Concept Formation Quotes

We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.

The view is often defended that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basal concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them.

Only the human brain can deliberately change perceptions, change patterns, invent concepts and tolerate ambiguity.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Sankhachil' did not have a script, to begin with. It was just a thought.

I tend to start with a kernel, a vague concept, and just begin to write things down - notes about a character, lines of dialogue, descriptive passages about a place. One idea fires another. I do that for about a year. By then there's a story, and I'll go on to a complete first draft that sews many of those ragtag pieces together.

Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals.

Ideas can be willed, and the imagination is their engine.

An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think.

A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.

Reading activates and exercises the mind. Reading forces the mind to discriminate. From the beginning, readers have to recognize letters printed on the page, make them into words, the words into sentences, and the sentences into concepts. Reading pushes us to use our imagination and makes us more creatively inclined.

Far more important throughout the rest of science is the ability to form concepts, during which the researcher conjures images and processes by intuition.

For a physicist mathematics is not just a tool by means of which phenomena can be calculated, it is the main source of concepts and principles by means of which new theories can be created.

Speech is the mother, not the handmaid, of thought.

Why, it is as easy to teach the name of an idea, if it is clearly formulated in the child's mind, as to teach the name of an object.

Let us create extraordinary words, on condition that they be put to the most ordinary use and that the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object.

The pen is the language of the soul; as the concepts that in it are generated, such will be its writings.

The senses at first let in particular Ideas, and furnish the yet empty Cabinet: And the Mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they are lodged in the Memory, and Names got to them.

Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own.

Ideas result from the collision of metaphors inside the head.

The first type of abstraction from objects I shall refer to as simple abstraction, but the second type I shall call reflective abstraction, using this term in a double sense.

Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?

It is easy to build a philosophy - it doesn't have to run