Peter Gärdenfors

Lund University | LU · Department of Philosophy

Micro-society experimental setups are increasingly used to infer aspects of human behavioural evolution. A key part of human society today is our dependence on, and use of, technology–whether simple (such as a knife) or complex (such as the technology that underpins AI). Previously, two groups of researchers used an abstracted-wheel experiment to e...

An enigma for human languages is that children learn to understand words in their mother tongue extremely fast. The cognitive sciences have not been able to fully understand the mechanisms behind this highly efficient learning process. In order to provide at least a partial answer to this problem, I have developed a cognitive model of the semantics...

In a series of papers, we have argued that causal cognition has coevolved with the use of various tools. Animals use tools, but only as extensions of their own bodies, while humans use tools that act at a distance in space and time. This means that we must learn new types of causal mappings between causes and effects. The aim of this article is to...

Generic statements play a crucial role in concept learning, communication and education. Despite many efforts, the semantics of generics remain a controversial issue, as they do not seem to fit our standard theories of meaning. In this article, we attempt to shed light on this problem by focusing on how these sentences function in reasoning. Drawin...

This article takes a cognitive approach to natural concepts. The aim is to introduce criteria that are evaluated with respect to how they support the cognitive economy of humans when using concepts in reasoning and communicating with them. I first present the theory of conceptual spaces as a tool for expressing the criteria. Then I introduce the ce...

A commonly held assumption is that demonstration and pantomime differ from ordinary action in that the movements are slowed down and exaggerated to be better understood by intended receivers. This claim has, however, been based on meagre empirical support. This article provides direct evidence that the different functional demands of demonstration...

Pantomime is a unique form of communication, which we improvise “on the fly” to transmit information when unable to use language, for example during intercultural contacts or when the use of language is blocked or constrained, as in the case of some medical conditions or the game of charades. Pantomimic communication has been investigated from a nu...

To make the content of films available to a visually impaired audience, a sighted translator can provide audio description (AD), a verbal description of visual events. To achieve this goal, the audio describer needs to select what to describe, when to describe it, and how to describe it, as well as to express the information aurally. The efficacy o...

To make the content of films available to a visually impaired audience, a sighted translator can provide audio description (AD), a verbal description of visual events. To achieve this goal, the audio describer needs to select what to describe, when to describe it, and how to describe it, as well as to express the information aurally. The efficacy o...

How can we make sure that AI systems align with human values and norms? An important step towards reaching this goal is to develop a method for measuring value alignment in AI. Unless we can measure value alignment, we cannot adjudicate whether one AI is better aligned with human morality than another. The aim of this paper is to develop two quanti...

Whereas the validity of deductive inferences can be characterized in terms of their logical form, this is not true for all inferences that appear pre-theoretically valid. Nonetheless, philosophers have argued that at least some of those inferences—sometimes called “similarity-based inferences” —can be given a formal treatment with the help of simil...

Over the past few decades, cognitive science has identified several forms of reasoning that make essential use of conceptual knowledge. Despite significant theoretical and empirical progress, there is still no unified framework for understanding how concepts are used in reasoning. This paper argues that the theory of conceptual spaces is capable of...

Thus far, most researchers have focused on the cognition of fire use, but few have explored the cognition of firemaking. With this contribution we analyse aspects of the two main hunter-gatherer firemaking techniques—the strike-a-light and the manual fire-drill—in terms of causal, social and prospective reasoning. Based on geographic distribution,...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

I propose that the evolution of teaching has been central in extending manipulative intentions. Demonstrating may be the evolutionarily first form of expression that is productive, ostensive, and involves informative intention. Demonstration also involves theory of mind. Then pantomime goes a step further and involves a communicative intention. Pan...

The central thesis of this article is that the evolution of teaching is one of the main factors that lead to increasingly complex communicative systems in the hominin species. Following earlier analyses of the evolution of teaching, the following steps are identified: (i) evaluative feedback, (ii) drawing attention, (iii) demonstration and pantomim...

Reasoning is not just following logical rules, but a large part of human reasoning depends on our expectations about the world. To some extent, non-monotonic logic has been developed to account for the role of expectations. In this article, the focus is on expectations based on actions and their consequences. The analysis is based on a two-vector m...

