What abilities do we need to be able to make and use concepts?
The easy answer is: all our abilities as human beings. But there are a few of these that stand out and it might be worth having a tailored description of them so as to relate them to each other as working parts that together form human doing.
Memory: The construction of a virtual world of thought in the form of a network of concepts and its space of implications is impossible without memory. The ability to form a memory is foundational to everything. Without memory there is no conception of space or time, there is only the prehension of contiguity, collision and change1. But even they cannot be registered without memory, without memory they are just ‘lost’ effects. Lost because without memory there is no mind for things to matter, there is no subject-object interaction. This is extremely profound and the implications of it are rarely worked out satisfactorily.
Perception: The ability to perceive the behaviour manifested by the world we think about through the syncopated and integrated action of our senses with our cognitive apparatus processing the feedback from our senses. Perception and cognition may be distinguished —although the distinction is a tortuous one— but can never be seen as separate activities. The act of perception is to conceive of difference and identity.
Pattern recognition: the process whereby the perception and cognition process allows us to find patterns of similarities and differences. The ability to recognize a whole with a name and a description of its behaviour and working with other wholes that are identical, similar or analogous; working as a part within greater wholes and working as a whole made up of parts. This part-whole relationship allows a concept to stand for a type of thing, relation, event or situation. This allows the formation of universals
Differentiation and Categorization: The ability to differentiate behaviour into this and that. Grouping similarities and dividing differences. Sorting information for relevance and salience. This is the first step towards the formation of an entity or a thing.
Entification: The portioning off or parceling of the behaviour of the world conceptually distinguished from the rest of that behaviour and making that parcel through the understanding into a whole with working parts. Entification is the ability to see what has been so differentiated and set it apart from its background as a coherent whole worthy of being considered a thing having its own name or image. These wholes we shall name ‘things’, ‘relations’, ‘events’ or ‘situations’. Relations, events and situations are themselves things but it helps to set them apart as deserving special attention.
Labelling and describing: giving something a name and dressing it in properties, that are other concepts.
Separation: Distinction is the act of differentiation, the act of separation is more complex. Things can be conceived as distinct and separate if they maintain themselves as things while being moved relative to other instances of behaviour in their environment. Something that is capable of movement relative to other behaviour in the universe has a strong argument to see itself as somehow ‘separate’. The onus is on those who want to argue that this separation is false to bring convincing reasons. The only argument I can come up with is that an entity can never be separated from the universe it is part of, and its movement ‘through’ the environment is merely a flow of behaviour, a current. It is an argument not unlike that used by Spinoza.
Cognition: The processing of feedback from the environment to react usefully and intentionally. So information spatially and temporally organized is related various levels of subconscious and conscious processing resulting in ‘useful’ reaction. We might distinguish between reactions that are prehensive, apprehensive and comprehensive, which can be seen as equivalent to physical, sentient and sapient reaction, of which only the last can be fully intentional.
Abstraction, the activity of reducing something into something else whereby the original can still be recognized in its reduced state, or whereby a property attributed to the thing abstracted can be assimilated to other properties belonging to other things.
Concept refinement, updating your concepts through learning: attributing further properties to it, expanding your understanding as to their working, correcting errors, reorganizing hierarchies of importance with reference to those properties,
Comparison: The ability to process differences and similarities such that things can be compared, that is, spotting differences and making similes and analogies. The ability to differentiate between various particulars belonging to the same universal allocating each their unique properties as they interact with their specific environment.
Judgment: Judgment comes in three general forms. Alethic judgments of truth and accuracy; ethical judgments of goodness, happiness, or rightness; and Aesthetic judgments of beauty, or fittingness. To judge is to assert that something may be thought to cohere (belong together intelligibly) and/or be consistent (giving the same result under the same circumstances).
Normation: The world conceived is given in the unqualified initial acceptance of the world we conceptually receive through the community we are part of. Things are made normal through habituation and acceptance. The normal is the world I am intimate with. That which I receive uncritically is normal. It is only gradually that I learn to analyse and critique norms.
Relation: This requires the ability to see different things as nevertheless belonging to each other in a way that the background cannot be seen to belong. This requires the ability to see relations, events and situations and conceive of them in terms of their fittingness, coherence and consistency. This leads to the ability to see how a coherent whole is made up of working parts and how that same whole is itself a working part of a greater whole. This allows things to be seen as working parts of other things while they are also made up of parts. Here we achieve the ability to see the oneness of the universe and it allows us to discern cause and modality.
Analysis: The activity of dividing a whole into its working parts so as to begin to see relations of cause and effect and relations of necessity and possibility.
Generalisation and particularisation The ability to differentiate between the concept as standing for a universal to it standing for a particular instance.
Critique, the ability to relate something analysed to one’s possible use of that so understood.
Discussion: The ability to use the concept sensibly in discourse relating it with other concepts through the following of (legitimate) inferential paths.
Practice: The ability to use the concept in discourse whereby the interaction with the whole differentiated within the behaviour of the world can be intentionally controlled.
Processing feedback: The ability to process feedback from those discursive and interactional practices to be able to tinker with one’s understanding of the way the concept and what it stands for works thus elaborating the concepts, making it acquire further properties that might affect our understanding of the universal or that might only affect our understanding of the particular
Exploration: The ability to explore the consequences and implications of the previous point for ones frame of reference
Communication: To express those consequences and implications in thought and communicate them back to one’s community.
© jacob voorthuis, 2025. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.