🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi Peter,

OK, makes sense, and good to know -- thanks.  My experience has been
that the study of language comprehension (within psychology) makes
extensive use of the notion of concepts, but in that subfield they use
the terms "propositions" and "propositional representations".  I just
assumed that linguistics would also have some notion of concepts, but
given that the focus is on the structure and function of language I
can see where this would in fact not be necessary.  Again, good to
know, and thanks.

As far as what I think a concept is, well, that's in part what I'm
trying to figure out and refine with my questions here.  That said,
one way I think about concepts is that they subsume categorization,
which in term subsumes object recognition:

  +--------------------+
  | Conceptualization  |
  |   +--------------+ |
  |   |Categorization| |
  |   |   +-----+    | |  
  |   |   | O.R.|    | |
  |   |   +-----+    | |  
  |   +--------------+ |
  +--------------------+

In this view, one defining characteristic of concepts is that they
abstract over some space, time, or (set of) entities -- or quite often
they abstract over other abstractions.  This is in contrast to
categories, which also abstract, but predominately from just an
instance to a class.

Another way to define concepts is as the mental representation of
important invariants in the content domain.  Kirsh (1991) puts it
nicely: "....That is, to have a concept is, among other things, to
have a capacity to find an invariance across a range of contexts, and
to reify that invariance so that it can be combined with other
appropriate invariances."

It seems to me that there must be more complete/better/additional ways
of defining concepts and conceptual representation/processing, but
after much searching I'm surprised at how little I'm able to find.
And this in light of the fact that the notion of concepts is
ubiquitous in the fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science,
neuoscience, computer science, and education.

Doug


On Sun, 02 Sep 2007 04:47:28 -0700, Peter T. Daniels 
<grammatim@verizon.net> wrote:
> 
>  What do you mean by "concept"?
> 
>  I don't think it occurs as a technical term in linguistics.
> 
>  Language is a means of communication (with a number of enumerable
>  characteristics). "Concept" isn't a means of communication, so I don't
>  see where your confusion arises.