PETER GARDENFORS

El humanismo plantea una cuestión fundamental: ¿qué es un ser humano? A partir de esta pregunta surge otra inevitable: ¿qué nos diferencia del resto de los animales? Este interesante ensayo aborda la evolucion desde una perspectiva detectivesca para tratar de resolver uno de los grandes misterios de la Humanidad: como se creo el pensamiento del hombre moderno.

A novel cognitive theory of semantics that proposes that the meanings of words can be described in terms of geometric structures.In The Geometry of Meaning, Peter Gardenfors proposes a theory of semantics that bridges cognitive science and linguistics and shows how theories of cognitive processes, in particular concept formation, can be exploited in a general semantic model. He argues that our minds organize the information involved in communicative acts in a format that can be modeled in geometric or topological termsin what he terms conceptual spaces, extending the theory he presented in an earlier book by that name.Many semantic theories consider the meanings of words as relatively stable and independent of the communicative context. Gardenfors focuses instead on how various forms of communication establish a system of meanings that becomes shared between interlocutors. He argues that these meetings of mind depend on the underlying geometric structures, and that these structures facilitate language learning. Turning to lexical semantics, Gardenfors argues that a unified theory of word meaning can be developed by using conceptual spaces. He shows that the meaning of different word classes can be given a cognitive grounding, and offers semantic analyses of nouns, adjectives, verbs, and prepositions. He also presents models of how the meanings of words are composed to form new meanings and of the basic semantic role of sentences. Finally, he considers the future implications of his theory for robot semantics and the Semantic Web.

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 Gardenfors and Matias Osta-Velez 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.