Reasoning with Concepts

A unified treatment of different types of reasoning with concepts, such as category-based induction, nonmonotonic reasoning, analogies, and generics.

Psychologists and philosophers have worked on topics such as category-based induction, nonmonotonic reasoning, analogies, and generics, but these problems have largely been investigated independently. In Reasoning with Concepts, Peter Gärdenfors and Matías Osta-Vélez bring them all together by presenting models built on the theory of conceptual spaces. This theory offers a rich framework for modeling many aspects of the structure of concepts. In particular, it allows the definition of measures for similarity, typicality, diagnosticity, and coherence of concepts, notions long employed informally by psychologists and philosophers.

While probabilistic models exist for some of these notions, no comprehensive formal framework has previously encompassed them all. The proposed measures here, based on distances in conceptual space and prototypes, generate novel testable predictions while unifying previously disparate theoretical territories. Furthermore, the models can be implemented in artificial systems that deal with different forms of reasoning.ENDORSEMENTS

“In this book, Peter Gärdenfors and Matías Osta-Vélez introduce a new approach to concept-based reasoning that spans diverse forms such as lexical implication, induction, expectations, generics, analogy, and essences. While earlier work treated these types of inference separately, the authors develop a unified and psychologically realistic model of human reasoning.”
—Professor Gerhard Schurz, Department of Philosophy, Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf, Germany

“Peter Gärdenfors's conceptual spaces framework changed how we think about concepts, and decades of work have since shown how fertile it is for philosophy and cognitive science, especially for the study of meaning and semantics. In this book, Gärdenfors and Matías Osta-Vélez extend that progressive research program to a new peak, showing how central patterns of human reasoning (induction, analogical reasoning, coherence, and more) can be explained by the geometry of concepts. The result is unified, elegant, and strikingly clear throughout, making this a landmark contribution and required reading for anyone who seriously studies reasoning.”
—Igor Douven, CNRS Research Professor, Sorbonne University, FrancePeter Gärdenfors is Professor of Cognitive Science, Lund University. He is the author of Knowledge in Flux (MIT Press), Conceptual Spaces (MIT Press), How Homo Became Sapiens, and Geometry of Meaning (MIT Press).

Matías Osta-Vélez is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of the Republic, Uruguay. Before that, he was a NeuroMind Research Fellow at Ruhr University Bochum and a Postdoctoral Researcher at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf.