conceptremains

Conceptremains is a theoretical notion used in philosophy of language, cognitive science, and digital humanities to describe the enduring core of a concept that persists despite changes in expression, representation, or context. It aims to capture how certain semantic commitments survive paraphrase, translation, cross-domain transfer, or different media formats, while peripheral details may vary.

The term has been introduced in discussions of semantic stability and is applied to cross-linguistic meaning, concept mapping, and memory studies. It is not a fixed definition but a family of related ideas about invariance and change in meaning.

Definition and approach: Conceptremains denotes the portion of a concept’s content that remains invariant under transformation. Researchers assess it by comparing concept representations across variants—such as synonyms, translations, or media forms—and by analyzing the overlap of core features, roles, or normative commitments. In computational work, it can be approximated with vector-space models by measuring embedding similarity across contexts.

Examples: The concept of justice preserves core normative features—fairness, accountability, rights—even as policy domains or case examples shift. The idea of democracy may retain values like participation and accountability across different political cultures, even when institutional forms differ.

Applications and limitations: In AI and NLP, conceptremains informs cross-language transfer, multilingual retrieval, and explainable reasoning. Critics caution that invariance is context-dependent and that what counts as the core may reflect evaluative choices, leading to methodological subjectivity.

See also: semantic stability, semantic drift, cross-linguistic semantics, concept embedding.