B
92-545: C D F G H I K M N P Q R S T U W Shai (also spelt Sai , occasionally Shay , and in Greek, Psais ) was the deification of the concept of fate in Egyptian mythology . As a concept, with no particular reason for associating one gender over another, Shai was sometimes considered female, rather than the more usual understanding of being male, in which circumstance Shai
184-510: A better vowel?" The Classical approach and Aristotelian categories may be a better descriptor in some cases. Theory-theory is a reaction to the previous two theories and develops them further. This theory postulates that categorization by concepts is something like scientific theorizing. Concepts are not learned in isolation, but rather are learned as a part of our experiences with the world around us. In this sense, concepts' structure relies on their relationships to other concepts as mandated by
276-496: 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. This question is contradictory to the Classical Theory because something is either a member of a category or is not. This type of problem is paralleled in other areas of linguistics such as phonology, with an illogical question such as "is /i/ or /o/
368-414: A complex idea may not have any corresponding physical object, though its particular constituent elements may severally be the reproductions of actual perceptions. Thus the idea of a centaur is a complex mental picture composed of the ideas of man and horse , that of a mermaid of a woman and a fish . "Ideas are to objects [of perception] as constellations are to stars," writes Walter Benjamin in
460-420: A concept of a tree. 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
552-412: 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. 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
644-437: A definitional structure. 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. 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. A feature is considered necessary if every member of
736-401: A direct relationship to ideas. In some cases, authors can be granted limited legal monopolies on the manner in which certain works are expressed. This is known colloquially as copyright , although the term intellectual property is used mistakenly in place of copyright . Copyright law regulating the aforementioned monopolies generally does not cover the actual ideas. The law does not bestow
828-431: A dog can still be a dog with only three legs. This view is particularly supported by psychological experimental evidence for prototypicality effects. Participants willingly and consistently rate objects in categories like 'vegetable' or 'furniture' as more or less typical of that class. It seems that our categories are fuzzy psychologically, and so this structure has explanatory power. We can judge an item's membership of
920-711: A few original cultures, the Adam of the Bible, or several cultural circles that overlap. Evolutionary diffusion theory holds that cultures are influenced by one another but that similar ideas can be developed in isolation. In the mid-20th century, social scientists began to study how and why ideas spread from one person or culture to another. Everett Rogers pioneered diffusion of innovations studies, using research to prove factors in adoption and profiles of adopters of ideas. In 1976, in his book The Selfish Gene , Richard Dawkins suggested applying biological evolutionary theories to
1012-682: A fish (this misconception came from an incorrect theory about what a whale is like, combining with our theory of what a fish is). 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
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#17327725521431104-470: A general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society. Patent law regulates various aspects related to the functional manifestation of inventions based on new ideas or incremental improvements to existing ones. Thus, patents have
1196-403: A particular mental theory about the state of the world. 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. 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
1288-434: A perception are by various authorities contrasted in various ways. "Difference in degree of intensity", "comparative absence of bodily movement on the part of the subject", "comparative dependence on mental activity", are suggested by psychologists as characteristic of an idea as compared with a perception . An idea, in the narrower and generally accepted sense of a mental reproduction, is frequently composite. That is, as in
1380-427: A piece of music, for example, can both be called 'art' without belonging to the same substance. They are related as forms of art (the term 'art' in this illustration would be a 'mode of relations'). In this way, Locke concluded that the formal ambiguity around ideas he initially sought to clarify had been resolved. Hume differs from Locke by limiting idea to only one of two possible types of perception. The other one
1472-541: A posteriori concept is a general representation ( Vorstellung ) or non-specific thought of that which is common to several specific perceived objects (Logic §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: 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
1564-464: A posteriori concepts, but also 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
1656-425: A subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by
1748-467: 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. According to
1840-438: 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
1932-422: A word in which this word has become, and performs, as a symbol." as George Steiner summarizes. In this way techne-- art and technology—may be represented, ideally, as "discrete, fully autonomous objects...[thus entering] into fusion without losing their identity." Diffusion studies explore the spread of ideas from culture to culture. Some anthropological theories hold that all cultures imitate ideas from one or
