Abstract

Following Aristotle and his logic, concepts and attributes - in our language typically represented by substantives and adjectives - are still considered logically equivalent by logicians and mathematicians, that usually make no difference between the sentences where the predicate is a concept or an attribute. But they are ontologically different: the concepts essentially sets of remembrances that share a common property, while the characters indicated by the attributes can only define their specific subsets. The difference can not be overlooked:, since concepts and attributes obey to different logical rules: the attributes at least approximately binary, while the concepts unary, since the negation is allowed only as denial of a preceding assertion, or at least presumption. At least implicitly, their difference is recognized in the solutions to the problem of making computers to understand our language, devised by Marvin Minsky and other researchers in the field of Artificial Intelligence.