Concept

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A concept is defined as an abstract idea. It is understood to be a fundamental building block underlying principles, thoughts and beliefs.[1] Concepts play an important role in all aspects of cognition.[2][3] As such, concepts are studied within such disciplines 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, cognitive science.[4]

In contemporary philosophy, three understandings of a concept prevail:[5]

  • mental representations, such that a concept is an entity that exists in the mind (a mental object)
  • abilities
    peculiar to cognitive agents (mental states)
  • abstract objects
    rather than a mental object or a mental state

Concepts are classified 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".

Diagram
A representation of the concept of a tree. The four upper images of trees can be roughly quantified into an overall generalization of the idea of a tree, pictured in the lower image.

Concepts may be exact or inexact.

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

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

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

The psychological view of concepts

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