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. While the CT is a fluid complex rhizomic structure, the molar content feeds off of and represents a rich, well-tested and structured 360 view of the concept.
• Hofstadter sees analogy as the core of cognition. He argues that analogy is not a luxury of high-level thought; it is the fundamental mechanism that creates categories in the first place. "Every concept we have is essentially nothing but a tightly packaged bundle of analogies, and all we do when we think is to move fluidly from concept to concept." Two core concepts are:
  • Conceptual slippage - When encountering a new situation, your brain doesn't need a perfect category match, but can stretch existing category allowing them to morph sufficiently to take on the novelty. A concept is an active, elastic bubble that stretches to accommodate new things that are "sort of like" old things.
  • Chunking - is how we build complex knowledge by binding small, scattered concepts together via analogy and chunking them into a single, higher-level concept.
• Dennett sees concepts as shortcuts that allow us to ignore billions of irrelevant physical details and make split-second predictions about complex things. They are "real patterns" that track real mathematical patterns in nature, even if those patterns are messy and full of noise.