Concepts As Variable Embodiments.

This paper studies conceptual evolution and ways to capture concepts' continuity despite their change. The proposal laid down in this paper is to interpret concepts as variable embodiments as first introduced by Fine. The main question of the paper is how to understand the principle of variable embodiment in the case of concepts. The paper proposes to use a specific notion of conceptual coherence to constrain the principle of variable embodiment. In general, the idea is that concepts must retain some shared information at different points in time. Conceptual coherence is defined as an overlap in topic, specifically captured through the intersection of possible generalisations of a concept at different moments. To formalise this idea, a framework incorporating refinement operators is proposed and its applicability is illustrated through the analysis of various examples from the literature.