【概念学习】什么是概念？

杠头儿 · 发表于 2011-1-22 17:19

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概念是人们用于认识和掌握自然现象之网的纽结，是认识过程中的阶段。思维要正确地反映客观现实的辩证运动，概念就必须是辩证的，是主观性与客观性、特殊性与普遍性、抽象性与具体性的辩证统一。概念还必须是灵活的、往返流动的和相互转化的，是富有具体内容的、有不同规定的、多样性的统一。

　

　概念是抽象的、普遍的想法、观念或充当指明实体、事件或关系的范畴或类的实体。在它们的外延中忽略事物的差异，如同它们是同一的去处理它们，所以概念是抽象的。它们等同的适用于在它们外延中的所有事物，所以它们是普遍的。概念也是命题的基本元素，如同词是句子的基本语义元素一样。

　　在《博弈圣经》中概念的描述是：概念是前卫的、新颖的、潮流的，有未来的趋势，有背景有画面。概念具有严格固定内容，也有一定的模糊性。概念不是实在的，而是想象的，用概念进行思想，用概念展示其真实性。意识的式样是无穷无尽的，如果区分的图像越彻底，就越有利于我们进入一个精细无限的领域，否则总是把一个事物归结为另一个事物。

　　概念是意义的载体，而不是意义的主动者。一个单一的概念可以用任何数目的语言来表达。狗的概念可以表达为德语的 Hund，法语的 chien 和西班牙语的 perro。概念在一定意义上独立于语言的事实使得翻译成为可能 - 在各种语言中词有同一的意义，因为它们表达了相同的概念。

　　概念：concept

　　人们对事物本质的认识，逻辑思维的最基本单元和形式。概念的辩证法是指概念的形成、变化和发展以及概念间的联系和转化的辩证关系。对概念的辩证本性的研究，是辩证逻辑的主要内容。从生动的直观到抽象的思维，形成一系列概念，这些概念的真理性又要返回实践中接受检验。如此循环往复，是人的认识日益接近于客观现实的一般途径。科学认识的主要成果就是形成和发展概念。概念越深刻、越正确、越完全地反映客观现实。概念的最基本特征是它的抽象性和概括性。

　　人们认识周围事物最初形成的概念是前科学思维时期的日常生活概念。这种最初形成的概念，通常是作为对周围事物的感性经验的直接概括，并不具有很高的抽象性。科学思维中运用的概念即科学概念，是在相关理论指导下形成的，而且它总是处于特定的理论系统之中，具有较高的抽象性和概括性。人们对于同一事物的认识，往往形成不同内容的科学概念。不同的学科对于同一事物会形成不同内容的科学概念，而在同一学科的不同理论中，对于同一事物也会形成不同内容的科学概念。人们对于特定事物的本质的认识，即科学概念的内容，并不是单一的、无条件的，而是多方面的、有条件的。概念总是随着人的实践和认识的发展，处于运动、变化和发展的过程中。这种发展的过程或是原有概念的内容逐步递加和累进，或是新旧概念的更替和变革。

　　概念是人们用于认识和掌握自然现象之网的纽结，是认识过程中的阶段。思维要正确地反映客观现实的辩证运动，概念就必须是辩证的，是主观性与客观性、特殊性与普遍性、抽象性与具体性的辩证统一。概念还必须是灵活的、往返流动的和相互转化的，是富有具体内容的、有不同规定的、多样性的统一。

　　人类对真理的认识，是在一系列概念的形成中，在概念的不断更替和运动中，在一个概念向另一个概念的无数转化中实现的。概念的形成、变化和发展以及概念间的相互依赖、对立和转化，是永恒运动的客观现实在人脑中的近似反映，因而存在着具有客观意义的概念辩证法。

概念定位
　　概念 Dictionary 是反映事物本质属性的思维产物。

　　概念是抽象的、普遍的想法、观念或充当指明实体、事件或关系的范畴或类的实体。在它们的外延中忽略事物的差异，如同它们是同一的去处理它们，所以概念是抽象的。它们等同的适用于在它们外延中的所有事物，所以它们是普遍的。概念也是命题的基本元素，如同词是句子的基本语义元素一样。

　　概念是意义的载体，而不是意义的主动者。一个单一的概念可以用任何数目的语言来表达。狗的概念可以表达为德语的 Hund，法语的 chien 和西班牙语的 perro。概念在一定意义上独立于语言的事实使得翻译成为可能 - 在各种语言中词有同一的意义，因为它们表达了相同的概念。

