  We outline the rationale and preliminary results of using the state context
property (SCOP) formalism, originally developed as a generalization of quantum
mechanics, to describe the contextual manner in which concepts are evoked, used
and combined to generate meaning. The quantum formalism was developed to cope
with problems arising in the description of (i) the measurement process, and
(ii) the generation of new states with new properties when particles become
entangled. Similar problems arising with concepts motivated the formal
treatment introduced here. Concepts are viewed not as fixed representations,
but entities existing in states of potentiality that require interaction with a
context-a stimulus or another concept-to 'collapse' to an instantiated form
(e.g. exemplar, prototype, or other possibly imaginary instance). The stimulus
situation plays the role of the measurement in physics, acting as context that
induces a change of the cognitive state from superposition state to collapsed
state. The collapsed state is more likely to consist of a conjunction of
concepts for associative than analytic thought because more stimulus or concept
properties take part in the collapse. We provide two contextual measures of
conceptual distance-one using collapse probabilities and the other weighted
properties-and show how they can be applied to conjunctions using the pet fish
problem.
