Contemplating Concepts: Exploring the Conceptual Landscape

We take our deepest concepts of ourselves and the world for granted, but they are anything but obvious. Nevertheless, our deepest concepts profoundly influence how we think and act in everyday affairs. Understanding the nature and organization of our concepts, and the subtleties involved in how we mentally represent them, is a primary goal of this book. The text covers three main topics from an information processing perspective. Part I is a fairly wide-ranging examination of the general nature of concepts-what they might be, how they might work, etc. Part II develops an explicit method for representing and organizing concepts to facilitate knowledge analysis. The third major topic, perception, is covered in a rather large appendix. Perception is the grist for our conceptual mill, serving as a basis for conceptualization, but employing radically different forms of representation. The core meaning we ascribe to our concepts, it is proposed, develops when we interpret our representations, either in or out of context, in terms of a latent personal ontology. (28)