　　概念是人类对一个复杂的过程或事物的理解。从哲学的观念来说概念是思维的基本单位。在日常用语中人们往往将概念与一个词或一个名词同等对待。

定义范围
　　在一些哲学理论中概念范围与概念内容的定义不同。

　　概念范围(外延)是指所有包括在这个概念中的事物，比如“白”的概念范围是所有白色的事物。范围相同的概念被称为是相当的，在逻辑研究中，尤其是在数学逻辑中相当的概念往往被看作是相同的。

　　在将一个概念细分为亚概念时要注意两分法的应用来防止逻辑谬误的发生。

　　在逻辑学中，一个概念的定义被看作是适当的，如果这个定义的用词描述的范围与概念范围相同。比如：

　　正方形是四个边长都相等的长方形。

　　是一个适当的概念。

　　概念内容(内涵)包括所有一个组成该概念的事物的特性和关系。比如“饲养技术”的内容包括所有有关于这个技术的特性。但在定义这个概念时人们挑选出这些特性中最关键的，比如：“饲养技术是繁殖、喂养、圈养和使用农业用动物和以此提取有价值的产品的技术”。

历史辨析
　　在古希腊和罗马概念被定义为抽象和区别后获的定义。

　　在中世纪概念被定义为“事物的一切”（Universalia post res），来说明一个概念包括它所定义的所有的事物。

　　笛卡尔和莱布尼茨将概念的清晰度和分明度称为是概念的特征。

　　康德区分概念与见解：他认为见解是对个别事物的想象，而概念则是对多个事物的共同点的想象。

哲学争论　　在哲学上对除用来描述的语言本体及其所描述的事物外是否还有其它思想上的、思维上的或抽象的实体如“思维单位”、内涵、外延等有争议。

　　在认识论中概念被看作是对与人类无关的事实存在的特性的反应。概念的变化和扩大反映了人类对世界的知识和认识的扩展。

相关标准　　中华人民共和国国家标准GB／T 15237．1—2000：“概念”是对特征的独特组合而形成的知识单元。

　　德国工业标准2342将概念定义为一个“通过使用抽象化的方式从一群事物中提取出来的反应其共同特性的思维单位”。

科学模型　　认知科学和人工智能中概念被用来作为人的知识的模型。

杠头儿 · 发表于 2011-1-23 13:25

回复 1# 杠头儿

A concept (abstract term: conception) is a cognitive unit of meaning—an abstract idea or a mental symbol sometimes defined as a "unit of knowledge," built from other units which act as a concept's characteristics. A concept is typically associated with a corresponding representation in a language or symbology[citation needed] such as a single meaning of a term.
There are prevailing theories in contemporary philosophy which attempt to explain the nature of concepts. The representational theory of mind proposes that concepts are mental representations, while the semantic theory of concepts (originating with Frege's distinction between concept and object) holds that they are abstract objects.[1] Ideas are taken to be concepts, although abstract concepts do not necessarily appear to the mind as images as some ideas do.[2] Many philosophers consider concepts to be a fundamental ontological category of being.
The meaning of "concept" is explored in mainstream cognitive science, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. The term "concept" is traced back to 1554–60 (Latin conceptum - "something conceived"),[citation needed] but what is today termed "the classical theory of concepts" is the theory of Aristotle on the definition of terms.[citation needed]

Origin and acquisition of concepts
A posterior abstractions
John Locke's description of a general idea corresponds to a description of a concept. According to Locke, a general idea is created by abstracting, drawing away, or removing the common characteristic or characteristics from several particular ideas. This common characteristic is that which is similar to all of the different individuals. For example, the abstract general idea or concept that is designated by the word "red" is that characteristic which is common to apples, cherries, and blood. The abstract general idea or concept that is signified by the word "dog" is the collection of those characteristics which are common to Airedales, Collies, and Chihuahuas.
In the same tradition as Locke, John Stuart Mill stated that general conceptions are formed through abstraction. A general conception is the common element among the many images of members of a class. "...[W]hen we form a set of phenomena into a class, that is, when we compare them with one another to ascertain in what they agree, some general conception is implied in this mental operation" (A System of Logic, Book IV, Ch. II). Mill did not believe that concepts exist in the mind before the act of abstraction. "It is not a law of our intellect, that, in comparing things with each other and taking note of their agreement, we merely recognize as realized in the outward world something that we already had in our minds. The conception originally found its way to us as the result of such a comparison. It was obtained (in metaphysical phrase) by abstraction from individual things" (Ibid.).
For Schopenhauer, empirical concepts "...are mere abstractions from what is known through intuitive perception, and they have arisen from our arbitrarily thinking away or dropping of some qualities and our retention of others." (Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. I, "Sketch of a History of the Ideal and the Real"). In his On the Will in Nature, "Physiology and Pathology," Schopenhauer said that a concept is "drawn off from previous images ... by putting off their differences. This concept is then no longer intuitively perceptible, but is denoted and fixed merely by words." Nietzsche, who was heavily influenced by Schopenhauer, wrote: "Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal. No leaf ever wholly equals another, and the concept 'leaf' is formed through an arbitrary abstraction from these individual differences, through forgetting the distinctions..."[3]
By contrast to the above philosophers, Immanuel Kant held that the account of the concept as an abstraction of experience is only partly correct. He called those concepts that result of abstraction "a posteriori concepts" (meaning concepts that arise out of experience). An empirical or an a posteriori concept is a general representation (Vorstellung) or non-specific thought of that which is common to several specific perceived objects (Logic, I, 1., §1, Note 1).
A concept is a common feature or characteristic. Kant investigated the way that empirical a posteriori concepts are created.

