What kind of thing is a concept?
Daniel Kayser · Computational Intelligence · 1988
We discuss several features of concepts used for common knowledge and argue that these features are not superficial, lexical level language‐dependent issues, but deep characteristics of the knowledge itself. It is thus necessary to build knowledge representation systems compatible with these characteristics. We show that the most common suggestions to cope with typicality (e.g., many‐valued and (or) nonmonotonic systems) fail to capture entirely this phenomenon. As for the other features, no serious attempt has been made yet, and we only propose tentative elements for a solution. The main idea is to decouple the notion of concept from the notion of basic element (predicate, node), and to represent a concept by an open‐ended family of entities of the system. Each entity conveys a possible interpretation of the concept, and interpretations are ordered, according to their “depth.” An example illustrating the main features of this scheme is provided.