Concept

“Jim, what is your concept for the new building?”

“Well, Joe, I think the new building should be of green glass, multi-storied and taper to an off-center point at the top. We want something very distinctive for our customers to recognize us by.”

“Thank you Jim, that is a very clear concept you have there.”

So a concept must be an idea, a visualization, a structured way of understanding something. How is it different from an idea? Perhaps a concept is something that has been thought theory. It has relationships internally and externally. It seems to stand-up and be meaningful in the context of its surroundings. It is more that some wild idea, some wandering thought. It has been created, tested, justified – though not necessarily proven. There are many ideas, like Jim’s thought about a building a new office that are not “proofable”. They are structured thoughts about the world and they fit logically into a mental model of the world.

Concept … conceive … create … structured belief system … ideas getting ready for a proof … seeds of a theory … baby born of mental effort to organize the world … adolescent who might become an adult theory some day.

The mental pool has run dry on this concept.