Evidence suggests that human non-verbal speech may be rich in iconicity. Here, we report results from two experiments aimed at testing whether perception of increasing and declining f 0 can be iconically mapped onto motion events. We presented a sample of mixed-nationality participants ( N = 118) with sets of two videos, where one pictured upward m...

In this paper, we outline a comprehensive approach to composed analogies based on the theory of conceptual spaces. Our algorithmic model understands analogy as a search procedure and builds upon the idea that analogical similarity depends on a conceptual phenomena called 'dimen-sional salience.' We distinguish between category-based, property-based...

In Gärdenfors and Makinson (1994) and Gärdenfors (1992) it was shown that it is possible to model nonmonotonic inference using a classical consequence relation plus an expectation-based ordering of formulas. In this article, we argue that this framework can be significantly enriched by adopting a conceptual spaces-based analysis of the role of expe...

We present a model of how counting is learned based on the ability to perform a series of specific steps. The steps require conceptual knowledge of three components: numerosity as a property of collections; numerals; and one-to-one mappings between numerals and collections. We argue that establishing one-to-one mappings is the central feature of co...

Central to the conceptual spaces framework is the thought that concepts can be studied mathematically, by geometrical and topological means. Various applications of the framework have already been subjected to empirical testing, mostly with excellent results, demonstrating the framework's usefulness. So far untested is the suggestion that conceptua...

The article begins with a presentation of the role of demonstration and pantomime in the evolution of teaching building on Gärdenfors and Högberg (2017). In comparison to different forms of animal communication, demonstration is voluntary, intentional, honest, and directed to one or a few individuals. Then the differences between demonstration and...

The aim of this article is to provide an evolutionarily grounded explanation of central aspects of the structure of language. It begins with an account of the evolution of human causal reasoning. A comparison between humans and non-human primates suggests that human causal cognition is based on reasoning about the underlying forces that are involve...

Human recognition of the actions of other humans is very efficient and is based on patterns of movements. Our theoretical starting point is that the dynamics of the joint movements is important to action categorization. On the basis of this theory, we present a novel action recognition system that employs a hierarchy of Self-Organizing Maps togethe...

We present an online system for real time recognition of actions involving objects working in online mode. The system merges two streams of information processing running in parallel. One is carried out by a hierarchical self-organizing map (SOM) system that recognizes the performed actions by analysing the spatial trajectories of the agent's movem...

Only among humans is teaching intentional, socially structured, and symbolically mediated. In this chapter, evidence regarding the evolution of the mindreading and communicative capacities underlying intentional teaching is reviewed. Play, rehearsal, and apprenticeship are discussed as central to the analyses of teaching. We present a series of lev...

It is widely thought that causal cognition underpins technical reasoning. Here we suggest that understanding causal cognition as a thinking system that includes theory of mind (i.e., social cognition) can be a productive theoretical tool for the field of evolutionary cognitive archaeology. With this contribution, we expand on an earlier model that...

We investigate a particular subclass of semantic features associated with demonstratives of quantity and quality, and the respective interrogatives. We explore these lexical elements as they behave linguistically in simile constructions in Croatian. We show that the semantic features that can be focused on in similes are the same as the references...

Reinforcement learning systems usually assume that a value function is defined over all states (or state-action pairs) that can immediately give the value of a particular state or action. These values are used by a selection mechanism to decide which action to take. In contrast, when humans and animals make decisions, they collect evidence for diff...

The world as we perceive it is structured into objects, actions and places that form parts of events. In this article, my aim is to explain why these categories are cognitively primary. From an empiricist and evolutionary standpoint, it is argued that the reduction of the complexity of sensory signals is based on the brain's capacity to identify va...

Osiurak and Reynaud do not explain the evolutionary emergence and development of the elephant in the room, that is, technical cognition. We first argue that there is a tight correlation between the evolution of cumulative technological culture (CTC) and the evolution of reasoning about abstract forces. Second, intentional teaching plays a greater r...

Many animal species use tools, but human technical engagement is more complex. We argue that there is coevolution between technical engagement (the manufacturing and use of tools) and advanced forms of causal cognition in the human (Homo) lineage. As an analytic tool, we present a classification of different forms of causal thinking. Human causal t...

