[Merged from (the now removed) ia: organizing notions:]

Many linguists consider words to be the building blocks of concepts, many philosophers think that concepts are built from constituent senses. But, still, we can go further, to the neurological basis of our understanding. At this point we have abstracted away from the meaning" — Source

First of all I think, that going to "the neorological basis" is not a step further from the senses, but a step back. I think, the senses are the base, since they connect a brain with its environment.

Secondary, i am not sure, whether that's really an abstraction of meaning, since: What's meaning. Have a look at Hilary Putnam. -- I thougth that for a while as well, but i am not sure on this anymore.<<

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Updates: 20070624: Tagged the posting. Updated the posting style (layout) to my current style, such as using blockquotes when appropriate. May/May not have removed my workaround for backlinks blogger.com didn't support in earlier times. Now, backlings are there, therefore the bypass can be dropped.

[Merged from (the now removed) ia: organizing notions:] Wow! That's it - what I was telling since a few years. Here, at the secondary "Definition" paragraph.

The author of that page got the idea:

A concept is a set of concepts and relations between them. This is a circular definition... but nonetheless true. It's not much different than "the set of all sets" or something self-referential like that. Whenever you see something recursive like that.. something self-similar, you know you are going to be dealing with Fractals, Recursion, Self-Symmetry and ideas like that.

True, that's a recursive definition, but you run into a problem - what are the absolutely basic concepts? - Referring to fractals doesn't release you out of this problem, since you don't start somewhere in the skies of concepts, but on the ground. - But where's that ground, if you set your foundation on a recursive definition of it?


Hint: Have a look at Rudolf Wille and his research topic "notion analysis"/"concept analysis" ("Begriffsanalyse" in German).<<

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