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Conception

 

 

Definition (The American Heritage Dictionary)
Definition (The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary)
Definition (William James)
Definition (John Dewey)
From sensation to conception (Immanuel Kant)
Conception and meaning (Abraham Kaplan)

 

 

Definition

[1974] The American Heritage Dictionary
- "3. The ability to form mental concepts; invention."
- "4. A concept, plan or thought."

[1983] The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
- “The action or faculty of conceiving in the mind: apprehension, imagination.”
- “The action or faculty of forming a concept.”
- “That which is conceived in the mind; an idea, notion.”

[1890] William James, The Principles of Psychology
“We, [however], running back and forth, like spiders on the web they weave, feel ourselves to be working over identical materials and thinking them in different ways. And the man who identifies the materials most is held to have the most philosophical human mind.”
“The function by which we thus identify a numerically distinct and permanent subject of discourse is called   CONCEPTION; and the thoughts which are its vehicles are called concepts.”
“The word 'conception' ... properly denotes neither the mental state nor what the mental states signifies, but the relation between the two, namely, the function of the mental state in signifying just that particular thing.”
(Chapter XII - Conception)

[1991] John Dewey, How We Think, First Published 1910, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, New York
“Any meaning sufficiently individualized to be directly grasped and readily used, and thus fixed by a word, is a conception or notion.”
(Chapter 9, p. 125)

 

From sensation to conception

[1781] Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
“... the impressions of sense give the first occasion for bringing into action the whole faculty of cognition, and for the production of experience, which contains two very dissimilar elements, namely, a matter for cognition, given by the senses, and a certain form for the arrangement of this matter, arising out of the inner fountain of pure intuition and thought; and these, on occasion given by sensuous impressions, are called into exercise and produce conceptions.”
(Chapter II, Section I)

 

Conception and meaning

[1964] Abraham Kaplan, The Conduct of Inquiry. Methodology for Behavioural Science, Chandler Publishing Company, Scranton, Pennsylvania
“How this meaning [i.e. the meaning of a term] is taken in a particular use may be spoken of as the conception.”
“A conception ‘belongs to’ a particular person (though, of course, others may have very similar conceptions), and it will differ, in general, from time to time.”
"Associated with the usage of a term is a concept, which may be said correspondingly to be a family of conceptions." (Chapter II, p. 48)

 

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