Currently, there is an interesting discussion about “concepts” on Stephen Downes’ blog. And I am unsettled about the word (notion? term? concept?) of “concept”. 

In German, I would simply use “Begriff” which has connotations with “grasp” in both the intellectual and the physical sense. The linguistic lexicon says that the translation is “concept” OR “notion”, so which one of them? Our German loanword “Konzept” has many senses that are very different from “concept”, such as “draft”, “sketch” or “planning” (see the lower left in the map), so this is not helpful, either . 

As a commenter on Stephen’s blog quotes Wittgenstein: ” ‘concept’ is a vague concept”.

I am starting to believe that, in English, “concept” is much more abstract than I thought.  So I went on and on to look up more and more entries in the dictionary, and I need to visualize them: Each  line is a dictionary entry. The tiny words are German, zoom in if you want to read them.

I would love to say: Look at the blue connections, they ARE the concept of concept. But I am not sure.