Concept

For other uses, see Concept (disambiguation).

A concept (substantive term: conception) is a cognitive unit of meaning—an abstract idea or a mental symbol sometimes defined as a "unit of knowledge," built from other units which act as a concept's characteristics. A concept is typically associated with a corresponding representation in a language or symbology; however, some concepts do not have a linguistic representation, which can make them more difficult to understand depending on a person's native language^[1], such as a single meaning of a term.

There are prevailing theories in contemporary philosophy which attempt to explain the nature of concepts. The representational theory of mind proposes that concepts are mental representations, while the semantic theory of concepts (originating with Frege's distinction between concept and object) holds that they are abstract objects.^[2] Ideas are taken to be concepts, although abstract concepts do not necessarily appear to the mind as images, while some ideas appear to.^[3] Many philosophers consider concepts to be a fundamental ontological category of being.

The term "concept" is traced back to 1554–60 (Latin conceptum - "something conceived"),^{[citation needed]} but what is today termed "the classical theory of concepts" is the theory of Aristotle on the definition of terms.^{[citation needed]} The meaning of "concept" is explored in mainstream information science,^{[4] [5]} cognitive science, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. In computer and information science contexts, especially, the term 'concept' is often used in unclear or inconsistent ways.^[6]

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 uncommon characteristic or characteristics from several particular ideas. The remaining 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..."^[7]

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."^[8]

A priori concepts

Main article: Category (Kant)

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.

One possible and likely structure

Concepts are formed by people's (or other) minds while reflecting upon their environment, subject to their sensory organs/sensors and the way such minds are in contact with their immediate and distant environment. The location of concepts is therefore assumed to be within the mind of such an organism/mechanism, more specifically in their head or equivalent place deemed to be the organ used for thinking (system of nerves or equivalent). However Concepts can be expressed in language and externalised by writing or other means such as Wikipedia. Others hold different views, such as Carl Jung, who holds that concepts may be attributed to space other than within the inside boundaries of any body or mass or material formation of living creatures. In fact some people even assume that inanimate object also have such property as "a concept" within their own solid structure.

The dual nature of concepts

Clearly, the location of concepts is not decided for good yet, but it looks certain that they are related to the external world or the environment, of which of course such a living and "thinking" creature is a part of. Thus a concept is started from outside, in the relation of conception, hence the subject is subjected to an object and has a concept of that object in a black box usually referred to as the mind. Such a content of the mind is then related to the original object that is reflected in and by the mind (for short) and it is also given another form to enable the creature to communicate about his/her/its experience of that object. In case of humans, it is usually a symbol or sign, maybe that of a language which is then also related to the external object and the internal concept in the triangle of meaning (which is the same as the triangle of reference). Do not forget that as we speak of existence as inseparable from space and time, such a relationship is established in time, meaning that whoever has a concept of whatever object with whichever name will have the three inputs synchronized. And should he be not alone at that location, he/she etc. will also check that what/whom he sees as existing is real, "objective", and not "subjective" (prone to various errors) through a dialog with the members of his/her race or community.

Conceptual content

Content as pragmatic role

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; 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 (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 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 creates "functions", and art "sensations". A concept is always signed: thus, Descartes' Cogito or Kant's "transcendental". It is a singularity, not 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

For more details on this topic, see List of concepts in science.

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 hypotheses 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 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 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.^[9]

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.

Concepts in empirical investigations

Concepts, as abstract units of meaning, play a key role in the development and testing of theories. For example, a simple relational hypothesis can be viewed as either a conceptual hypothesis (where the abstract concepts form the meaning) or an operationalized hypothesis, which is situated in the real world by rules of interpretation. For example, take the simple hypothesis Education increases Income. The abstract notion of education and income (concepts) could have many meanings.

A conceptual hypothesis cannot be tested. They need to be converted into operational hypothesis or the abstract meaning of education must be derived or operationalized to something in the real world that can be measured. Education could be measured by “years of school completed” or “highest degree completed” etc. Income could be measured by “hourly rate of pay” or “yearly salary”, etc. The system of concepts or conceptual framework can take on many levels of complexity. When the conceptual framework is very complex and incorporates causality or explanation they are generally referred to as a theory.

