The Relationship of Concepts, Memory, and Language in the Cognitive Psychology of Thinking: An Aristotelian-Thomistic Appraisal

The concept, in conjunction with memory and language, is the foundation of the cognitive psychology of thinking. All related areas of thinking, reasoning, inference, decision-making, problem solving, are manipulations and predications of concepts. This essay examines current theories of concept formation, as grounded in the information processing, computational approach, and considers the philosophical underpinnings of that view as related to concept formation, memory, and language. A philosophical approach, based on the classical realism of Aristotle and Aquinas, is presented as an alternative metaphysics worthy of serious consideration.