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#17327725521432024-604: 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,
2116-526: Is ." "That's so." "And, moreover, we say that the former are seen, but not intellected, while the ideas are intellected but not seen." Descartes often wrote of the meaning of the idea as an image or representation, often but not necessarily "in the mind", which was well known in the vernacular . Despite Descartes' invention of the non-Platonic use of the term, he at first followed this vernacular use. In his Meditations on First Philosophy he says, "Some of my thoughts are like images of things, and it
2208-462: 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. A concept
2300-577: Is called "impression", and is more lively: these are perceptions we have "when we hear, or see, or feel, or love, or hate, or desire, or will." Ideas are more complex and are built upon these more basic and more grounded perceptions. Hume shared with Locke the basic empiricist premise that it is only from life experiences (whether their own or others') that humans' knowledge of the existence of anything outside of themselves can be ultimately derived, that they shall carry on doing what they are prompted to do by their emotional drives of varying kinds. In choosing
2392-428: Is considered to be an essential and defining feature of human beings . An idea arises in a reflexive, spontaneous manner, even without thinking or serious reflection , for example, when we talk about the idea of a person or a place. A new or an original idea can often lead to innovation . The word idea comes from Greek ἰδέα idea "form, pattern", from the root of ἰδεῖν idein , "to see." The argument over
2484-402: Is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By a universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for
2576-473: Is disseminated the word "idea" begins to take on connotations that would be more familiarly associated with the term today. In the fifth book of his Republic , Plato defines philosophy as the love of this formal (as opposed to visual) way of seeing. Plato advances the theory that perceived but immaterial objects of awareness constituted a realm of deathless forms or ideas from which the material world emanated. Aristotle challenges Plato in this area, positing that
2668-411: Is his principles of mutually enhanced contrasts and of assimilation and dissimilation (i.e. in color and form perception and his advocacy of objective methods of expression and of recording results, especially in language. Another is the principle of heterogony of ends — that multiply motivated acts lead to unintended side effects which in turn become motives for new actions. C. S. Peirce published
2760-437: Is itself another word for concept, and "sorting" thus means to organize into concepts.) 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. There is debate as to the relationship between concepts and natural language . However, it is necessary at least to begin by understanding that
2852-440: Is meant by phantasm, notion, species, or whatever it is which the mind can be employed about in thinking; And I could not avoid frequently using it." He said he regarded the contribution offered in his essay as necessary to examine our own abilities and discern what objects our understandings were, or were not, fitted to deal with. In this style of ideal conception other outstanding figures followed in his footsteps — Hume and Kant in
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2944-429: 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. Kant maintained the view that human minds possess not only empirical or
3036-411: Is said to be obscure. He argued that to understand an idea clearly we should ask ourselves what difference its application would make to our evaluation of a proposed solution to the problem at hand. Pragmatism (a term he appropriated for use in this context), he defended, was a method for ascertaining the meaning of terms (as a theory of meaning). The originality of his ideas is in their rejection of what
3128-430: Is the "basic" or "middle" level at which people will most readily categorize a concept. For example, a basic-level concept would be "chair", with its superordinate, "furniture", and its subordinate, "easy chair". Concepts may be exact or inexact. 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
3220-591: Is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over
3312-423: Is the ideas which distinguish mere opinion from knowledge, for unlike material things which are transient and liable to contrary properties, ideas are unchanging and nothing but just what they are. Consequently, Plato seems to assert forcefully that material things can only be the objects of opinion; real knowledge can only be had of unchanging ideas. Furthermore, ideas for Plato appear to serve as universals; consider
3404-401: Is to these alone that the name 'idea' properly belongs." He sometimes maintained that ideas were innate and uses of the term idea diverge from the original primary scholastic use. He provides multiple non-equivalent definitions of the term, uses it to refer to as many as six distinct kinds of entities, and divides ideas inconsistently into various genetic categories. For him knowledge took
3496-417: Is traced back to 1554–60 (Latin conceptum – "something conceived"). Idea In common usage and in philosophy , ideas are the results of thought . Also in philosophy, ideas can also be mental representational images of some object . Many philosophers have considered ideas to be a fundamental ontological category of being . The capacity to create and understand the meaning of ideas
