I’ve been struggling to put an idea I have into words. I think it may be better suited as a visual representation since the very concept I am talking about is, well, concepts.
However, every time I try to draw it out I am unsatisfied. I tried drawing it as an upside down cake and a graph on an x an y axis. Both visuals didn’t quite encompass what I wanted to convey. So I’ll stick to my skill set and try to describe my view on concepts using concepts.
I see concepts as a continuum. (The following is a bit of a wild ride and may just confuse and frustrate more than further illuminate, so you may want to skip to the conclusion first and then go back to reading this.)
But before I talk about the continuum of concepts I first want to try my best to define what concepts are in simple language. This may be a bit insulting to the ears of a philosopher, but I am not trying to speak only to philosophers. I want most people to understand this. A concept is an idea. As humans we represent concepts with symbols. For example we represent a quantity with the concept of numbers. The symbols we use for these numbers (in English at least) are 1,2,3,4 etc… Most of us go about our lives using these symbols and concepts in a completely automatic and natural way. Even those who think about what concepts and symbols are continue on autopilot when using them most of the time.
I think it is important to step back and see concepts for what they are in order to understand and navigate reality better. For the longest time I thought that what we needed to do is increase the number of concepts we use and reduce the definitions. An example of this would be expanding a language to contain more words but each word would have a more exacting meaning. The purpose of this would be so we can communicate reality with one another in a more efficient manner.
But then I remembered metaphor and how much I love metaphor to communicate. Metaphor is a much more primitive form of concept making. It takes fewer words and seemingly infinite definition to convey ideas in a more “feeling” sort of away rather than a “thinking” way.
So once again I realized I was making a false dichotomy by trying so desperately to define everything in my world with pure concepts. Certain ideas are so huge that only metaphor can be used to convey the ideas to multiple people.
So back to the continuum of concepts.
At one side you have crude metaphors as a way of representing ideas. Broad definitions, few words. This shows up most in our culture as art. Music, poetry, psychological movies, and abstract art are a few examples.
On the other end you have words that represent something perfectly in objective reality. Infinite words, specific definitions. I think the concept of a pure concept to be something that we can approach as humans, but never achieve due to our evolutionary limitations. So I recognize this end of the spectrum as some form of infinity, if you were to think of it mathematically. None-the-less I need it in order to define what I am trying to describe. The way pure(er) concepts show up in our society are as science, math and more open philosophies.
I said I was going to describe this because I couldn’t figure out a good representation but as I was writing this a graph popped into my mind that seems to explain this.

I now wish I had have paid more attention in my higher math classes because the next part of this could probably be combined with this graph in order to make even further sense of the concept continuum and why it is important to us.
As a species we use our concepts in an increasingly divergent way. We have more and more words but we are also increasing our definitions. I think this is changing the size of the graph but not the shape. But that doesn’t matter as much as accepting where we can put a dot on that graph for our language as a species. An average of course, as there are millions of points created by each concept we hold.
Now that I look at this graph I realize why it is not complete. There is another continuum to be considered. That’s the continuum of what is real and what is not. I don’t know if this is a Z axis or if it can even be successfully represented graphically.
Conclusion(for now): We have our concept continuum. And then we have reality. What we are trying to do with our concepts is describe and relate reality to one another. Metaphors are useful in quickly relating reality in a “feeling” way to one another. Pure(er) concepts are useful in relating reality in a “thinking” way to one another. Cognitive distortion is when we think of our metaphors as pure concept and our pure concepts as metaphors. For example, many still believe that there is a god. I think this concept belongs on the metaphor end of the scale where someone else puts it on the pure concept end of the scale. From what we can detect with the devices that allow us to go beyond our own senses, there is no evidence of god as an objective concept. So when god is assigned to a pure concept rather than a metaphor our brains are out of line with reality. On the other end of the spectrum is taking a feeling (anger for example) and attributing it to a pure concept. Anger can not be conveyed successfully on that end of the spectrum and is best left to the more metaphorical end of the spectrum.

I might be wrong about all of this but this is how I view reality currently. And this will play into how I define the concept of morality. I do not know yet when I will write more on this subject as I think more attention needs to go towards the concept continuum before I just start wildly plotting concepts on this graph.
Let me know your thoughts on this and if you have a better way of conveying what I am trying to convey, I would greatly appreciate it.