Primitive concepts

The empiricists held that all concepts are definable in terms of perceptual primitives. A.s.a. H.’s sense of light, temperature, and force, signals that are the outputs of sense organs, might be examples. In the case of humans, however, some primitive concepts may have already involved innate computation, preprocessing if you will. Infants have an innate sense of heights for example. Similarly, A.s.a.’s IR or ultrasonic distance sensors do some innate preprocessing in order to compute a measure of near or far.