Reasoning with Concepts

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, France

Peter Gärdenfors is Professor of Cognitive Science at Lund University. He is the author of Knowledge in Flux, Conceptual Spaces, How Homo Became Sapiens, and Geometry of Meaning.

Matias Osta-Velez 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.

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