Types of concepts: logic for all

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:45

We are constantly confronted with logical laws in everyday life. But, unfortunately, the study of this science takes place in full only at a few faculties in higher educational institutions.

There are different types of concepts, the logic of which can be traced back to ancient times. It all starts with Aristotle's Organon (this is the traditional title of six treatises on thinking proposed by Andronnik of Rhodes, the publisher of this philosopher's works).

Subsequently, the ideas of Aristotle were modified by the Renaissance thinker Francis Bacon, one of the first empiricists of his time. The philosopher gave his treatise the name "New Organon". He treated Aristotle's thoughts with a share of skepticism, believing that the task of science is to construct a new method of cognition and benefit all people. Bacon criticized the old logic, which, in his opinion, brought only confusion into the general system of knowledge about thinking. He prioritized experience and the inductive method.

It is worth noting that logic developed especially intensively in the 20th century, turning into a probabilistic, mathematical, clear and well-coordinated system. But so far, formal logical laws have a great methodologicalvalue for all sciences.

Formal logic

Its laws also include types of concepts. Logic builds a presentation scheme, which is a chain "concept - judgment (or statement) - conclusion". The simplest, but at the same time fundamental is the concept. Before constructing a statement and drawing a conclusion (inference) on its basis, it is necessary to have a concept of the subject, to comprehend its essential features. These are not single images of sensory perception, on which creative thinking is most often built. Speaking of signs, they mean specific features of difference or similarity. A distinctive feature is a property that is inherent only to this particular subject.

A concept is a conceivable reflection in the form of a totality (or unity) of essential and general features of an object.

Considers logic types of concepts, examples of which are very easy to find. When pronouncing the word "cat", we imagine a specific set of signs: claws, wool, whiskers, meowing, catching mice. This set in itself is a separate concept, so we can say that the concept of "cat" is complex. It includes other concepts that have already been mentioned above.

Types of concepts

Concepts can be as follows:

1. Registering (they answer the questions “what kind of individual?”, “When?”, “Where?”). Examples of such concepts: “people who live today in Ivanovo”, “the island of Madagascar”, “Fyodor Dostoevsky”. They, in turn, are divided into singular (those that mean one specific subject - "Jack London") and general ("writer", "state").

2. Non-registrative ("word", "animals", "man"). They can be defined only qualitatively, they have an infinite scope of concepts included in them, as a result of which many of their elements cannot be taken into account. Logic sometimes also divides these types of concepts into open (non-registering) and closed (registering).

3. Non-empty and empty on the basis of the correspondence or non-correspondence of a particular concept to something in the real world.

4. abstract and concrete. The former are concepts about relations or properties of an object (“honor”, “dignity”, “courage”), and the latter speak about specific objects (“pillar”, “beehive”).

5. Negative (speaking about the absence of properties of a certain object, for example, “not a person”, “not a cat”) and positive (“cat”, “person”).

6. Correlative and irrelevant. Logic characterizes these types of concepts as dependent on each other and independent. That is, for example, the concepts of "grape" and "leg" are in no way dependent on each other, therefore they can be considered irrelevant.

Conclusion

Formal logic has a number of shortcomings that have been identified by the most experienced thinkers for several centuries. Therefore, modern logic, although it observes the principles of formal logic, nevertheless differs from the latter in its more perfect structure. Also, this science widely usesmathematics for various calculations. But the types of definitions of concepts in logic do not lose their relevance today. Therefore, every thinking person simply needs to familiarize himself with the structure of such a term as "concept".