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:

    “Behind the concept of woman’s strangeness is the idea that a woman may do anything: she is below society, not bound by its law, unpredictable; an attribute given to every member of the league of the unfortunate.”
    —Christina Stead (1902–1983)

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

    “The concept is interesting: to see, as though reflected
    In streaming windowpanes, the look of others through
    Their own eyes.”
    —John Ashbery (b. 1927)