This book offers a model for concepts and their dynamics. Since one of our basic
assumptions is that concepts are composed by components, we start with some
specifications about the nature of these components. In our model, they are
represented by large binary patterns; the psychological meaning of these patterns is
governed by the interaction between the conceptual modules and other functional
modules. The components of a concept do not define the concept in terms of
necessary and sufficient conditions. Although this view has been dominant for quite
some time, it has been abandoned during the last two decades. Indeed, concepts are
sometimes quite flexible, and their membership function usually is not discrete but has
different gradations instead