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The logical acts of the understanding by which concepts are generated as to their form are:
- p, m) F9 f1 O9 i
comparison, i.e., the likening of mental images to one another in relation to the unity of consciousness;
reflection, i.e., the going back over different mental images, how they can be comprehended in one consciousness; and finally
abstraction or the segregation of everything else by which the mental images differ ... In order to make our mental images into concepts, one must thus be able to compare, reflect, and abstract, for these three logical operations of the understanding are essential and general conditions of generating any concept whatever. For example, I see a fir, a willow, and a linden. In firstly comparing these objects, I notice that they are different from one another in respect of trunk, branches, leaves, and the like; further, however, I reflect only on what they have in common, the trunk, the branches, the leaves themselves, and abstract from their size, shape, and so forth; thus I gain a concept of a tree.
– Logic, §6
4 `9 X0 @* C3 I$ ]
Kant's description of the making of a concept has been paraphrased as "...to conceive is essentially to think in abstraction what is common to a plurality of possible instances..." (H.J. Paton, Kant's Metaphysics of Experience, I, 250). In his discussion of Kant, Christopher Janaway wrote: "...generic concepts are formed by abstraction from more than one species."[4]

A priori conceptsMain article: Category (Kant)

Kant declared that human minds possess pure or a priori concepts. Instead of being abstracted from individual perceptions, like empirical concepts, they originate in the mind itself. He called these concepts categories, in the sense of the word that means predicate, attribute, characteristic, or quality. But these pure categories are predicates of things in general, not of a particular thing. According to Kant, there are 12 categories that constitute the understanding of phenomenal objects. Each category is that one predicate which is common to multiple empirical concepts. In order to explain how an a priori concept can relate to individual phenomena, in a manner analogous to an a posteriori concept, Kant employed the technical concept of the schema.

Conceptual structure

It seems intuitively obvious that concepts must have some kind of structure. Up until recently, the dominant view of conceptual structure was a containment model, associated with the classical view of concepts. According to this model, a concept is endowed with certain necessary and sufficient conditions in their description which unequivocally determine an extension. The containment model allows for no degrees; a thing is either in, or out, of the concept's extension. By contrast, the inferential model understands conceptual structure to be determined in a graded manner, according to the tendency of the concept to be used in certain kinds of inferences. As a result, concepts do not have a kind of structure that is in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions; all conditions are contingent (Margolis:5).
However, some theorists claim that primitive concepts lack any structure at all. For instance, Jerry Fodor presents his Asymmetric Dependence Theory as a way of showing how a primitive concept's content is determined by a reliable relationship between the information in mental contents and the world. These sorts of claims are referred to as "atomistic", because the primitive concept is treated as if it were a genuine atom.

杠头儿 · 发表于 2011-1-23 13:27

回复 2# 杠头儿

Embodied content
In cognitive linguistics, abstract concepts are transformations of concrete concepts derived from embodied experience. The mechanism of transformation is structural mapping, in which properties of two or more source domains are selectively mapped onto a blended space (Fauconnier & Turner, 1995; see conceptual blending). A common class of blends are metaphors. This theory contrasts with the rationalist view that concepts are perceptions (or recollections, in Plato's term) of an independently existing world of ideas, in that it denies the existence of any such realm. It also contrasts with the empiricist view that concepts are abstract generalizations of individual experiences, because the contingent and bodily experience is preserved in a concept, and not abstracted away. While the perspective is compatible with Jamesian pragmatism (above), the notion of the transformation of embodied concepts through structural mapping makes a distinct contribution to the problem of concept formation.

