The use of concepts in the process of cognition in materialist dialectics.

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The use of concepts in the process of cognition in materialist dialectics has been defined by Lenin in his Philosophical Notebooks as "human concepts which must likewise be hewn, treated, flexible, mobile, relative, mutually connected, united in opposites, in order to embrace the world".

Concepts are reflections of categories in the world and are created through experience with the world. Concepts provide a way of organizing experience into meaningful units. The ability to store and access conceptual information is vital to cognition because many tasks that people perform on a daily basis require them to apply existing knowledge to new situations. To illustrate, if someone sees a new animal, he/she can use conceptual knowledge of animals to classify it as a bear even though he/she has not previously encountered this particular bear. In addition, concepts allow people to make predictions. For example, identifying an animal as a bear allows a person to predict that it might be dangerous and act accordingly. Given the central importance of conceptual information in cognition, concepts are often referred to as the building blocks of cognition.

Our understanding of the social world is influenced by our concepts, beliefs, implicit theories, goals, and our memories and attention. Our basic cognitive processes such as attention and memory are affected by social factors such as our stereotypes, our expectancies, what others tell us especially when we try to make sense of our social world such as when evaluating other people and self.

Certain pivotal roles that concepts perform in our everyday life are as follows:

  • Classification: We recognize certain exemplars of a social category as members of  a certain concept
  • an offer to carry an old person’s grocery can be recognized as help
  • Inferring additional attributes: Once we have classified an instance as belonging to a concept, we can use this concept to go beyond the information given about that particular instance on that particular occasion
  • a person classified as clinically depressed can also be thought to be suicide-prone
  • Guiding attention and interpretation: Concepts provide a framework for making sense of incoming information
  • when we observe a woman crying at a funeral, we will see this as an expression of sadness; the same behavior can be interpreted as an expression of joy when observed in a wedding (Trope, 1986)
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  • Communication: Concepts ensure effective communication because they allow the speaker to omit many details under the assumption that the listener already knows them or can infer them
  • A: why were you running?
  • B: I saw a rattlesnake

Some of the important characteristics of cognition are that objects, entities and events, are treated in thought and language as members of conceptual categories. Concepts or conceptual categories, are mental representations of objects, entities or events, sorted in memory. Thus the ability to place objects in conceptual categories is a fundamental property of perception. Without conceptual categories, it ...

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