Conceptbearers

Conceptbearers are terms used in philosophy of language and cognitive science to denote entities that bear or encode a concept—i.e., that carry semantic content. The concept itself is distinct from its bearer; in many theories the bearer is the token that expresses the content, while the concept is the abstract meaning or mental content it stands for.

Carriers can take various forms: linguistic signs such as words and sentences; visual signs such as icons or diagrams; mental representations including images and schemas; and computational encodings such as symbol tables or vector embeddings used in artificial intelligence.

In philosophy, the type-token distinction helps separate the content from its bearer. In cognitive science, conceptbearers include mental representations and neural activation patterns that encode semantic information. In AI, distributional embeddings and symbolic representations act as conceptbearers that enable language understanding and reasoning.

Debates address whether non-linguistic items like pictures can bear concepts, whether fictional or abstract entities can be conceptbearers, and how different kinds of bearers relate to intentionality and truth conditions.

The concept of conceptbearers informs analyses of communication, learning, and knowledge representation, as it clarifies how ideas are transmitted and manipulated across minds, signs, and machines.