The noted philosopher of science Carl Gustav Hempel says this more eloquently: “An adequate empirical interpretation turns a theoretical system into a testable theory: The hypothesis whose constituent terms have been interpreted become capable of test by reference to observable phenomena. Frequently the interpreted hypothesis will be derivative hypotheses of the theory; but their confirmation or disconfirmation by empirical data will then immediately strengthen or weaken also the primitive hypotheses from which they were derived.”^[10]

Hempel provides a useful metaphor that describes the relationship between the conceptual framework and the framework as it is observed and perhaps tested (interpreted framework): “The whole system floats, as it were, above the plane of observation and is anchored to it by rules of interpretation. These might be viewed as strings which are not part of the network but link certain points of the latter with specific places in the plane of observation. By virtue of those interpretative connections, the network can function as a scientific theory”.^[11]

See also

• Abstraction
• Categorization
• Class (philosophy)
• Concept and object
• Concept car
• Concept learning
• Concept map
• Concept single
• Conceptual art
• Conceptual blending
• Conceptual clustering
• Conceptual framework
• Conceptual history (also termed: 'History of concepts' or 'Begriffsgeschichte')
• Conceptual model
• Conveyed concept
• Definitionism
• Formal concept analysis
• Fuzzy concept
• Hypostatic abstraction
• Idea
• Meme
• Notion (philosophy)
• Object (philosophy)
• Philosophy
• Recept
• Schema (Kant)
• Social construction
• Symbol grounding problem

References

1. ^ Lston-Güttler, Kerrie E., and John N. Williams. "First Language Polysemy Affects Second Language Meaning Interpretation: Evidence for Activation of First Language Concepts during Second Language Reading." Second Language Research 24.2 (2008). Second Language Research. Web. <http://slr.sagepub.com/content/24/2/167.abstract>.
2. ^ The Ontology of Concepts—Abstract Objects or Mental Representations?, Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence
3. ^ Cambribdge Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Audi
4. ^ Stock, W.G. (2010). Concepts and semantic relations in information science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(10), 1951-1969.
5. ^ Hjørland, B. (2009). Concept Theory. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60(8), 1519–1536
6. ^ Smith, B. (2004). Beyond Concepts, or: Ontology as Reality Representation, Formal Ontology and Information Systems. Proceedings of the Third International Conference (FOIS 2004), Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2004, 73–84.
7. ^ "On Truth and Lie in an Extra–Moral Sense," The Portable Nietzsche, p. 46
8. ^ Christopher Janaway, Self and World in Schopenhauer's Philosophy, Ch. 3, p. 112, Oxford, 2003, ISBN 0-19-825003-7
9. ^ 'Godel's Rationalism', Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
10. ^ Hempel, C. G. (1952). Fundamentals of concept formation in empirical science. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, p. 35.
11. ^ Hempel, C. G. (1952). Fundamentals of concept formation in empirical science. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, p. 36.

A concept is a system of general ideas targeting the multilateral treatment/interpretation of economic, social, legal, scientific, technical and other problems, and reflecting the manner of perception or the multitude of opinions, ideas regarding problems associated with to the development of one or several fields or sectors as a whole.

Publications

• The History of Calculus and its Conceptual Development, Carl Benjamin Boyer, Dover Publications, ISBN 0-486-60509-4
• The Writings of William James, University of Chicago Press, ISBN 0-226-39188-4
• Logic, Immanuel Kant, Dover Publications, ISBN 0-486-25650-2
• A System of Logic, John Stuart Mill, University Press of the Pacific, ISBN 1-4102-0252-6
• Parerga and Paralipomena, Arthur Schopenhauer, Volume I, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-824508-4
• What is Philosophy?, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
• Kant's Metaphysic of Experience, H. J. Paton, London: Allen & Unwin, 1936
• Conceptual Integration Networks. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, 1998. Cognitive Science. Volume 22, number 2 (April–June 1998), pages 133-187.
• The Portable Nietzsche, Penguin Books, 1982, ISBN 0-14-015062-5
• Stephen Laurence and Eric Margolis "Concepts and Cognitive Science". In Concepts: Core Readings, MIT Press pp. 3–81, 1999.
• Birger Hjørland. (2009). Concept Theory. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60(8), 1519–1536
• Georgij Yu. Somov (2010). Concepts and Senses in Visual Art: Through the example of analysis of some works by Bruegel the Elder. Semiotica 182 (1/4), 475–506.
• Daltrozzo J, Vion-Dury J, Schön D. (2010). Music and Concepts. Horizons in Neuroscience Research 4: 157-167. [1]

External links

• E. Margolis and S. Lawrence (2006), Concepts entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Blending and Conceptual Integration
• Conceptual Science and Mathematical Permutations
• Concept Mobiles Latest concepts
• v:Conceptualize: A Wikiversity Learning Project
• Concept simultaneously translated in several languages and meanings
• Product Research and Conceptualization