Customer Reviews

The Big Book of Concepts (Bradford Books)

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Gregory Murphy begins this extraordinary book by saying, "Concepts are the glue that holds our mental world together". This is actually an understatement. Without concepts there would be no mental world in the first place. Concepts are mental representations that tie together specific instances, and are essential for relating ongoing experience to knowledge from the past. Concepts allow us to move from William James' "blooming buzzing confusion" to structured and adaptive thought.

Murphy is one of the leading scholars in this area, and he reviews a messy and complicated literature with honesty, clarity, and wit. This is going to be the classic text in the field for a very long time. It is one of the rare cases where the standard back-of-the-book blurb is actually true: Anyone seriously interested in concepts and categorization - seasoned researchers, graduates and advanced undergraduates, or scholars who simply want to get a sense of the field - really must read this book.

(Note: this is an excerpt from a review that was published in the journal "Nature")

The Big Book of Concepts is the best book on concepts since George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, published 15 years earlier. I am a professional cognitive scientist and I first read this book a number of years ago. I recently needed to look something up on infant concept formation, so I reread the chapter called "Concepts in Infancy," and was reminded just how good the book is. It is crammed with so much information that it has the potential for being as dry as dust, but, happily, it is loaded with clear examples, and is written in such a fluid style that you tend to keep reading, even after you've found the item or reference or example you were looking for. The book includes in-depth discussions of everything from theories of what constitutes a concept, to how they develop, to how they are related to words, and to the role of computational modeling in concept understanding (the succinct description of Nosofsky's Generalized Context Model, pp. 65-71, is one of the clearest, simplest descriptions of that model around). In short, for people interested in concepts and categorization, this book is a must-have for their library.