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Concept - Wikipedia

The document discusses the concept of concepts. It defines a concept as an abstract idea that is a fundamental building block of principles, thoughts and beliefs. Concepts play an important role in cognition and are studied in disciplines like linguistics, psychology and philosophy.

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19 views1 page

Concept - Wikipedia

The document discusses the concept of concepts. It defines a concept as an abstract idea that is a fundamental building block of principles, thoughts and beliefs. Concepts play an important role in cognition and are studied in disciplines like linguistics, psychology and philosophy.

Uploaded by

rahal8472
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Concept

Article Talk

For other uses, see Concept (disambiguation).

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)

Fregean senses, 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".

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.[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

Notable theories on the


structure of concepts

Ideasthesia

Etymology

See also

References

Further reading

External links

Last edited 5 days ago by Gangplank…

Content is available under CC BY-SA 4.0 unless


otherwise noted.

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