Conceptualizing Concept

It might be totally difficult to achieve understandings in our everyday life if we don’t agree on one idea about a certain thing. There is, therefore, the tendency to form what we call “concept”. Thus, this paper tries to explain the meaning of a concept by logical demonstrations and seeks to answer its distinctions from the others through comparisons. It also aims to put significance in forming a concept by knowing its uses.

According to Andrew Heywood in his book entitled Politics (page 18), “A concept is a general idea about something, usually a single word or a short phrase… Concept helps us to classify objects by recognizing that they have similar forms or similar properties.” Each of us has an idea about something which differs from others so in order to come to an agreement, we look for a commonality from these attributes, extract it, put it all together to form a common definition, a generalization of all our notions, a concept. 

Let’s take the concept of habitat for example. What we know about a particular habitat as simply a place where we stay is different from the idea of habitat where living thing is fitted to live in. Ponds, lakes forest, seas, grasslands, rice crops, swamps and even our homes are considered as habitats. These things exhibit different features. Forest, for instance, has trees which provide the environment that animals like birds, sloth and monkey need for survival, while our home is built, generally, as four-cornered, with posts and roof to permit living for us, humans. On the other hand, fish can’t live in a cave neither elephants can in Mount Everest because these can’t provide the environment that the said animals are supposed to have. So, if we look at their characteristics, we will come up with an idea which is similar to all- habitat is a place which permits living. Crescencia C. Joaquin and Catherine B. Lagunzad also defined habitat in their work Functional Biology (p.27) as “the type of environment in which organisms live.” This distinctive feature of habitat is also based on the idea that we have generalized from its various attributes.

To further exemplify, when we say sea, we know that it’s a habitat inasmuch as it provides survival for marine animals. The same goes with forest which is the dwelling of several terrestrial organisms. In this case, sea may be different from forest physically but they’re under the concept of habitat since they both allow living. It is also essential to remember that not all places can permit living or can be called habitat. As long as one is able to subsist in a place, it is therefore his habitat. Hence, knowing this concept helps you to choose and criticize a proper house for any living things. 

Without a concept, analyzing things is a very hard task. Concepts link ideas and group them as one according to their similar characteristics. It assists us in classifying objects, checking out their properties and knowing whether it is what we look for or not. 

When linking the words ponds, lakes, forest, grasslands, swamps and lakes, we look at their similar characteristics and group them to come up with a concept. The common attributes that we can extract from these are an area, an environment, a portion of space, a spot, and something that permits living. From these features, we cannot conclude that the words we’re trying to group are just “places”, rather, we say that these are habitats because of the presence of their similar characteristic which is “permit living”- something that is not present to the other group of attributes. So, once we remove this certain characteristic, our concept will lose its special attribute  and thereby simply fall under the concept of “place”. It is therefore important to do careful grouping, classifying and linking of ideas to make sure that the characteristics we have do really satisfy our concept. 

By simply examining the comparisons we made, we were able to understand the meaning of the concept we used in this paper and why it was considered as a concept. It is indeed important to form a concept. As what Heywood also pointed out in Politics (p.18), “In order to make sense of the world, we must, in a sense, impose meaning upon it, and this we do through the construction of concepts.”