About concept and conceptology

Considered in the paper is the critical analysis of the so-called conceptology, the theory of concepts. The basic object in conceptology is the concept. But the idea of a concept is based on neither facts and experiments nor strict logical analysis. The concept still remains «a hypothetical mental structure» (A. G. Sonin) which defies observation and experimental verification. Their «fabrication» «is becoming the main trend of activity». V. A. Vinogradov called this kind of work «cracking sunflower seeds». Conceptology has become young but hasn’t become a science. It contradicts numerous laws of language and speech, fundamentals of linguistics, psychology and philosophy, requirements of objectivity and verification. It can’t be understood, accepted and used. It is natural that it can’t be the object of study in school or college, in any educational lecture-room. The cognitive linguistics should not study the conceptual sphere of society or the scientific picture of the world which is studied by scientists, representatives of different fields of knowledge. It should study the role of a language in processing human experience, fixation of information and semantics of the language picture of the world. It is traditional linguistics (with all its drawbacks) that adequately describes the structure of the language and mechanism of speech formation, cognitive and communicative activity of a human being. The unit of consciousness should be called by the traditional general scientific term notion and the term concept should be used as its synonym.