What is a "concept"?

Sometimes, when certain words are overused, one tends to blind to its meaning altogether. The currency for the word "concept" or "conceptual" in academia can have such an effect. When is something not conceptual, or when does something become conceptual? What can something be called conceptual, and how do we formulate concepts? Can the act of conceptualisation be taught? What are its pedagogical processes? Are we always aware when formulating new concepts? Are we not always suspended in some existing concepts? Is it possible to live a life without conceptual thinking? Or do we just occupy concepts that exist for us? Is a new conceptualization possible only through the interrogation of an earlier concept? Are concepts then merely interrogations? Are concepts mental, or are they material processes? Do new concepts necessarily change our everyday material conditions, or do they simply create new frames of reference? Are concepts instruments of the mind? Could then, existing environments simply be read conceptually afresh? Would one need to change anything material within them for them to gain a new conceptual charge? Or are they already suspended in multiple concepts and call for a reorientation of our encounter with them? Where does the concept lie then - in the reader or the material?

There can be further stream of questions that one can keep asking about this term "concept / conceptual". But what precisely is a concept? In order to have some clarity for my own self, I began looking at its definitions and etymological origins. Quite simply, "concept" is a conceived imagination. but then, such a root does not help our purpose. Hence I started looking at more elaborations, because often, the inter-related words "concept", "thought", "imagination", "idea", "theory" get mixed up in academic conversations which produces a conundrum in meaning formation. Dictionaries rely on each of these words for explaining the other. And therefore, the notion of "concept" gets further confusing. What is however important to use a word which is closest to the meaning that we want to convey, even if the meaning could be swerved for context. Rather than using the confusion (or the creation of it thereof) as escape to evade contingent parts of a conversation, it is worthwhile to build redirections of meaning consciously.

Having read and meditated on some amount of definitions and discussions, I have come to deduce that it is best to consider a "concept" as a "form of experience" - that it is an experiential space. In / for architecture, we could think of it as taking someone in a space of a particular / new experiential register. To "reconceptualize" thus would merely mean to rethink the experiential coordinates of an existing phenomenon or space (in architecture). For example, to rethink the hospital as a garden would give it an altogether new conceptual charge. However, here, "garden" is a notion that can itself be opened up in many ways, through many interpretations. But it shifts the idea of a hospital from an institutionalised medical facility that is situated in the seriousness of treating the ailing body, into its imagination as a landscape of strolling bodies which may be located in a more open environment. Such a restructuring of environmental imagination could have a material translation, or even remain as a textual reading.

Professors of higher education from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, USA, Anfara and Mertz (2006) mention that "Concepts are words assigned to experience. Concepts combine to form a "construct". Constructs form propositions. Relationships among propositions form a "theory"." What I understand from such a description is that particular forms of experience set the coordinates for the perception of an environment. The manner in which we come to inhabit this environment is the only way to thus live a concept. The particular feelings it produces, the values and modes of thinking it triggers are all embedded in such an environment. When a series of such experiences settle in our lives, they produce a trusted model for living-thinking. This model is an understanding retained in the mind where reason gets associated with it, and aids its solidification. (This reason is not necessarily same as the scientific notion of reason, rather it is a cultural mode in which the mind reconciles with several unknowns towards living a practical life. For example, the notion of 'respecting elders' is a conceptual idea that is not rationalised empirically, but culturally - for it may be believed that those who may have lived a longer life must have greater life experience, and therefore greater wisdom to act upon the eventualities one is faced with in life). This is perhaps why, concepts can be so hard to challenge, because it would mean the interrogation of very associations of acts through which one reason one's life for practical purposes. 

Thus, such a model of reason produces a construct. Since they are "trusted" now, they can be depended upon (they get solidified), and even proposed to someone else to achieve the respective mental / physical state. Thus, they can now be proposed as accepted modes of living. According to Anfara and Mertz, relationships between these modes of living, or propositions, form a "theory". This is something I will need to consider with more attention. I say this because I am trying to figure in my head the difference between "conceptual thinking" and "theoretical thinking". At this point, both of them almost feel the same. However, theory is understood as a framework to study a structure / phenomena. (framework is another word one must open up). It could be a model to even predict certain things. If theory too, is a model, how is it different from conceptual apparatus? Theory is also defined as "a set of principles on which the practice of an activity is based." Another definition says  that theory is "a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something, especially one based on general principles independent of the thing to be explained." Further, idea is "an explanation to describe something about the world that is not necessarily proven". This likens idea to a "hypothesis" - an informed guess, which may be disproven later by some formal investigation. 

Someone has straightforwardly said that a theory in its strictest sense is an underlying explanation of how something works. In this line of thought, theory is not integrally linked to experience, but a process. Either understanding processes helps us to troubleshoot a particular outcome, or it can be a way in which ideas or things may be "mobilised". To be sure, theory is based on empirical research, and got popular in the late 16th century as a mental scheme of something to be done. Theory may also thus be associated with the certain development of scientific thinking. While theory is a mode of contemplation or speculation, concept is closer to thought and imagination. Thus, theoretical thinking is processual, whereas conceptual thinking is imaginative and creative. The ontologies of both these modes may be quite different. For instance, while theoretical thinking may simply chart out a process of approaching the future without necessarily a "clear" picture of the future, conceptual thinking may conceive of an imagination of the future and attempt to reach it. While in the theoretical approach, method drives the act; in conceptual approach, act drives the method. Thus, in the first case, one arrives at the image of future, whereas, in the other, one departs from the image of the future.

more thoughts later.