Definition
Conceptual organization, which this term names, is a pattern of distinctions an organization draws, together with what follows from drawing them: the inferences, actions or further distinctions it licenses. Two marks separate it from a discriminator that merely sorts:
- Reuse. The same distinctions serve across a stated range of contexts and tasks, not one.
- Systematic consequence and counterfactual reach. Drawing them has consequences beyond the sorting itself. They apply to cases the organization has not met in the way they apply to those it has.
Conceptual corrigibility is a further capacity, and not part of the definition. It is the capacity to find and revise inadequacies in a concept’s application, its inferential role or its specification. The corrections may come from what the concept is applied to, from proof, from inconsistency, or from changed inferential commitments. It may be a developmental achievement of conceptual organization rather than a precondition of it. An incorrigible concept is still a concept.
“Concept” names a role an organization’s distinctions play, not a kind of substance. A5: “Being an effective constraint is not sufficient for being conceptual.”
What it is not
- Not the feature or representation that carries it. A feature, in the sense of THEORY-965, is a unit a model computes with. A concept may be carried by many features, or by none in particular. “A change in the local learning coefficient is not itself concept formation” (A4).
- Not the organization that realizes it. Two organizations can realize one concept, as a communicative kind has many tokens (TERM-040).
- Not its object. A concept is about something it is not. Where it partly constitutes its object, as the perceiver’s concepts group emotion categories (THEORY-057) or status functions make a legal person (THEORY-625), that is the constitutive sense of individuation (TERM-088), and it must be shown case by case.
- Not a thing or entity. A thing is an individuated organization. An entity (A6) is anything treated as a distinct bearer of properties in a domain. A concept can be an entity in a theory without being a thing.
- Not its corrigibility. A frozen classifier, an entrenched misconception or a rigid ideological category can carry a concept it cannot revise.
What would settle it
Whether reuse and counterfactual reach arrive together, and whether corrigibility comes with them or separately, in a learning system (QUESTION-360). If reuse and reach come apart, the term may need to split.