A Study Of Concept Formation

Concepts embody our knowledge of the kinds of things there are in the world. Tying our past experiences to our present interactions with the environment, they enable us to recognize and understand new objects and events. Concepts are also relevant to understanding domains such as social situations, personality types, and even artistic styles. Yet like other phenomenologically simple cognitive processes such as walking or understanding speech, concept formation and use are maddeningly complex. Research since the 1970s and the decline of the "classical view" of concepts have greatly illuminated the psychology of concepts. But persistent theoretical disputes have sometimes obscured this progress. The Big Book of Concepts goes beyond those disputes to reveal the advances that have been made, focusing on the major empirical discoveries. By reviewing and evaluating research on diverse topics such as category learning, word meaning, conceptual development in infants and children, and the basic level of categorization, the book develops a much broader range of criteria than is usual for evaluating theories of concepts.

This book treats memory and understanding on two levels, on the phenomenological level of experience, on which a theory of dynamic conceptual semantics is built, and on the neuro-connectionist level, which supports the capacities of concept formation, remembering, and understanding. A neuro-connectionist circuit architecture of a constructive memory is developed in which understanding and remembering are modelled in accordance with the constituent structures of a dynamic conceptual semantics. Consciousness emerges by circuit activation between conceptual indicators and episodic indices with the sensory-motor, emotional, and proprioceptual areas. This theory of concept formation, remembering, and understanding is applied to Proust s "A la recherche du temps perdu," with special attention to the author s excursions into philosophical and aesthetic issues. Under this perspective, Proust s work can be seen as an artistic exploration into our capacity of understanding, whereby the unconscious, the memory, is exteriorized in consciousness by presenting the experienced episodes in the conceptual order of similarity and contiguity through our capacity of concept formation. (Series A)

This book provides a comprehensive, accessible guide to social science methodology. In so doing, it establishes methodology as distinct from both methods and philosophy. Most existing textbooks deal with methods, or sound ways of collecting and analysing data to generate findings. In contrast, this innovative book shows how an understanding of methodology allows us to design research so that findings can be used to answer interesting research questions and to build and test theories. Most important things in social research (e.g., beliefs, institutions, interests, practices and social classes) cannot be observed directly. This book explains how empirical research can nevertheless be designed to make sound inferences about their nature, effects and significance. The authors examine what counts as good description, explanation and interpretation, and how they can be achieved by striking intelligent trade-offs between competing design virtues. Coverage includes: • why methodology matters; • what philosophical arguments show us about inference; • competing virtues of good research design; • purposes of theory, models and frameworks; • forming researchable concepts and typologies; • explaining and interpreting: inferring causation, meaning and significance; and • combining explanation and interpretation. The book is essential reading for new researchers faced with the practical challenge of designing research. Extensive examples and exercises are provided, based on the authors′ long experience of teaching methodology to multi-disciplinary groups. Perri 6 is Professor of Social Policy in the Graduate School in the College of Business, Law and Social Sciences at Nottingham Trent University. Chris Bellamy is Emeritus Professor of Public Administration in the Graduate School, Nottingham Trent University.

Carey begins by characterizing the innate starting point for conceptual development, namely systems of core cognition. Representations of core cognition are the output of dedicated input analyzers, as with perceptual representations, but these core representations differ from perceptual representations in having more abstract contents and richer functional roles. Carey argues that the key to understanding cognitive development lies in recognizing conceptual discontinuities in which new representational systems emerge that have more expressive power than core cognition and are also incommensurate with core cognition and other earlier representational systems. Finally, Carey fleshes out Quinian bootstrapping, a learning mechanism that has been repeatedly sketched in the literature on the history and philosophy of science. She demonstrates that Quinian bootstrapping is a major mechanism in the construction of new representational resources over the course of children's cognitive development.

This book brings together results on concept formation from cognitive psychology and machine learning, including explanation-based and inductive approaches. Chapters from these differing perspectives are intermingled to highlight the commonality of their research agendas.

Uniqueness of style versus plurality of styles: in terms of these aesthetic categories one of the most important differences between the recent past and the present can be described. This difference manifests itself in all spheres of life - in fashion, in everyday life, in the arts, in science. What is of interest for my purposes in this book are its manifestations in the processes of con cept formation as they occur in the humanities, broadly conceived. Here the following methodological approaches seem to dominate the scene. 1. A tendency to apply semiotic concepts in various fields of research. 2. Attempts to introduce metrical concepts and measurement, even into disciplines tra ditionally considered as unamenable to mathematical treatment, like aesthetics and theory of art. 3. Efforts to fmd ways of formulating empirically testable, operational criteria for the application of concepts, especially concepts which refer to objects directly not observable, like dispositions, attitudes, character or personality traits. Care is also taken to take advantage of the conceptual apparatus of methodology to express problems in the humanities with the highest possible degree of clarity and precision. 4. Analysis of the p~rsuasive function oflanguage and its possible uses in science and in everyday life. The above tendencies are present in this book. It is divided into two parts: I. Methods of Concept Formation, and II. Applications. In the first part some general methods of concept formation are presented and their merits discussed.