The concept of concept is central to several mathematical fields dealing with the processing and interpretation of knowledge, such as Computational Learning Theory in Machine Learning or Formal Concept Analysis in Artificial Intelligence. It has however had much less of an impact on other related mathematical fields, amongst which Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery in Databases, for which the pattern rather than the concept seems to play the role of the basic unit of knowledge. In this paper we examine the potential role of cybernetical thinking in the formal analysis of concepts with relevance to learning and performance.