3588-443: Is usually taken as a definition of time. Given that most later theories of concepts were born out of the rejection of some or all of the classical theory, 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 summarized as follows: Prototype theory came out of problems with
3680-523: The Ren , and had become considered goddess of fortune. Because of the power associated in the concept, Akhenaten , in introducing monotheism , said that Shai was an attribute of Aten , whereas Ramses II claimed to be lord of Shai (i.e. lord of fate ). During Ptolemaic Egypt , Shai, as god of fate, was identified with the Greek god Agathodaemon , who was the god of fortune telling. Thus, since Agathodaemon
3772-425: The determinism of the empirical subject. Kant felt that it is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy exists. The business of philosophy he thought was not to give rules, but to analyze the private judgement of good common sense. Whereas Kant declares limits to knowledge ("we can never know the thing in itself"), in his epistemological work, Rudolf Steiner sees ideas as "objects of experience" which
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3864-497: The hard problem of consciousness . 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. Later research expanded these results into everyday perception. 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. The term "concept"
3956-407: The phenomenal world of ideas arises as mental composites of remembered observations. Though it is anachronistic to apply these terms to thinkers from antiquity, it clarifies the argument between Plato and Aristotle if we call Plato an idealist thinker and Aristotle an empiricist thinker. This antagonism between empiricism and idealism generally characterizes the dynamism of the argument over
4048-833: The 18th century, Arthur Schopenhauer in the 19th century, and Bertrand Russell , Ludwig Wittgenstein , and Karl Popper in the 20th century. Locke always believed in the good sense — not pushing things to extremes and while taking fully into account the plain facts of the matter. He prioritized common-sense ideas that struck him as "good-tempered, moderate, and down-to-earth." As John Locke studied humans in his work "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" he continually referenced Descartes for ideas as he asked this fundamental question: "When we are concerned with something about which we have no certain knowledge, what rules or standards should guide how confident we allow ourselves to be that our opinions are right?" Put in another way, he inquired into how humans might verify their ideas, and considered
4140-475: 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. Lakoff stresses that experience and cognition are critical to
4232-460: The classical view of conceptual structure. Prototype theory says that concepts specify properties that members of a class tend to possess, rather than must possess. Wittgenstein , Rosch , Mervis, Brent Berlin , Anglin, and Posner are a few of the key proponents and creators of this theory. Wittgenstein describes the relationship between members of a class as family resemblances . There are not necessarily any necessary conditions for membership;
4324-399: The concept "dog" is philosophically distinct from the things in the world grouped by this concept—or the reference class or extension . Concepts that can be equated to a single word are called "lexical concepts". The study of concepts and conceptual structure falls into the disciplines of linguistics , philosophy , psychology , and cognitive science . In the simplest terms, a concept
4416-517: 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
4508-405: 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"
4600-401: The denoted class has that feature. A feature is considered sufficient if something has all the parts required by the definition. For example, the classic example bachelor is said to be defined by unmarried and man . 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
4692-463: The distinctions between different types of ideas. Locke found that an idea "can simply mean some sort of brute experience." He shows that there are "No innate principles in the mind." Thus, he concludes that "our ideas are all experienced in nature." An experience can either be a sensation or a reflection: "consider whether there are any innate ideas in the mind before any are brought in by the impression from sensation or reflection." Therefore, an idea
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#17327725521434784-465: The empirical object is not prior to its perception by a knowledgeable subject, in other words. He also published many papers on logic in relation to ideas . G. F. Stout and J. M. Baldwin , in the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology , define the idea as "the reproduction with a more or less adequate image , of an object not actually present to the senses." They point out that an idea and
4876-408: The example given above of the idea of a chair, a great many objects, differing materially in detail, all call a single idea. When a man, for example, has obtained an idea of chairs in general by comparison with which he can say "This is a chair, that is a stool", he has what is known as an "abstract idea" distinct from the reproduction in his mind of any particular chair (see abstraction ). Furthermore,
4968-441: The example of beauty as a mode. He points to combinations of color and form as qualities constitutive of this mode. Substances , however, are distinct from modes. Substances convey the underlying formal unity of certain objects, such as dogs, cats, or tables. Relations represent the relationship between two or more ideas that contain analogous elements to one another without the implication of underlying formal unity. A painting or
