ABSTRACT
Concepts (aka schemas; see Chapter 15) are the bases of human understanding and reasoning. Concepts are the mental representations that humans construct to interpret phenomena in the world. The most popular psychological conception of a concept is a schema. A schema consists of slots (placeholders) in which attributes of the concept are embedded. So, we construct schemas (concepts) based on their associations (links) with other schemas. According to Thagard (1992), concepts are predicates taking one argument (attributes). Among the most common attributes of concepts is the instance or example. That is, a concept (Chevrolet) is an instance or example of a more general concept (automobile).