Concepts and metaphilosophy
A long and well-established tradition philosophy posits that philosophy itself is nothing more than conceptual analysis. This view has its proponents in contemporary literature as well as historical. According to Deleuze and Guattari's What Is Philosophy? (1991), philosophy is the activity of creating concepts. This creative activity differs from previous definitions of philosophy as simple reasoning, communication or contemplation of universals. Concepts are specific to philosophy: science creates "functions", and art "sensations". A concept is always signed: thus, Descartes' Cogito or Kant's "transcendental". It is a singularity, not universal, and connects itself with others concepts, on a "plane of immanence" traced by a particular philosophy. Concepts can jump from one plane of immanence to another, combining with other concepts and therefore engaging in a "becoming-Other."

Concepts in epistemologyFor more details on this topic, see List of concepts in science.

Concepts are vital to the development of scientific knowledge. For example, it would be difficult to imagine physics without concepts like: energy, force, or acceleration. Concepts help to integrate apparently unrelated observations and phenomena into viable hypotheses and theories, the basic ingredients of science. The concept map is a tool that is used to help researchers visualize the inter-relationships between various concepts.

Ontology of concepts
Although the mainstream literature in cognitive science regards the concept as a kind of mental particular, it has been suggested by some theorists that concepts are real things (Margolis:8). In most radical form, the realist about concepts attempts to show that the supposedly mental processes are not mental at all; rather, they are abstract entities, which are just as real as any mundane object.
Plato was the starkest proponent of the realist thesis of universal concepts. By his view, concepts (and ideas in general) are innate ideas that were instantiations of a transcendental world of pure forms that lay behind the veil of the physical world. In this way, universals were explained as transcendent objects. Needless to say this form of realism was tied deeply with Plato's ontological projects. This remark on Plato is not of merely historical interest. For example, the view that numbers are Platonic objects was revived by Kurt Gödel as a result of certain puzzles that he took to arise from the phenomenological accounts.[5]
Gottlob Frege, founder of the analytic tradition in philosophy, famously argued for the analysis of language in terms of sense and reference. For him, the sense of an expression in language describes a certain state of affairs in the world, namely, the way that some object is presented. Since many commentators view the notion of sense as identical to the notion of concept, and Frege regards senses as the linguistic representations of states of affairs in the world, it seems to follow that we may understand concepts as the manner in which we grasp the world. Accordingly, concepts (as senses) have an ontological status (Morgolis:7).
According to Carl Benjamin Boyer, in the introduction to his The History of the Calculus and its Conceptual Development, concepts in calculus do not refer to perceptions. As long as the concepts are useful and mutually compatible, they are accepted on their own. For example, the concepts of the derivative and the integral are not considered to refer to spatial or temporal perceptions of the external world of experience. Neither are they related in any way to mysterious limits in which quantities are on the verge of nascence or evanescence, that is, coming into or going out of appearance or existence. The abstract concepts are now considered to be totally autonomous, even though they originated from the process of abstracting or taking away qualities from perceptions until only the common, essential attributes remained.

Concepts in Empirical Investigations
Concepts, as abstract units of meaning, play a key role in the development and testing of theories. For example, a simple relational hypothesis can be viewed as either a conceptual hypothesis (where the abstract concepts form the meaning) or an operationalized hypothesis, which is situated in the real world by rules of interpretation. For example, take the simple hypothesis Education increases Income. The abstract notion of education and income (concepts) could have many meanings. A conceptual hypothesis cannot be tested. They need to be converted into operational hypothesis or the abstract meaning of education must be derived or operationalized to something in the real world that can be measured. Education could be measured by “years of school completed” or “highest degree completed” etc. Income could be measured by “hourly rate of pay” or “yearly salary” etc. The system of concepts or conceptual framework can take on many levels of complexity. When the conceptual framework is very complex and incorporates causality or explanation they are generally referred to as a theory. Noted philosopher of science Carl Gustav Hempel says this more eloquently “An adequate empirical interpretation turns a theoretical system into a testable theory: The hypothesis whose constituent terms have been interpreted become capable of test by reference to observable phenomena. Frequently the interpreted hypothesis will be derivative hypotheses of the theory; but their confirmation or disconfirmation by empirical data will then immediately strengthen or weaken also the primitive hypotheses from which they were derived.”[6]
Hempel provides a useful metaphor that describes the relationship between the conceptual framework and the framework as it is observed and perhaps tested (interpreted framework). “The whole system floats, as it were, above the plane of observation and is anchored to it by rules of interpretation. These might be viewed as strings which are not part of the network but link certain points of the latter with specific places in the plane of observation. By virtue of those interpretative connections, the network can function as a scientific theory”.[7]

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