5060-458: The experimental method failed, he turned to other objectively valuable aids , specifically to those products of cultural communal life which lead one to infer particular mental motives. Outstanding among these are speech, myth, and social custom. Wundt designed the basic mental activity apperception — a unifying function which should be understood as an activity of the will. Many aspects of his empirical physiological psychology are used today. One
5152-458: The external world . In so doing, he includes not only ideas of memory and imagination , but also perceptual processes, whereas other psychologists confine the term to the first two groups. One of Wundt's main concerns was to investigate conscious processes in their own context by experiment and introspection . He regarded both of these as exact methods , interrelated in that experimentation created optimal conditions for introspection. Where
5244-423: The features in the definition. 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. 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
5336-428: The first full statement of pragmatism in his important works " How to Make Our Ideas Clear " (1878) and " The Fixation of Belief " (1877). In "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" he proposed that a clear idea (in his study he uses concept and idea as synonymic) is defined as one, when it is apprehended such as it will be recognized wherever it is met, and no other will be mistaken for it. If it fails of this clearness, it
5428-496: The following passage from the Republic : "We both assert that there are," I said, "and distinguish in speech, many fair things, many good things, and so on for each kind of thing." "Yes, so we do." "And we also assert that there is a fair itself, a good itself, and so on for all things that we set down as many. Now, again, we refer to them as one idea of each as though the idea were one; and we address it as that which really
5520-412: The form of ideas and philosophical investigation is devoted to the consideration of these entities. John Locke 's use of idea stands in striking contrast to Plato's. In his Introduction to An Essay Concerning Human Understanding , Locke defines idea as "that term which, I think, serves best to stand for whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks, I have used it to express whatever
5612-446: The function of language, and Labov's experiment found that the function that an artifact contributed to what people categorized it as. 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. Prototypes also deal with the essence of things and to what extent they belong to
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#17327725521435704-424: The globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be
5796-420: The introduction to his The Origin of German Tragic Drama . "The set of concepts which assist in the representation of an idea lend it actuality as such a configuration. For phenomena are not incorporated into ideas. They are not contained in them. Ideas are, rather, their objective virtual arrangement, their objective interpretation." Benjamin advances, "That an idea is that moment in the substance and being of
5888-432: The legal status of property upon ideas per se. Instead, laws purport to regulate events related to the usage, copying, production, sale and other forms of exploitation of the fundamental expression of a work, that may or may not carry ideas. Copyright law is fundamentally different from patent law in this respect: patents do grant monopolies on ideas (more on this below). A copyright is meant to regulate some aspects of
5980-518: 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. 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
6072-464: 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. In contemporary philosophy , three understandings of a concept prevail: Concepts are classified into a hierarchy, higher levels of which are termed "superordinate" and lower levels termed "subordinate". Additionally, there
6164-407: The means to those ends, they shall follow their accustomed associations of ideas. Hume has contended and defended the notion that "reason alone is merely the 'slave of the passions'." Immanuel Kant defines ideas by distinguishing them from concepts . Concepts arise by the compositing of experience into abstract categorial representations of presumed or encountered empirical objects whereas
6256-513: 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
6348-481: The mind apprehends, much as the eye apprehends light. In Goethean Science (1883), he declares, "Thinking ... is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye of perception perceives colors and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." He holds this to be the premise upon which Goethe made his natural-scientific observations. Wundt widens the term from Kant's usage to include conscious representation of some object or process of
6440-444: The moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it
6532-411: The origin of ideas, for Kant, is a priori to experience. Regulative ideas , for example, are ideals that one must tend towards, but by definition may not be completely realized as objects of empirical experience. Liberty , according to Kant, is an idea whereas "tree" (as an abstraction covering all species of trees) is a concept . The autonomy of the rational and universal subject is opposed to
6624-446: 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. Platonist views of the mind construe concepts as abstract objects. 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
6716-439: 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
