Complex concepts into basic concepts

Complex Concepts into Basic Concepts Rick Szostak University of Alberta Tory Building, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2H4, Canada [email protected] 780-492-7645; FAX 780-492-3300 ABSTRACT Interdisciplinary communication, and thus the rate of progress in scholarly understanding, would be greatly enhanced if scholars had access to a universal classification of documents or ideas not grounded in particular disciplines or cultures. Such a classification is feasible if it is possible to understand complex concepts as some combination of more basic concepts. The first part of the paper is theoretical. Philosophers are far from consensus in their view of concepts. Yet there appear to be five main types of concept theory in the philosophical literature. Each provides some support for the idea of breaking complex into basic concepts that can be understood across disciplines or cultures, but each has detractors. It will be argued that none of these criticisms represents a substantive obstacle to breaking complex concepts into basic concepts within information science. The second part is empirical. Can we take the subject entries in existing universal but discipline-based classifications, and break these into a set of more basic concepts that can be applied across disciplinary classes? The author performs this sort of analysis for Dewey classes 300 to 339.9. This analysis will serve to identify the sort of ‘basic concepts’ that would lie at the heart of a truly universal classification, and thus allow a pragmatic evaluation of whether these can be understood across disciplines and cultures. It is argued that there are two key types of basic concept: the things we study (individuals, rocks, trees), and the relationships that exist among these (talking, moving, paying).