Many animal species use tools, but human technical engagement is more complex. We argue that there is coevolution between technical engagement (the manufacturing and use of tools) and advanced forms of causal cognition in the human (Homo) lineage. As an analytic tool, we present a classification of different forms of causal thinking. Human causal t...

The aim of the article is to present a model of causal relations that is based on what is known about human causal reasoning and that forms guidelines for implementations in robots. I argue for two theses concerning human cognition. The first is that human causal cognition, in contrast to that of other animals, is based on the understanding of the...

Most semantic models employed in human-robot interactions concern how a robot can understand commands, but in this article the aim is to present a framework that allows dialogic interaction. The key idea is to use events as the fundamental structures for the semantic representations of a robot. Events are modeled in terms of conceptual spaces and m...

This article presents two learning processes in order to explain how children at an early age can transform a complex sensory input to concepts and categories. The first process constructs the perceptual structures that emerge in children’s cognitive development by detecting invariants in the sensory input. The invariant structures involve a reduct...

Unifying the manuscripts collected in this volume is Gärdenfors’s (2000) theory of conceptual spaces. It has meanwhile established itself both within contemporary cognitive science and beyond, as a descriptive approach mediating between the symbolic and the sub-symbolic levels of representation.

This article is a rejoinder to Hernández-Conde’s (Synthese 194(10):4011–4037, 2017) criticism of the convexity criterion in the theory of conceptual spaces. His arguments in general claim that the convexity criterion could be false and that it therefore is problematic for the theory. However, this is a misunderstanding since the convexity criterion...

Adult humans spontaneously associate visual features, such as size and direction of movement, with phonetic properties like vowel quality and auditory pitch. A number of recent studies have claimed that looking time in preverbal infants reveals the same associations, which would indicate that some cross-modal correspondences are the result of perce...

A framework for cognitive spaces Ever since Tolman's proposal of cognitive maps in the 1940s, the question of how spatial representations support flexible behavior has been a contentious topic. Bellmund et al. review and combine concepts from cognitive science and philosophy with findings from neurophysiology of spatial navigation in rodents to pro...

Conceptual spaces have become an increasingly popular modeling tool in cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, and philosophy. e core idea of the conceptual spaces approach is that concepts can be represented geometrically, as regions in similarity spaces. While it is generally acknowledged that not every region in such a space represents a...

Within analytic philosophy, induction has been seen as a problem concerning inferences that have been analysed as relations between sentences. In this article, we argue that induction does not primarily concern relations between sentences, but between properties and categories. We outline a new approach to induction that is based on two theses. The...

Dieser Beitrag versucht die evolutionären Ursprünge von Ritualen nachzuvollziehen. Meine These ist dabei, dass Rituale als Konventionalisierungen von Pantomimen entstanden sind. Die ursprüngliche Funktion von Pantomime ist die Lehre. In dieser Funktion bezieht sich Pantomime auf Demonstration. Mein Schwerpunkt in diesem Beitrag liegt auf Ritualen,...

Events can be modeled through a geometric approach, representing event structures in terms of spaces and mappings between spaces. At least two spaces are needed to describe an event, an action space and a result space. In this article, we invoke general mathematical structures in order to develop this geometric perspective. We focus on three cognit...

It is argued that early language learning in children emerges from five primary knowledge structures: Space, objects, actions, number and events. These structures constitute the basis for the semantic domains that are used to form categories that represent the meanings of early words. The domains are naturally modeled in conceptual spaces that are...

We introduce a memory model for robots that can account for many aspects of an inner world, ranging from object permanence, episodic memory, and planning to imagination and reveries. It is modeled after neurophysiological data and includes parts of the cerebral cortex together with models of arousal systems that are relevant for consciousness. The...

With this contribution we analyze ancient hunting technologies as one way to explore the development of causal cognition in the hominin lineage. Building on earlier work, we separate seven grades of causal thinking. By looking at variations in force dynamics as a central element in causal cognition, we analyze the thinking required for different hu...

