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The three initial sources of this book are a Marxist dialectical theory of concepts, an emphasis on the collective and historically evolving nature of concepts, and the turn toward everyday practical activities as legitimate arenas of thinking and conceptualizing. The resources for integrating these sources into a coherent framework come from cultural-historical activity theory and the theory of expansive learning, applied and developed in interventionist studies of various types of work and organizations, from cleaning services to hospitals and courts of law to factories and banks. In recent years, this empirical basis has been broadened to include social movements and societal change efforts championed by broad-based coalitions. The primary focus of this book is on collective creation of culturally new concepts in the wild. The starting point is the realization that culturally novel concepts are not only created by scientists but also by people struggling with persistent problems and challenges in all walks of life. We are all involved in the creation of new concepts. This has been largely omitted by scholars of concept formation. Taking this seriously means that we need to reexamine and perhaps revamp aspects of our basic understanding of concepts.
The semantic notions of truth and logical validity in predicate logic, being dependent on what the correlates of our universal terms are, demand at least a certain semantic clarification of the issue of universals. Apparently, the primary issue concerning universals is ontological. It should be clear that these objective concepts are non-conventionally objective. It should also be clear that the laws of logic in the framework are supposed to be fundamentally different from the laws of psychology. For while the former are the laws of the logical relations among objective concepts, the latter are the laws of the causal relations among formal concepts. Thus, whereas logic can be normative, prescribing the laws of valid inference, cognitive psychology can only be descriptive, describing and perhaps explaining the psychological mechanisms that can make us prone to certain types of logical errors.
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