Simple Concepts

To talk about simple concepts presupposes that the notion of concept has been aptly explicated. I argue that a most adequate explication should abandon the set-theoretical paradigm and use a procedural approach. Such a procedural approach is offered by Tichý´s Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL). Some main notions and principles of TIL are briefly presented, and as a result, concepts are explicated as a kind of abstract procedure. Then it can be shown that simplicity, as applied to concepts, is well definable as a property relative to conceptual systems, each of which is determined by a finite set of simple (‘primitive’) concepts. Refinement as a method of replacing simple concepts by compound concepts is defined.