Project Gutenberg.

con·cept

 (kŏn′sĕpt′)

n.

1. A general idea or understanding of something: the concept of inertia; the concept of free will. See Synonyms at idea.

2. A plan or original idea: The original concept was for a building with 12 floors.

3. A unifying idea or theme, especially for a product or service: a new restaurant concept.

adj.

Having an experimental or strikingly different design, especially to test or demonstrate new features: a concept car.

---

[Late Latin conceptus, from Latin, past participle of concipere, to conceive; see conceive.]

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

concept

(ˈkɒnsɛpt)

n

1. an idea, esp an abstract idea: the concepts of biology.

2. (Philosophy) philosophy a general idea or notion that corresponds to some class of entities and that consists of the characteristic or essential features of the class

3. (Philosophy) philosophy

a. the conjunction of all the characteristic features of something

b. a theoretical construct within some theory

c. a directly intuited object of thought

d. the meaning of a predicate

4. (Automotive Engineering) (modifier) (of a product, esp a car) created as an exercise to demonstrate the technical skills and imagination of the designers, and not intended for mass production or sale

[C16: from Latin conceptum something received or conceived, from concipere to take in, conceive]

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

con•cept

(ˈkɒn sɛpt)

n.

1. a general notion or idea; conception.

2. an idea of something formed by mentally combining all its characteristics or particulars; a construct.

3. a directly conceived or intuited object of thought.

4. a theme or image, esp. as embodied in the design or execution of something.

[1550–60; < Latin conceptum something conceived, orig. neuter of conceptus, past participle of concipere; see conceive]

Random House Kernerman Webster’s College Dictionary, © 2010 K Dictionaries Ltd. Copyright 2005, 1997, 1991 by Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

concept

A notion or statement of an idea, expressing how something might be done or accomplished, that may lead to an accepted procedure.

Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. US Department of Defense 2005.

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Freud taught us that it wasn’t God that imposed judgment on us and made us feel guilty when we stepped out of line. Instead, it was the superego — that idealized concept of what a good person is supposed to be and do — given to us by our parents, that condemned us for what had been hitherto regarded as ungodly behavior.

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ETYMOLOGY OF THE WORD CONCEPT

From Latin conceptum something received or conceived, from concipere to take in, conceive.

PRONUNCIATION OF CONCEPT

GRAMMATICAL CATEGORY OF CONCEPT

Concept is a noun.

WHAT DOES CONCEPT MEAN IN ENGLISH?

Definition of concept in the English dictionary

The first definition of concept in the dictionary is an idea, esp an abstract idea. Other definition of concept is a general idea or notion that corresponds to some class of entities and that consists of the characteristic or essential features of the class. Concept is also the conjunction of all the characteristic features of something.

WORDS THAT RHYME WITH CONCEPT

SYNONYMS OF «CONCEPT»

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REFERENCE

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