A Concept Must Be Some Kind of Process

The ontological status of a concept is typically conceived by either: (i) relating to abstract objects, (ii) relating to abilities, or (iii) relating to mental representations. I advocate for a fourth reading, whereby a concept is a process that preserves the logical coherence of a complex of topic relations throughout ongoing conversational interactions. Concepts in this account are not tokenesqe structures as typically conceived: Instead, they are non-localised coherences that emerge and stabilise themselves through conversational interactions. I suggest how conversation theory embodies this reading and how it could provide a potential non-representational avenue for emulating conceptualisation processes within artificial intelligence and machine learning.