Idea is a term used both popularly and in
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 copyright or patent, though some believe there is a
realm where ideas exist and that we only discover
ideas much like we discover the.....
See: Bishop Castle
Marshall McLuhan
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 concept in popular
usage.
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 used
it in the sphere of metaphysics for the eternally existing
reality, the archetype, of which the objects of sense are
more or less imperfect copies. Chairs may be of different
forms, sizes, colors and so forth, but “laid up in the
mind of God” there is the one permanent idea or type, of
which the many physical chairs are derived with various
degrees of imperfection.
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.).
In striking
contrast to Plato’s use 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.
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.”
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
and 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.
“Idea” as
property
Throughout
the twentieth century the expression and fixation of ideas
has become more commercialized as reproductive
technologies have proliferated and driven the cost of the
reproduction down. Capitalists have seen this as an
opportunity to exploit the content of these reproductions
by obtaining 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 livelyhood 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 their protection that was supposed to be
guaranteed.
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 data streams. 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 or 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 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.
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