the mental shortcuts that let you recognize a thousand dogs without meeting them all first.
means a concept is a mental category that groups things by shared features so the brain doesn't have to relearn the world every second.
from from latin conceptum, meaning something formed or conceived, tracing to concipere, to take together — the mind literally grabbing scattered things and holding them as one.
plato's forms — ancient greece, 4th century bce, argued concepts outrank objects in realness
wittgenstein's game — 1953 book showed game has no single defining feature, just family resemblance
chomsky's universals — 1960s claim that humans share innate conceptual scaffolding across all languages
google's word2vec — 2013 model mapped concepts as directions in vector space, king minus man plus woman equals queen