RoR: Forum

Forum : Article Discussions : Concept Formation

Tuesday
August 29, 2006

Concept Formation by Joseph Rowlands

It's time to go over exactly how a concept is formed. Understanding this process can help you in several ways. First, by understanding how they are formed, you get a better idea of what a concept is. By understanding the method, you can learn to perform it more efficiently, and more accurately. You'll learn the kinds of mistakes that can happen if someone doesn't construct a concept correctly. You'll be able to understand the limits and advantages of conceptual thought. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (2 messages)

Post 0

Tuesday, August 29, 2006 - 12:55pm

Link

Edit

Joe,

As a further reference on concept formation and Rand's thinking about it, I would like to share the Abstract of my 1990 essay on the topic in Objectivity.

ABSTRACT

“Capturing Concepts” by Stephen Boydstun

Volume 1, Number 1, Pages 13–41

Concepts are thoughts indicating and specifying kinds and sets of items. Concepts are marked and evoked by words. Starting with that general view of concepts, Boydstun brings the research of developmental cognitive psychologists to bear on philosophic accounts of what concepts are and how we acquire our earliest concepts. He reviews the phenomena of categorical perception, perceptual recognition, and iconic representation (i) for their contributions to our concepts and (ii) for the ways they are different from our earliest genuine concepts.

Boydstun examines Ayn Rand’s distinctive theory of concepts as abstractions from perceptual concretes by a process of measurement-omission. He draws forth the theory’s kinships with the views on abstraction of Aquinas and Ockham, as well as its contradiction of the view of Berkeley and Hume. Boydstun holds to Rand’s view of what concepts are, the view of concepts standing as with measurements omitted from the particulars they subsume. Rand’s conjectures concerning the formation of our earliest concepts are critically reviewed in light of developmental psychological research: on the acquisition of language; on the early method of classification, by overall similarity; on the emergence of a principle of identity privileged over similarity; and on the eventual ability to organize classifications according to abstracted ordinal dimensions.

Post 1

Monday, September 4, 2006 - 8:30pm

Link

Edit

Joe,

Excellent illumination of how differentiation precedes the conceptual discernment of anything in reality (against a background other existing things in reality) ...

=======================
Well, related to being similar is being different. Similar actually means not very different. So to form the concept blue, we don't just need blue objects. We need other colored objects as well. We have to differentiate the blue ones from something else. By seeing that the blue ones are not very different with respect to each other as they are with respect to other colors like red, white, orange, green, and purple, we are able to place them in their own category.

So the ability to integrate referents based on their similarity is actually part of the differentiation process. You'll notice that to see this kind of difference, you need two or more things that end up being "similar", and at least one other thing that's "different". To see that the difference between one shade of blue and another is not very big, it has to be compared to something that has a very big difference, relatively.

In fact, without differentiation, you can't even be aware of something. Imagine you could only see the color blue, and to further confuse the matter, it's uniform in shade. Everything shows up as blue. You wouldn't even notice the blue because it's always the same.

There's no other color or other visual signals to let you differentiate it, which means you can't draw your attention to it. If everything were the same color, you wouldn't have a concept for color. It's the differences that make it possible to identify something because you're differentiating it from the background. Identification requires differentiation.
=======================

Excellent.

Ed