Forming and Applying Concepts

1. Forming and Applying Concepts Chapter 7 Chaffee Critical Thinking

2. concepts • General ideas used to organize experience and bring order and intelligibility to our life • Organizers of experience: concepts work in conjunction with language to identify, describe, distinguish, and relate all various aspects of the world • Vocabulary of thought • Key concepts • Research paper: focus on certain concepts, develop a thesis around them, present the thesis (a concept) with carefully argued points, and back itup with specific examples.

3. conceptualizing • Developing expertise in conceptualizing process • Ability to form, apply, define, and relate concepts

4. Activity: Forming new concepts through experience • Identify an initial concept you had about an event in your life (starting a new job, attending college, and so) that changed as a result of your experiences. After identifying your initial concept, describe the experiences that led you to change or modify the concept and then explain the new concept you formed to explain the situation. Your response should include the following elements: an initial concept, new information provided by additional experiences, and a new concept formed to explain the situation.

5. Mastery of concepts in academic study, professional career, and personal life • Subtext, unconscious, aesthetic, schizophrenia • To make sense of how a discipline functions, you need to understand what the concepts of the discipline mean, how to apply them, and the way they relate to other concepts. • Learn the methods of investigation, patterns of thought, and forms of reasoning that various disciplines use to form larger conceptual theories and methods • Conceptual abilities: Aristotle: an intelligent person is a ‘master of concepts’

6. Structure of concepts • General ideas used to identify, distinguish, and relate various aspects of experience • Organize world into patterns that make sense • Group aspects of experience based on similarity to one another • Being able to see and name the similarities among certain things in your experience is the way you form concepts and is crucial for making sense of your world

7. Model for Structure of a Concept Properties Qualities that all examples of the concept share in common Concept Sign Word-symbol that names the concept Referents Examples of the Concept

8. Forming Concepts • Generalizing: focusing on certain similar features among things to develop the requirements for the concept • Interpreting: looking for different things to apply the concept to in order to determine if they ‘meet the requirements’ of the concept we are developing • An iterative (back-and-forth) process between generalizing and interpreting to develop a list of requirements that something must have to be considered an example of the concept and to give ourselves a clear idea of how the concept is defined

9. Defining a concept: Concepts in your research papers • Giving an effect definition of a concept means both: • Identifying the general qualities of the concept, which determine when it can be correctly applied; • Using appropriate examples to demonstrate actual applications of the concept – that is, examples that embody the general qualities of the concept. • What concept are you working on in your research paper? • What are the general properties of this concept?