6808-406: The process of abstracting or taking away qualities from perceptions until only the common, essential attributes remained. The classical theory of concepts, also referred to as the empiricist theory of concepts, is the oldest theory about the structure of concepts (it can be traced back to Aristotle ), and was prominently held until the 1970s. The classical theory of concepts says that concepts have
6900-453: 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
6992-470: 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. 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. Lech, Gunturkun, and Suchan explain that categorization involves many areas of
7084-409: The scientific and philosophical understanding of concepts. 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. Concepts are mental representations that allow us to draw appropriate inferences about
7176-476: The spread of ideas. He coined the term meme to describe an abstract unit of selection , equivalent to the gene in evolutionary biology . It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property
7268-471: The structure of a concept to determine its referent class. In fact, for many years it was one of the major activities in philosophy — concept analysis . Concept analysis is the act of trying to articulate the necessary and sufficient conditions for the membership in the referent class of a concept. 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
7360-408: 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. This question is also known as
7452-505: The theory of ideas up to the present. This schism in theory has never been resolved to the satisfaction of thinkers from both sides of the disagreement and is represented today in the split between analytic and continental schools of philosophy. Persistent contradictions between classical physics and quantum mechanics may be pointed to as a rough analogy for the gap between the two schools of thought. Plato in Ancient Greece
7544-595: The type of entities we encounter in our everyday lives. Concepts do not encompass all mental representations, but are merely a subset of them. The use of concepts is necessary to cognitive processes such as categorization , memory , decision making , learning , and inference . Concepts are thought to be stored in long term cortical memory, 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
7636-410: The underlying nature of ideas is opened by Plato , whose exposition of his theory of forms —which recurs and accumulates over the course of his many dialogs—appropriates and adds a new sense to the Greek word for things that are "seen" (re. εἶδος) that highlights those elements of perception which are encountered without material or objective reference available to the eyes (re. ἰδέα ). As this argument
7728-452: 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
7820-555: 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
7912-470: The usage of expressions of a work, not an idea. Thus, copyrights have a negative relationship to ideas. Work means a tangible medium of expression. It may be an original or derivative work of art, be it literary, dramatic, musical recitation, artistic, related to sound recording, etc. In (at least) countries adhering to the Berne Convention , copyright automatically starts covering the work upon
8004-409: The word concept can refer to any idea . 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
8096-411: Was accepted as a view and understanding of knowledge as impersonal facts which had been accepted by scientists for some 250 years. Peirce contended that we acquire knowledge as participants , not as spectators . He felt "the real", sooner or later, is composed of information that has been acquired through ideas and knowledge and ordered by the application of logical reasoning. The rational distinction of
8188-513: Was an experience in which the human mind apprehended something. In a Lockean view, there are really two types of ideas: complex and simple. Simple ideas are the building blocks for more complex ideas, and "While the mind is wholly passive in the reception of simple ideas, it is very active in the building of complex ideas…" Complex ideas, therefore, can either be modes , substances , or relations . Modes combine simpler ideas in order to convey new information. For instance, David Banach gives
8280-668: Was considered to be a serpent , and the word Shai was also the Egyptian word for pig , in the Hellenic period, Shai was sometimes depicted as a serpent-headed pig, known to Egyptologists as the Shai animal . Concept A concept is an abstract idea that serves as a foundation for more concrete principles, thoughts , and beliefs . Concepts play an important role in all aspects of cognition . As such, concepts are studied within such disciplines as linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, and these disciplines are interested in
8372-525: Was one of the earliest philosophers to provide a detailed discussion of ideas and of the thinking process (in Plato's Greek the word idea carries a rather different sense of our modern English term). Plato argued in dialogues such as the Phaedo , Symposium , Republic , and Timaeus that there is a realm of ideas or forms ( eidei ), which exist independently of anyone who may have thoughts on these ideas, and it
8464-488: Was referred to as Shait (simply the feminine form of the name). His name reflects his function, as it means (that which is) ordained . As the god of fate, it was said that he determined the span of each man's life, and was present at the judgement of the soul of the deceased in the Duat . In consequence, he was sometimes identified as the husband of Meskhenet , goddess of birth, or, in later years, of Renenutet , who assigned
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