"Concepts" and Term Hierarchy

The paper proposes a coherent, exhaustive and verifiable theory of terminology. It demonstrates the empirical and methodological inadequacy of the notion of "concept" in philosophical semantics and Wusterian terminology. It maintains that the social nature of cognition allocates linguistics an important role in the construction and validation of human knowledge. It suggests a four stage hierarchy for classifying lexical units based upon four successive stages of knowledge acquisition.