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 (1) the measurement
process, and (2) 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
observable form as an 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