On the concept of a concept

 

What is a concept?

An abstraction?, cognitive building block, a container for idea(s)?, a symbol & representation?, a tool for indexing, learning, memory and navigation?, a fundamental language construct?, a reified cognitive artifact?, a category?  Concepts can be any unit of thought or a mental image formed by generalization.

Any concept is more than its name, the links to related concepts define its meaning, every concept has a life-cycle. A concept is an abstract, universal psychical entity that serves to designate a category or class of entities, events or relations. WikiPedia

So what does a concept look like?

Fuzzy or crisp boundaries with gradational or binary membership?, does the essential meaning morph with community membership? is there a universal classification of concept types?, is a concept both a personal or group possession?

Concepts are defined along multiple dimensions:  abstract-concrete, conjunctive-disjunctive, artificial-natural, well-defined/ill-defined, object-event.....

Why are concepts important?

Our beliefs, world views, creativity and communication ability, depend on the concepts we hold, how strongly we hold them and ways we can change them. Concepts are the building blocks for analytical and mental models. Making concepts explicit and visual helps promote learning, knowledge construction and assists with memory retention.

Concepts are key entities for knowledge work. They solidify ideas, reify emergent distinctions, help with articulation & explication, aid discovery and meme description.

We now have the means to access and navigate texts at the level of the contained concepts. This has important implications for personal learning, JIT knowledge provision, spawns new revenue models and helps with profile building.  Tagging gives concept level ways to classify and retrieve works.

How are new concepts acquired?

Mostly from instances through; abstraction of invariant features, hypothesis testing, selection of prototypes. Acquisition may be through language using definitions, synonyms, analogy, and metaphor. A fundamental difference in conceptual approach is found between 'lumpers & splitters'

Concept mapping

This article by Joe Novak explores the theory, provides practical tools and tips for mapping concepts

Related questions

1. How are concepts related to      categories and classification?,
2. What are the 'hidden      politics' in concept formation and agreement,
3. How do concepts relate to      knowledge construction and 'bringing forth our worlds'?

My previous thoughts on concepts – coming in a kind of circle.

Comments

[Donald Tiffany]

Vacuity can be related to concepts in that concepts can be seen as representing the result of a mental form; of reaching into the unknown; of seeing something where previously nothing new was seen; of crossing a gap or closing a loop around some things that were not joined; or conversely of dividing some things that were unified.

[JohnKellden]

Hi Denham, wrt to "bringing forth our worlds", there's also another continuum of sorts, between concepts and mental models.

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/whats_your_idea_of_a_mental_model.php

John

[Jeff Beddow]

Hi Denham. My take is a few years old and could be updated, but essentially it distinguishes between a percept as what you perceive, and a concept as what you conceptualize independent of sensory corroboration. A concept is like a blueprint without a building, in that regard. The term gets a lot of abuse. Was the idea of making the Sears tower like a few cigarette cylindars pushed up at different lengths in fact a concept? Or was it just a notion until enough engineering expertise could be brought to bear to make it viable?

From an ontological standpoint, you could say there is a continuum from inkling --> notion --> idea --> concept --> plan --> project --> finished work.

[David Locke]

A concept doesn't happen without a person, one person. It's up to that one person to take the concept and place it in a conceptualization.

The concept is new. The conceptualization is the old. This provides the mechanism that the person doing the conceptualizing will use to sell the conceptualization to others.

Concepts don't just happen. It takes a person and then people.

David,

Thanks for making this very important point - a concept only comes to life when it shared. DCG