Within analytic philosophy, induction has been seen as a problem concerning inferences that have been analysed as relations between sentences. In this article, we argue that induction does not primarily concern relations between sentences, but between properties and categories. We outline a new approach to induction that is based on two theses. The...

We argue that the meanings of demonstratives and articles can be analysed in terms of a combination of the spatial domain and a small set of semantic domains. We propose that deictic terms have a 'fast semantics' in the sense that they get their meaning in the course of the communicative act, as a result of an interaction between the interlocutors,...

By understanding laws of nature as geometrical rather than linguistic entities, this paper addresses how to describe theory structures and how to evaluate their continuity. Relying on conceptual spaces as a modelling tool, we focus on the conceptual framework an empirical theory presupposes, thus obtain a geometrical representation of a theory’s st...

As autonomous robots expand their application beyond research labs and production lines, they must work in more flexible and less well defined environments. To escape the requirement for exhaustive instruction and stipulated preference ordering, a robot’s operation must involve choices between alternative actions, guided by goals. We describe a rob...

The qualitative division between domain-general and domain-specific cognition is unsubstantiated. The distinction is instead better viewed as opposites on a gradual scale, which has more explanatory power and fits current empirical evidence better. We also argue that causal cognition may be more general than social learning, which it often involves...

Human recognition of the actions of other humans is very efficient and is based on patterns of movements. Our theoretical starting point is that the dynamics of the joint movements is important to action categorization. On the basis of this theory, we present a novel action recognition system that employs a hierarchy of Self-Organizing Maps togethe...

We suggest a seven-grade model for the evolution of causal cognition as a framework that can be used to gauge variation in the complexity of causal reasoning from the panin-hominin split until the appearance of cognitively modern hunter-gatherer communities. The intention is to put forward a cohesive model for the evolution of causal cognition in h...

Donald proposes that early Homo evolved mimesis as a new form of cognition. This article investigates the mimesis hypothesis in relation to the evolution of teaching. The fundamental capacities that distinguish hominin teaching from that of other animals are demonstration and pantomime. A conceptual analysis of the instructional and communicative f...

We present a novel action recognition system that is able to learn how to recognize and classify actions. Our system employs a three-layered neural network hierarchy consisting of two self-organizing maps together with a supervised neural network for labeling the actions. The system is equipped with a module that pre- processes the 3D input data be...

Teaching is present in all human societies, while within other species it is very limited. Something happened during the evolution of Homo sapiens that also made us Homo docens-the teaching animal. Based on discussions of animal and hominin learning, we analyze the evolution of intentional teaching by a series of levels that require increasing capa...

The main thesis of this chapter is that children do not learn single new words but rather new words that belong to the same domain. For example, once they learn a word for a color, other color words will be learned soon after. The chapter presents a model of such domain-oriented language learning. Conceptual spaces are used as a framework for model...

We present a hierarchical self-organizing map based system for online recognition of human actions. We have made a first evaluation of our system by training it on two different sets of recorded human actions, one set containing manner actions and one set containing result actions, and then tested it by letting a human performer carry out the actio...

Spaces in the brain can refer either to psychological spaces, which are derived from similarity judgments, or to neurocognitive spaces, which are based on the activities of neural structures. We want to show how psychological spaces naturally emerge from the underlying neural spaces by dimension reductions that preserve similarity structures and th...

In robotics research with language-based interaction, simplifications are made, such that a given event can be described in a unique manner, where there is a direct mapping between event representations and sentences that can describe these events. However, common experience tells us that the same physical event can be described in multiple ways, d...

There is a great deal of justified concern about continuity through scientific theory change. Our thesis is that, particularly in physics, such continuity can be appropriately captured at the level of conceptual frameworks (the level above the theories themselves) using conceptual space models. Indeed, we contend that the conceptual spaces of three...

We approach the semantics of prepositions from the perspective of conceptual spaces. Focusing on purely spatial locative and directional prepositions, we analyze both types of prepositions in terms of polar coordinates instead of Cartesian coordinates. This makes it possible to demonstrate that the property of convexity holds quite generally in the...

This paper extends earlier work by its authors on formal aspects of the processes of contracting a theory to eliminate a proposition and revising a theory to introduce a proposition. In the course of the earlier work, Gardenfors developed general postulates of a more or less equational nature for such processes, whilst Alchourron and Makinson studi...

