After the fact, I can understand the "logic" behind the Italien breakup of "in fact" into in effetti, di fatto, infatti, in realtà, anzi, però, tant'è vero che, per esempio, a dire il vero, and so forth, but I never would have thought of it myself.(page 200)
Obviously no exact number of concepts exist for any occurrence whatsoever.
The quality and quantity of concepts depend strongly on one's culture and environment.
In an environment with very frequent snowfall one may have more words for the different kinds of snow than in other places; a society living in an environment with many different sorts of sand most likely will come up with a respectable amount of words describing these different types.
Also worthwile pointing out is Hofstadter's idea of conceptual slippage:
For example, the Italian question "Lei ha fratelli?" actually means "Do you have brothers?" (page 199). But what if one has two sisters instead? Will one simply answer "No."?
Of course not; In English one would answer "No, but I have two sisters.".
And in Italian one even answers "Sì, due sorelle" - meaning "Yes, two sisters.".
Why is this? The reason is that many statements and questions (like here the "Lei ha fratelli?") are merely to be understood metaphorically.
Every real-world occurrence is more or less "fuzzy". There is (practically) nothing that is 100% this way or 100% that way. Therefore, our concepts must be "fuzzy" as well.
An artificial system that should even remotely be able to interact with its environment in a human-like manner must account for this fuzziness in order to be successful.
This fuzziness must also include the ability of constantly being able update one's concepts, if necessary.
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