Exercises in this lecture   Go to the notes, in which this exercise belongs -- Keyboard shortcut: 'u'   Alphabetic index   Course home   

Exercise solution:
Concepts and Phenomena


Some of the items clearly represent phenomena. These are:

Most of the other items may, depending on our perspective, represent either a phonomenon or a concepts. Personally, I consider almost all of the items to represent phenomena. 'European country', however, is most likely to be considered a concept, namely a specialization of the concept 'Country'. Collections like newspapers and students typically represent phenomena. (Properties of such phenomena includes "the number of elements in the collections". Operationally, it may be possible to add an element to a collection or remove an element from the collection).

The concept behind "the collection of all copies of today's newpapers" may be newspaper bundle. You can imagine many instances of this concept (just take a look in your surrounding).