Percept and Concept
In a this review of a comic book from Atop the Fourth Wall, The Ultimate Warrior is quoted as saying:
“A warrior’s visual senses form the percepts which become his concepts by utilizing the filing system of his mind. His recall catalogues similar identities until information is such that he can assign identification.”
I guess this is hilarious, because we get the following reaction from Todd in the Shadows (though I don’t know if he wrote it):
“Percepts is not a word. The hell… I can’t tell if he misspelled the word ‘precepts,’ in which case he’s using it improperly, or if this is another attempt to just invent a new word like ‘jet-jack’ and ‘foke.’”
Not only is percept a word, but The Ultimate Warrior was using it correctly by pairing it with concept. Here is an explanation from American philosopher William James, from his final book, Some Problems of Philosophy:
“The problem convenient to take up in the next in order will be that of the difference between thoughts and things. ‘Things’ are known to us by our senses, and are called ‘presentations’ by some authors, to distinguish them from ideas or ‘representations’ which we may have when our senses are closed. I myself have grown accustomed to the words ‘percept’ and ‘concept’ in treating of the contrast, but concepts flow out of percepts and into them again, they are so interlaced, and our life rests on them so interchangeably and undiscriminatingly, that it is often difficult to beginners a clear notion of the difference meant. Sensation and thought in man are mingled, but they vary independently.”
As an aside, The Warrior’s idea about memory being like a catalog isn’t wrong either, here’s cognitive scientist Don Norman on the subject in his book The Design of Everyday Things:
“Another theory is based on the filing cabinet model, wherein there are lots of cross references and pointers to other records. This theory has a good deal going for it, and is probably a reasonable characterization of the most prominent approach today. Of course, it is not called a file cabinet theory. It goes by the names ‘schema theory,’ or sometimes ‘semantic networks’ and ‘propositional encoding.’”
