Concepts

Concept is a way of categorizing or classifying the people, objects & events in the environment (Anglin, 1977). Concept is described in cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology deals about thinking, memory, intelligence, decision making, problem solving etc. Concept gives a general idea before thinking.

Criteria of concepts:

Concepts are developed from birth. After birth child are cry which make his mother a concept of hunger. After feeding the baby stops crying. In infantile period, babies are unable to eat by using hands. But after passing time, they are able to hold objects & proficient in eating by using hands that gives them a new concept of eating. First, babies are using both hands for eating, but after teaching, they learn another concept that right hand is only used for eating. So, concepts are developed from birth.  

Concepts are categories of linguistic, information, images, ideas, experimental. For example, when our grandmother telling a story about princess, we are started to imagine a beautiful girl have a crown on head, wear a gorgeous dress, glass slippers, having amiable behavior etc. according to the description of narration.

Every day we gather knowledge. Like, while we reading about characteristic of Sodium metal without seeing it, we drawn a picture of Sodium in our mind. Like, Sodium is silvery in color, it is soft in consistency and easily cutting by knife; it imagines that a silvery soft substance is cutting with knife. When Sodium is heated with Chlorine it makes salt that represents common salts. This gives us two separate conception of Sodium and salt. The first example of concept is categories as linguistic or images which developed by seeing objects or capacity of narration. The second categories of concept are informative.

Natrum muriaticum is a Homoeopathic medicine prepared from salt. It has several beneficial effects on curing disease. Its symptoms are described in Homoeopathic materia medica. When a Homoeopath applied this medicine in particular disease condition and disease is cured that give him an experimental concepts of Natrum mur.

Concepts are core of intelligent behavior. For example, a person sees that the smoke is coming out from a house he must thought first, the house has started to burn. Then he tries to solve the problem by calling a fire brigade to controlling situation.

Acquiring concepts:

Concepts are acquiring by hypothesis testing. This occurs when we test & evaluate alternative explanation of phenomena. Like, the famous philosopher Aristotle states that, “The sun moves around the earth.” But in 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus detailed his radical theory of the universe in which the earth along with other planets rotated around the sun. In 1610, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei discovered evidence to support the theory of Copernicus. Thus, the concept of Aristotle is proved wrong. Then another question arises that why we aren’t falling from earth? The famous physicist Sir Isaac Newton discovered the gravitational theory. So, the concepts are acquiring by hypothesis testing.

The nature of concepts:

According to psychology, concepts are described into two, logical concept & natural concept.

Logical concepts:

Logical concept is defined by a rule or characteristic that distinguished one from other. Like, a triangle is recognized by its three corners, on the other hand square has four corners, circle is round & it has no corners. Before doing algebra, you must know the formula, you must know the process of equation, summation, multiplication, subtraction. So, logical concept should follow some rules & it has characteristic feature & usually fixed in nature.

Natural concepts:  

Natural concepts are developed by our own knowledge, by experience either directly or indirectly. If one lived in rain forest, he must know about the weather of forest that it raining off & on. On the other hand, we are known by watching discovery channel, reading newspaper, books.

Natural concepts are vague & cannot follow the specific rules. When we want to give an example of furniture, we give a familiar one like chair. But the bed, wardrobe, dinning table, book-shelf are others categories of furniture. An apple is characterized as the best example of fruit. But various fruits are harvested around the world. So, only saying fruit cannot characterized as specific one. For specifying it we should know about its size, shape, color, smell etc. Fruits cannot bear the similarity with furniture.

          So, the key difference of natural & logical concept is that natural concepts are not defined by rules, that specify the relevant feature of an objects. Instead, natural concepts include members that share a number of different features. The prototypical examples bear the strong similarity to other members of the concept & least similarity to other groups.              

 

___Amatul Zami Aditi

Student (final year B.H.M.S.)

Govt. Homoeopathic Medical College, Dhaka, Bangladesh.