Philosophy--10/9/2012

I read about the idea of "concept", which is often used in linguistics. A concept is a mental abstraction of really anything, concrete or not. For example, the concept of a book is a stack of bound pages with a front and back cover. Most people who see something like that think "book". Concepts are never arbitrary and they are formed by taking similar traits of something and combining them in a way that is significant. In the case of the book, what is important are the pages and covers that are bound together. The color doesn't matter, the size doesn't matter, and the words don't even necessarily matter. This is a general concept so color and size can't be specified. And because journals that haven't been written in also count as books, the words aren't important.