This article presents a unified approach to the semantics of prepositions based on the theory of conceptual spaces. Following the themes of my recent book The Geometry of Meaning, I focus on the convexity of their meanings and on which semantic domains are expressed by prepositions. As regards convex-ity, using polar coordinates turns out to provid...

This article discusses the relation between knowing, learning and teaching in relation to early Palaeolithic technologies. We begin by distinguishing between three kinds of knowledge: knowing how, knowing what and knowing that. We discuss the relation between these types of knowledge and different forms of learning and long-term memory systems. On...

Social learning is essential for human evolution. To achieve such learning, cultural processes which trigger the development of active teaching and intergenerational transmission and accumulation of knowledge are needed. The understanding of how such systems and processes were developed over a long time is essential for our understanding of human e...

We argue that Kline's analysis does not account for the evolutionary mechanisms that can explain the uniqueness of human teaching. We suggest that data should be complemented by an analysis of archaeological material with respect to what forms of teaching are required for the transmission of technologies over generations. How to Cite This Article...

While “meaning negotiation” has become an ubiquitous term, its use is often confusing. A negotiation problem implies not only a convenience to agree, but also diverging interest on what to agree upon. It implies agreement but also the possibility of (voluntary) disagreement. In this chapter, we look at meaning negotiation as the process through whi...

This introductory chapter provides a non-technical presentation of conceptual spaces as a representational framework for modeling different kinds of similarity relations in various cognitive domains. Moreover, we briefly summarize each chapter in this volume.

This volume provides an overview of applications of conceptual spaces theory, beginning with an introduction to the modeling tool that unifies the chapters. The first section explores issues of linguistic semantics, including speakers negotiation of meaning. Further sections address computational and ontological aspects of constructing conceptual s...

There are two major ways to deal with the limitations of classical logic. It can be replaced by systems representing alternative accounts of the laws of thought (non-classical logic), or it can be supplemented with non-inferential mechanisms. David Makinson has a leading role as proponent of the latter approach in the form of the inferential-prefer...

Categorization of rhythmic patterns is prevalent in musical practice, an example of this being the transcription of (possibly not strictly metrical) music into musical notation. In this article we implement a dynamical systems' model of rhythm categorization based on the resonance theory of rhythm perception developed by Large (2010). This model is...

Classical conditioning is important in humans to learn and predict events in terms of associations between stimuli and to produce responses based on these associations. Social robots that have a classical conditioning skill like humans will have an advantage to interact with people more naturally, socially and effectively. In this paper, we present...

Pointing is a typical means of directing a human's attention to a specific object or event. Robot pointing behaviours that direct the attention of humans are critical for human-robot interaction, communication and collaboration. In this paper, we describe an experiment undertaken to investigate human comprehension of a humanoid robot's pointing beh...

Computational complexity has been developed under the assumption that thinking can be modelled by a Turing machine. This view of cognition has more recently been complemented with situated and embodied cognition where the key idea is that cognition consists of an interaction between the brain, the body and the surrounding world. This chapter deals...

We propose an event-based account of the cognitive and linguistic representation of time and temporal relations. Human beings differ from nonhuman animals in entertaining and communicating elaborate detached (as opposed to cued) event representations and temporal relational schemas. We distinguish deictically based (D-time) from sequentially based...

The meanings of words are not permanent but change over time. Some changes of meaning are quick, such as when a pronoun changes its reference; some are slower, as when two speakers find out that they are using the same word in different senses; and some are very slow, such as when the meaning of a word changes over historical time. A theory of sema...

CastañedaHector-Neri. Thinking and doing. The philosophical foundations of institutions. Philosophical studies series in philosophy, vol. 7. D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht and Boston1975, XVIII + 366 pp. - Volume 50 Issue 1 - Peter Gärdenfors

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 Gärdenfors 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...

This article contains comments on the other papers in this volume. I take up the roles of the world, the mind and the society in my semantic theory. I show how semantic differences between languages can be seen as attending to different parts of event structures. The role of the emotion domain in relation to the meaning of pejoratives is discussed....