Concepts as hidden knowledge

Let's imagine we're in the middle of a conversation with a friend, with a topic along the lines of:

- So, how's John been doing lately, any news?
- W
ell, i heard he just bought a new car, as for his wife, she [...]

What is it that we think of when we hear the word 'car' in the example above? Or, in other words, what was our mental representation for 'car'? Let's try to make this question more explicit:
  • do we mean 'what "mental image" do we see'? If this is the case then the answer is: we see absolutely nothing.
  • do we mean 'what "mental sound" do we hear'? Again, if this is the case then the answer is: none.
  • do we mean 'what characteristics that are all common to the concept of car are we thinking of in that moment'? And yet again, if this is the case then the answer is: none.
The interesting remark here is that although we somehow do operate with the concept of 'a car' when we hear the sentence 'he just bought a new car', the inner representation of 'a car' is apparently not tangent with any modality of sensory perception, i.e. we don't, and can't, actually have any specific sensation that would directly reflect the presence of a concept in our mind. Specifically, attempting to actually have a sensory modality-related mental representation of a concept will, in most cases, be physically and/or logically impossible: for example, we cannot possibly have an accurate visual representation of the concept 'car' for as long as this concept does not imply a specific shape (and color, and background image, etc); in other words, we cannot imagine a car that is in the same time shaped a car-model-x and car-model-y, as these two different car models have different, irreconcilable shapes.
The reason for which we can so easily talk about concepts without actually having a definition of the term (e.g. this note on the concept of concept) might be that, apart from being able to perform cognitive operations (e.g. memorizing, making associations, etc) with data that we can somehow be aware of, we can also perform similar operations with synthetic data that we are not aware of. One such kind of synthetic data is what we call 'concepts'. In other words, while concepts may indeed represent a specific kind of data that is operated upon by the cognitive processes, this special kind of data is hidden from our direct awareness and no direct sensation of any kind is biunivocally associated with it. While we can infer the fact that we operate with something-we-call-concepts from the patterns in our mental processes, we cannot actually feel the presence of a concept in our minds.

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