concept
Sign in to savethumb|right|alt=Diagram|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. A concept is an abstract idea that serves as a foundation for more concrete principles, thoughts, and beliefs. Concepts play an important role in all aspects of cognition. 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
AI overview
A concept is an abstract idea that helps us organize and understand the world by grouping similar things together—like how we use the general idea of "tree" to recognize many different individual trees. Concepts matter because they're fundamental to how we think, learn, and communicate, which is why scientists studying the mind, language, and logic all focus on understanding how concepts work.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
Article
28 sectionsContents
- Definition and central features
- Roles
- Types
- Theories
- Structure
- Classical
- Prototypes and exemplars
- Theory theory, atomism, and pluralism
- Ontology
- As mental entities
- As abstract objects
- Others
- Formation and learning
- Learning mechanisms and situations
- Children, animals, and artificial intelligence
- Ideasthesia
- In various fields
- Psychology
- Philosophy
- Linguistics
- Others
- See also
- References
- Notes
- Citations
- Sources
- Further reading
- External links
thumb|right|alt=Diagram|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. A concept is an abstract idea that serves as a foundation for more concrete principles, thoughts, and beliefs. Concepts play an important role in all aspects of cognition. 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.
In contemporary philosophy, three understandings of a concept prevail: 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