ABSTRACT
Philosophy.—Concepts are the constituents of thoughts. For example, the concept [bald] is a constituent of the thought [Socrates is bald]. One important feature of concepts is that they are shareable, both by different people and by the same person at different times. Consequently, they need to be distinguished from the particular ideas that pass through the mind at a particular time (→MIND). In much of the psychological literature, where the concern is often with an agent’s system of internal representation (→CATEGORIZATION, REPRESENTATION), concepts are regarded as internal representation types that are tokened on different occasions (in the way that the type word cat can have many different inscriptions as tokens; →TYPE/TOKEN). But many philosophers argue that these internal representation types are not concepts any more than are the type words in a natural language (→LANGUAGE). One person might express the concept [city] by the word city, another by the word ville, and still another perhaps by a mental image of bustling boulevards (→MENTAL IMAGERY); for all that, however, they might have the same concept [city]. Moreover, different people might employ the same representation to express different concepts (→DIFFERENTIATION): one person might use an image of the Eiffel Tower to express [the Eiffel Tower], while another person might use that image to express [Paris], and still another to express [France].
