Concepts, proto-concepts, and shades of reasoning in neural networks

One of the most important functions of concepts is that of producing classifications; and since there are at least two different types of such things, we better give a preliminary short description of them both. The first kind of classification is based on the existence of a property common to all the things that fall under a concept. The second, instead, relies on similarities between the objects belonging to a certain class A and certain elements of a subclass AS of A, the so-called ‘stereotypes.’ In what follows, we are going to call ‘proto-concepts’ all those concepts whose power of classification depends on stereotypes, leaving the term ‘concepts’ for all the others. The main aim of th…