Category:Concepts

I've done a lot of reading and taken a lot of notes. Now, on this page, I want to start pulling out concepts that I want to think about. I can start them on this page and then if they get rich enough they can move out to their own page.

• Aristotle - argues that everything could be fit into a strict logical hierarchy and that objects have essential and accidental properties.

• Kant - argues that are born with built in mental categories and that are minds actively shape our experience of reality.
• Wittgenstein argues that there are no perfect definitions and that it is impossible to rigidly delineate a category such as games.
• Vygotsky argues that concepts are socially and culturally constructed and that we learn to see the world in the ways that our culture has agree it is.
• Eleanor Rosch in the 1970s argues that categories are based around a kind of mental average or prototype
• Eco contrasted a hierarchical "dictionary" vision of categories and a boundless network of categories that he sees as a rhizome - a tangled underground root system
  • Cognitive types are mental blueprints for things like "dog". A CT is a multimodal, sensory-motor schema, a fluid set of neuro-cognitive "recognition instructions" built from every direct or indirect encounter you have ever had with a dog a vast array of experience that makes the concept live in you.
  • Nuclear content is the minimal core public version of the concept that allows us to discuss dogs - "They are furry animals with four legs and a tail that go woof".
  • Molar content is the totality of society's knowledge of the concept.