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18Similarity-based categorization and fuzziness of natural categoriesCognition 65 (2-3): 137-165. 1998.
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482Rules and similarity – a false dichotomyBehavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (1): 26-26. 2005.Unless restricted to explicitly held, sharable beliefs that control and justify a person's behavior, the notion of a rule has little value as an explanatory concept. Similarity-based processing is a general characteristic of the mind-world interface where internal processes (including explicitly represented rules) act on the external world. The distinction between rules and similarity is therefore misconceived.
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24Quantum probability and conceptual combination in conjunctionsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (3). 2013.I consider the general problem of category conjunctions in the light of Pothos & Busemeyer (P&B)'s quantum probability (QP) account of the conjunction fallacy. I argue that their account as presented cannot capture the – the case in which a class is a better member of a conjunction A^B than it is of either A or B alone
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25Modeling category coordination: Comments and complicationsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (4): 496-497. 2005.Consideration of color alone can give a misleading impression of the three approaches to category coordination: the nativist, empiricist and culturalist models. Empiricist models can benefit from a wider range of correlational information in the environment. Also, all three approaches may explain a set of perceptual categories within the human repertoire. Finally, a suggestion is offered for supplementing the naming game by varying the social status of agents.
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22Language’ role in enabling abstract, logical thoughtBehavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (6): 688-688. 2002.Carruthers’ thesis is undermined on the one hand by examples of integration of output from domain-specific modules that are independent of language, and on the other hand by examples of linguistically represented thoughts that are unable to integrate different domain-specific knowledge into a coherent whole. I propose a more traditional role for language in thought as providing the basis for the cultural development and transmission of domain-general abstract knowledge and reasoning skills.
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44Implicit and explicit knowledge: One representational medium or many?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (5): 769-770. 1999.In Dienes & Perner's analysis, implicitly represented knowledge differs from explicitly represented knowledge only in the attribution of properties to specific events and to self-awareness of the knower. This commentary questions whether implicit knowledge should be thought of as being represented in the same conceptual vocabulary; rather, it may involve a quite different form of representation.
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21Folk biology and external definitionsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (4): 574-574. 1998.Atran's thesis has strong implications for the doctrine of externalism in concepts (Fodor 1994). Beliefs about biological kinds may involve a degree of deference to scientific categories, but these categories are not truly scientific. They involve instead a folk view of science itself.
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40Context, categories and modality: Challenges for the rumelhart modelBehavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (6): 716-717. 2008.Three issues are raised in this commentary. First, the mapping of semantic information into the different layers could be done in a more realistic way by using the Context layer to represent situational contexts. Second, a way to differentiate category membership information from other property information needs to be considered. Finally, the issue of modal knowledge is raised
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275The Curious Case of the Refrigerator–TV: Similarity and HybridizationCognitive Science 36 (6): 992-1018. 2012.This article examines the role of similarity in the hybridization of concepts, focusing on hybrid products as an applied test case. Hybrid concepts found in natural language, such as singer songwriter, typically combine similar concepts, whereas dissimilar concepts rarely form hybrids. The hybridization of dissimilar concepts in products such as jogging shoe mp3 player and refrigerator TV thus poses a challenge for understanding the process of conceptual combination. It is proposed that models o…Read more
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243How do people use and appraise concepts? (edited book)Springer Nature. forthcoming.To approach the many challenges involved in the notion of engineering concepts, it is important to have a clear idea of the starting point – the concepts that people use in their everyday lives, in conversations and in expressing beliefs, desires, intentions and so forth. The first Section of this chapter introduces evidence that I have accumulated over the last many years concerning the flexibility, context-dependence, and vagueness of such common concepts. The concept engineer needs to underst…Read more