Concepts
A concept is a system of grouping and categorizing our brain uses to sort and store information. Concepts change and adapt as the amount of knowledge about a particular subject changes and grows. For example, as a child we were told that dogs and cats are animals. The concept of an animal might have been something furry with four legs. As school progressed and we learned more about animals the concept changed to incorporate everything from mammals to amphibians to fish. Limited concepts can lead to two things- undergeneralization and overgeneralization. Undergeneralization would be too narrow of a view of what or who are included in a concept, like thinking fish are not animals because they have no legs or fur. Overgeneralization is placing things and ideas in a concept that are, in fact, not related to the concept, like thinking a chair is an animal because it has four legs. There are a few main parts to a concept.
Read more about this topic: Organizing Knowledge Cognitively
Famous quotes containing the word concepts:
“During our twenties...we act toward the new adulthood the way sociologists tell us new waves of immigrants acted on becoming Americans: we adopt the host culture’s values in an exaggerated and rigid fashion until we can rethink them and make them our own. Our idea of what adults are and what we’re supposed to be is composed of outdated childhood concepts brought forward.”
—Roger Gould (20th century)
“When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)