Concept
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 laid 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 Godel as a result of certain puzzles that he took to arise from 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 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.
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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
- Conveyed concept
- Formal concept analysis
- Fuzzy concept
- Hypostatic abstraction
- Idea
- Meme
- Misconception
- Philosophy
- Prescisive abstraction
- Schema (Kant)
- Social construction
- Symbol grounding problem
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References
- ^ Damasio, Antonio R. "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain," Avon 1994, p. 106 ff.
- ^ "On Truth and Lie in an Extra–Moral Sense," The Portable Nietzsche, p. 46
- ^ Christopher Janaway, Self and World in Schopenhauer's Philosophy, Ch. 3, p. 112, Oxford, 2003, ISBN 0-19-825003-7
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This article is missing citations or needs footnotes. Using inline citations helps guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies. (December 2006) |
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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.
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External links
- E. Margolis and S. Lawrence (2006), Concepts entry at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Blending and Conceptual Integration
- v:Conceptualize: A Wikiversity Learning Project
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