If offered ten more years to think about these matters with someone, give me Nick Shea. (And let me very strongly urge Nick’s recent book Concepts at the Interface!! (Oxford University Press. Open Access 2024) [“Unicepts at the interface’??]
I am ashamed how little I now know of contemporary developments in the cognitive sciences. But outside of cog-sci, in general philosophy we did at least have, for example, “the concept dog,” “our concept of a university” “the concept of division” and so forth. And certainly we still do have “conceptual analysis” and “conceptual engineering” which assume that there are such things as “the concept” this and “the concept” that. These uses align concepts with words (or descriptions). It is unclear just what relation “our/the concept of X” has to “the definition of X“ or to “what X is”. But if we both use the word X and understand one another quite exactly we probably share the concept of X. I’m not claiming that there are no such things as concepts. And I certainly do not wish to replace them with unicepts. But they are not what I am talking about when I speak of “unicepts.” You and I cannot share a unicept. We could only have identical unicepts. We surely do have many of the same concepts.
Suppose Bing meets Tweedledee and Bang meets Tweedledum. Bing observes and and remembers exaxtly the same things about Twreedledee that Bang remembers about Tweedledum. Bing has a unicept of Tweedldee; Bang has a unicept of Tweedledum. Because what the unicept is a unicept of depends on where the information it links together came from. (Do they have the same concept or different ones? )
Briefly: colors are not real kinds; they are properties. A musical genre is a real kind. There are various properties that many compositions in the genre have, supporting various inductions. You tell if a composition belongs to the genre by checking if it has a lot of those properties. There are also reasons why these properties are found together. Some musical things just do or don’t go together. And composers learn from one another.
For what it’s worth, here is my understanding of the relation between unicepts and concepts:
Unicepts are the exact patterns recognized by unitrackers in the brain. Each person will generate unique unitrackers which will necessarily be different from anyone else’s unitrackers, and so the unicepts will be unique. Concepts are an attempt to match up unicepts to the extent possible. Some (like “Sun”) will not be controversial, where others (like “sandwich”) may be more controversial. Seem reasonable?