We are constantly confronted with logical laws in everyday life. But, unfortunately, the study of this science is fully taking place only at a few faculties in higher educational institutions.
There are various types of concepts, the logic of which can be traced back to ancient times. It all starts with Aristotle's Organon (this is the traditional name of six treatises on thinking proposed by Andronnik of Rhodes - the publisher of the works of this philosopher).
Subsequently, the ideas of Aristotle were modified by the Renaissance thinker Francis Bacon, one of the first empiricists of his time. The philosopher gave his treatise the name "New Organon". He reacted to the thoughts of Aristotle with a degree of skepticism, believing that the task of science was to construct a new method of cognition and benefit all people. Bacon criticized the old logic, which, in his opinion, added only confusion to the general system of knowledge about thinking. He put above all experience and inductive method.
It is worth noting that logic developed especially intensively in the 20th century, turning into a probabilistic, mathematical, clear and coherent system. But so far, formal logical laws have great methodological significance for all sciences.
Formal logic
Its laws include types of concepts. Logic builds a presentation scheme, which is a chain of "concept - judgment (or statement) - inference." The simplest, but at the same time fundamental, concept is. Before you build a statement and draw a conclusion on its basis (inference), you must have a concept of the subject, to comprehend its essential features. These are not isolated images of sensory perception, on which creative thinking is most often built . Speaking of signs, they mean specific traits of difference or similarity. A distinctive feature is such a property that is inherent only to this particular subject.
A concept is a conceivable reflection in the form of a general totality (or unity) of essential and general attributes of an object.
Logic considers types of concepts, examples of which are very easy to find. Speaking the word "cat", we imagine a specific set of signs: claws, hair, mustache, meow, catch mice. This totality in itself is separate concepts, so we can say that the concept of “cat” is complex. It includes other concepts that have already been mentioned above.
Types of concepts
The concepts may be as follows:
1. Registration (answer the questions "what kind of individual?", "When?", "Where?"). Examples of such concepts: “people who live today in Ivanovo”, “island of Madagascar”, “Fedor Dostoevsky”. They, in turn, are divided into single (those that mean one specific subject - “Jack London”) and general (“writer”, “state”).
2. Non-registrants (“word”, “animals”, “man”). They can be defined only qualitatively, have an infinite amount of concepts included in them, as a result of which many of their elements cannot be taken into account. Logic sometimes also divides these types of concepts into open (non-registering) and closed (registering) ones.
3. Non-empty and empty based on the correspondence or inconsistency of a particular concept to something in the real world.
4. Abstract and specific. The former are concepts about the relationship or properties of an object (“honor”, ​​“dignity”, “courage”), and the latter speak of specific objects (“pillar”, “hive”).
5. Negative (indicating the absence of the properties of a particular subject, for example, “not a man”, “not a cat”) and positive (“cat”, “man”).
6. Relative and non-relational. Logic characterizes these types of concepts as being dependent on each other and independent. That is, for example, the concepts of “grapes” and “leg” in no way depend on each other, therefore they can be considered irrelevant.
Conclusion
Formal logic has a number of shortcomings that the most experienced thinkers have identified for several centuries. Therefore, modern logic, although it follows the principles of formal, but still differs from the latter in its more perfect structure. Also, this science makes extensive use of mathematics for a variety of calculations. But the types of definitions of concepts in logic do not lose their relevance today. Therefore, every thinking person just needs to get acquainted with the structure of such a term as a “concept”.