Conceptual SpacesThe Geometry of Thought | Books Gateway | MIT Press

Peter Gärdenfors is Professor of Cognitive Science at Lund University, Sweden. He is the author of Conceptual Spaces: The Geometry of Thought (MIT Press) and other books. Within cognitive science, two approaches currently dominate the problem of modeling representations. The symbolic approach views cognition as computation involving symbolic manipulation. Connectionism, a special case of associationism, models associations using artificial neuron networks. Peter Gärdenfors offers his theory of conceptual representations as a bridge between the symbolic and connectionist approaches. Symbolic representation is particularly weak at modeling concept learning, which is paramount for understanding many cognitive phenomena. Concept learning is closely tied to the notion of similarity, which is also poorly served by the symbolic approach. Gärdenfors's theory of conceptual spaces presents a framework for representing information on the conceptual level. A conceptual space is built up from geome

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