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Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication
Abstraction; general ideas; concept individuation; top-down effects in perception; Hebbian learning; classical conditioning
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Full-Text Articles in Philosophy
How Do Ideas Become General In Their Signification?, Alexandros Tillas
How Do Ideas Become General In Their Signification?, Alexandros Tillas
Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication
Abstraction is one of the central notions in philosophy and cognitive science. Though its origins are often traced to Locke, various senses of abstraction have been developed in fields as diverse as philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and computer science (e.g. Barsalou 2005). The notion of abstraction on which I am focusing here is as that of a process of similarities recognition across instances of a given kind involving progressive exclusion of instance details. As such, abstraction plays a major role in concept-formation and learning. Traditionally, abstraction models have been deemed circular (e.g. Berkeley 1710/1957), while in recent years …