Concept

Concept

A concept is a mental symbol, used to denote a class of things in the world. Concepts are mental representations that allows us to draw appropriate inferences about the type of entities we encounter in our everyday lives. Concepts do not encompass all mental representations, but are merely a subset of them. Concepts are the glue that bind entities in the world, and are distinct from 'conceptions', which are the beliefs that we hold about these entities. The use of concepts is necessary to cognitive processes such as categorization, memory, decision making, learning and inference.

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Famous quotes containing the word concept:

    The concept of a mental state is primarily the concept of a state of the person apt for bringing about a certain sort of behaviour.
    David Malet Armstrong (b. 1926)

    Every new concept first comes to the mind in a judgment.
    Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)

    The nearer a conception comes towards finality, the nearer does the dynamic relation, out of which this concept has arisen, draw to a close. To know is to lose.
    —D.H. (David Herbert)