Our Thoughts and How We Form Concepts

At times, we do picture thinking. The thought process is sometimes confusing and it would be more so if it were not for the fact that most word symbols stand not for just one subject or event, but for a general class of things like 'birthdays,' 'automobiles,' 'girls' etc.

Such generalized classes of meaning are meaningful concepts; the grouping of objects or events in terms of some common property. Justice is a concept and so is number but, these are not quite so easily definable as the concept of Scottie as a class of dog. Studies show that we may form concepts, retain them over a period of time, and perhaps even use them, but mainly we build up meaningful concepts by using them over and over.

The more concrete the concept, the better we can talk about it. Children's early concepts used by adults have some tendency to be influenced by individual and sometimes biased meanings. Some people take the dictionary definition of a word, which is denotative while others give emotional associations with the symbol, which is connotative. For example, the scientist means something very specific when he speaks of 'control'; this bears little relation to the emotional connotation given to the same word by the rabble rouser.

It is probably true that most of our thinking tends to run to things rather than abstractions. Objects have a form which abstractions lack. For example, it is hard to put 'minus two' into a concrete image. We arrive at many of our concepts by asking questions about things and events. How does the washing machine work? What is the fire engine for? The child quickly comes to understand the answers to these questions. He has more difficulty in grasping the concept of time. As adults, we too may have difficulty with questions that relate to philosophy.

Although we may conclude from our daily experiences that we grasp concrete concepts more easily than those which are abstract, it is not necessarily true that we can learn them more readily under all conditions. From several studies comes the conclusion that we learn concepts more readily from positive than from negative instances; that is, we learn better by being exposed to information about what something is, than from information about what something is not.

Can a person learn the concept of table more easily than the concept of threeness (three houses, three girls) because the former is more concrete? Not necessarily; other things are also involved. A table arouses only a few associations. When exposed to a number of specific tables one quickly sees the common elements. By contrast, any instance of "threeness" arouses conflicting responses, making the concept more difficult to learn. Although we may conclude that we grasp concrete concepts more easily than those which are abstract, it is not true that we learn them more readily under all conditions.