Idea

The neutrality of this article is disputed.

An Idea is the result of thinking. (aka Thought)

Idea is the term used in both popular and philosophical terminology with the general sense of "mental picture" or "understanding". Today many people believe that ideas are a new sort of intellectual property like a copyright or patent. There are some who believe that there is a realm in which ideas exist and that we only discover these ideas in much the same way that we discover the Wikiwiki world.

To "have no idea how a thing happened" is to be without a mental picture of an occurrence. In this general sense it is synonymous with the idea of concept in popular usage.

Table of contents

1 the Idea in Philosophy

1.1 Plato
1.2 John Locke
1.3 David Hume
1.4 Wilhelm Wundt
1.5 G. F. Stout & J. M. Baldwin

2 the Idea as Property

2.6 Copyrights & Patents

3 Related Topics
4 Credits

the Idea in Philosophy

In philosophy, the term “idea” is common to all languages and periods, but there is scarcely any term which has been used with so many different shades of meaning.

Plato

Plato utilized the concept of idea in the realm of metaphysics. He asserted that everything has an ideal form which exists in your mind but a chair that exists in reality was merely an imperpect version of the idea or concept that you have about chairs in your mind. (see archetype)
From this doctrine, it follows that these ideas are the sole reality (see also idealism), in opposition to it are the empirical thinkers of all time who find reality in particular physical objects (see hylozoism, empiricism, etc.).

John Locke

In striking contrast to Plato’s use of idea is that of John Locke, who defines “idea” as “whatever is the object of understanding when a man thinks” (Essay on the Human Understanding (I.), vi. 8). Here the term is applied not to the mental process, but to anything whether physical or intellectual which is the object of it.

David Hume

Hume differs from Locke by limiting “idea” to the more or less vague mental reconstructions of perceptions, the perceptual process being described as an “impression.”

Wilhelm Wundt

Wundt widens the term to include “conscious representation of some object or process of the external world.” In so doing, he includes not only ideas of memory and imagination, but also perceptual processes, whereas other psychologists confine the term to the first two groups.

G. F. Stout & J. M. Baldwin

G. F. Stout & J. M. Baldwin, in the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, define “idea“ as “the reproduction with a more or less adequate image, of an object not actually present to the senses.” They point out that an idea and a perception are by various authorities contrasted in various ways. “Difference in degree of intensity,” “comparative absence of bodily movement on the part of the subject,” “comparative dependence on mental activity,” are suggested by psychologists as characteristic of an idea as compared with a perception.

It should be observed that an idea, in the narrower and generally accepted sense of a mental reproduction, is frequently composite. That is, as in the example given above of the idea of chair, a great many objects, differing materially in detail, all call a single idea. When a man, for example, has obtained an idea of chairs in general by comparison with which he can say “This is a chair, that is a stool,” he has what is known as an “abstract idea” distinct from the reproduction in his mind of any particular chair (see abstraction). Furthermore a complex idea may not have any corresponding physical object, though its particular constituent elements may severally be the reproductions of actual perceptions. Thus the idea of a centaur is a complex mental picture composed of the ideas of man and horse, that of a mermaid of a woman and a fish.

the Idea as Property

Throughout the twentieth century the expression and fixation of ideas has become more commercialized as reproductive technologies have proliferated driving the cost of reproduction down. Capitalists see this as an opportunity to exploit the content of these reproductions and thus obtain state sanctioned monopolies to prevent the unauthorized reproduction of content. What started with Victor Hugo and the Berne Convention as a means of protecting the economic livelihood of authors and artists has turned into a faceless international propaganda machine that bombards individuals with an endless stream of product that is recycled to create more profits for corporate shareholders -- the individual artists and writers have lost the protection that was supposed to be guaranteed.

Copyrights & Patents

Patents are a scheme to protect a new idea that has a functional manifestation as invention or know-how. Copyright law is a scheme to protect the expression of ideas like books, videodiscs, and datastreams. There are other schemes to protect designs and even laws to protect integrated circuit patterns. Those types of law are aimed to protect the value of expression for a limited period of time so that the creators, authors, or their designated assignee can exploit those ideas -- a form of monopoly. This area of law is quite complex and the bucket of entitlements that refer to these types of incorporeal property have come to be referred to as intellectual property. With the development of digital reproduction the legal concept of fixation has become more an more ephemeral and it has become more difficult to control the reproduction of information that can exist in the digital domain. Some would say that this is the underpinning idea behind the open source and GNU movements. Software patents, which monopolize the pure idea, not the expression of it, are becoming a huge threat for these movements.

Credits

From a 1911 encyclopedia