Concept

A concept is a referencer to a thing that is a member of a conceptual framework (of beliefs).

• AKA: Idea, Unit of Thought.
• Context:
  • It can range from being a Concrete Concept to being an Abstract Concept.
  • It can (typically) be member of a Concept Set.
  • It can range from being a Basic Concept (about a single thing that can stand on its own) to being a Composite Concept (that involves a Semantic Relation with other Concepts).
  • It can range from being a Common Concept to being a Technical Concept (associated to a Discipline).
  • It can (typically) be produced by a Conception Task (by an intelligent agent).
  • It can range from being an Internally Represented Concept (within an intelligent agent) to being an Externally Represented Concept (within a knowledge base)
  • It can be used within a Communication Task (e.g. another intelligent agent as a concept mention).
  • It can have: an Identity, a Name, and a Concept Definition.
  • It can be a Justified Concept that is epistemically guaranteed to have a Referent (e.g. the keyboard that I am touching).
  • It can range from being an Entity Concept to being a Relation Concept.
  • It can (typically) be in a Semantic Relation with other Concepts, such as in an IsA relation.
  • It can be used in Reasoning.
  • …
• Example(s):
  • The Concept of a specific person, say Alan M. Turing.
  • The Concept of a set of People, say all English Language speakers (is a Class Concept of a set of Physical Entities).
  • The Concept of an (idealized) person and its (their) Properties (Name, birthDate, etc.).
  • The Concept of a Physical Instance of a Publication, say this Webpage at this moment.
  • The Concept of a Publication, say the first edition of The Origin of Species.
  • The Concept of a set of Publication]]s, say all editions of The Origin of Species, or of all Biomedical Documents.
  • The Concept of an (idealized) Publication and its Properties (Title, Author, etc.), is a Basic Concept of an Abstract Entity.
  • The Concept of an (idealized) ParentOf Relation and its parenthood Properties, is a Relation Concept of an Abstract Entity.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • A Physical Entity, such as a protein or person.
  • An abstract entity, such as Pi or Unicorn,, prior to their conception (by the first person to conceived them).
  • A Causal Relation.
  • A Physical Phenomena, such as a Chemical Reaction, and Subcellular Localization.
  • A Belief.
  • A Perception.
• See: Subsumption Relation, Information, Concept Map.

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References

2013

• (Wikipedia, 2013) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept
  • In metaphysics, and especially ontology, a concept is a fundamental category of existence. In contemporary philosophy, there are at least three prevailing ways to understand what a concept is:
    • Concepts as mental representations, where concepts are entities that exist in the brain.
    • Concepts as abilities, where concepts are abilities peculiar to cognitive agents.
    • Concepts as abstract objects, where objects are the constituents of propositions that mediate between thought, language, and referents.

2009

• (Carey, 2009) ⇒ Susan Carey. (2009). “The Origin of Concepts." Oxford University Press, ISBN:0199887918
  • QUOTE: Concepts are units of thought, the constituents of beliefs and theories, and those that interest me here are roughly the grain of single lexical items. Indeed, the meanings of words are paradigm examples of concepts. I am concerned with the mental representation of concepts; I use phrases such as “the infant’s concept animal” to mean the infant’s representation of animals. I assume representations are states of the nervous system that have content, that refer to concrete or abstract entities, to properties, to events. I do not attempt a philosophical analysis of mental representations; I will not try to say how it is that some states of the nervous system have symbolic content. Such a theory would explain how the extension of a given representation is determined, as well as providing a computational account of how that representation fulfills its particular inferential role, how it functions in thought.1 Here I merely assume that such a theory will be forthcoming. In the pages to come, I work backwards from behavioral evidence for some concept’s extension and inferential role to characterize that concept’s content and to specify something of its nature and format of representation.

    There are many different types of mental representations and one challenge to cognitive science is to find the principled distinctions among them. Different types of representations may well have theoretically important differences in origins, developmental trajectories, types of conceptual roles, and relations to their extensions. Also, some theories of conceptual development posit shifts in kinds of mental representations available to children of different ages — from a perceptual similarity space to natural kind concepts (Quine, 1977), from sensori-motor to symbolic representations (Piaget, 1954), from implicit to explicit representations (Karmiloff-Smith, 1990), for examples. Such theories depend, of course, on defensible distinctions among types of mental representations.

    I will join forces with the many writers who draw a distinction between perceptual representations, on the one hand, and conceptual representations, on the other. Chapter 2 examines thesis that infants begin with perceptual representations and only construct conceptual representations later in development. Differentiating the perceptual from the conceptual is difficult. There are probably many different distinctions at work here, and most are probably ends of continua rather than categorical. An intuitive characterization of perceptual representations as what things in the world look like, sound like, feel like, taste like, contrasts these with conceptual representations as what things is the world are.. Distinctive properties of perceptual representations include, first of all, that their extensions are fixed by virtue of innate, modular, sensory input analyzers. There are innate shape analyzers, phoneme detectors, color detectors, motion detectors, and so forth. That representations of red have the content red is ensured by evolution, by how color vision works. Second, perceptual representations have very little in the way of inferential role. Almost nothing else follows from the fact that something is red. Third, and related to the above two points, perceptual representations are inferentially close the output of sensori-analyzers. Consider the difference between the representation of red or loud, on the one hand, and the representation of electron or life, on the other. Although we certainly can sometimes identify electrons or living things perceptual evidence, there is a long inferential chain between a path in a cloud chamber to the presence of an electron, or from what a bacteria colony on a petri dish looks like to the fact that it contains living things.

• (Wikipedia, 2009) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept
  • A concept or conception is an abstract idea or a mental symbol, typically associated with a corresponding representation in a language or symbology. [citation needed] Concept has also been defined as a unit of knowledge built from characteristics.
  • A concept (abstract 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^{[citation needed]} 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. Ideas are taken to be concepts, although abstract concepts do not necessarily appear to the mind as images as some ideas do. Many philosophers consider concepts to be a fundamental ontological category of being.

• (WordNet, 2009) ⇒ http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=concept
  • S: (n) concept, conception, construct (an abstract or general idea inferred or derived from specific instances)
• Wiktionary http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/concept
  • < Latin conceptus (“‘a thought, purpose, also a conceiving, etc.’”) < concipere, pp. conceptus (“‘to take in, conceive’”); see conceive.
  • Noun
    • 1. Something understood, and retained in the mind, from experience, reasoning and/or imagination; a generalization (generic, basic form), or abstraction (mental impression), of a particular set of instances or occurrences (specific, though different, recorded manifestations of the concept).
    • 2. (programming) In generic programming, a description of supported operations on a type, including their syntax and semantics.
  • Synonyms: conception, notion
  • Derived terms: concept map
  • Related terms: conceive, conceptionary, conceptual, misconceive, misconception

2008

• (Dextre Clarke et al., 2008) ⇒ Stella Dextre Clarke, Alan Gilchrist, Ron Davies and Leonard Will. (2008). “Glossary of Terms Relating to Thesauri and Other Forms of Structured Vocabulary for Information Retrieval." Willpower Information
  • concept
    • unit of thought
    • The semantic content of a concept can be re-expressed by a combination of other and different concepts, which may vary from one language or culture to another. Concepts exist in the mind as abstract entities which are independent of the terms used to label them.

2005

• (ANSI Z39.19, 2005) ⇒ ANSI. (2005). “ANSI/NISO Z39.19 - Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies." ANSI.
  • QUOTE: "concept A unit of thought, formed by mentally combining some or all of the characteristics of a concrete or abstract, real or imaginary object. Concepts exist in the mind as abstract entities independent of terms used to express them.

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