Description

Javier Belastegui (ILCLI): "Exploring the landscape of classical concepts"

October 31, 2025. 15:00.

Venue: Carlos Santamaria Zentroa, room 4.

Abstract:
In the framework of conceptual spaces introduced by P. Gärdenfors, objects, similarities and concepts are represented, respectively, as points, distances and regions in some mathematical space. Such a geometric model for concepts has been argued to be useful in the study of several phenomena involving concepts, such as vagueness, (non-)naturalness and inductive and analogical inference. 
A common assumption of this framework, coming from psychology, is that concepts have prototype structure. For an object to fall under a concept (e.g. CUP, BIRD) is for it to be similar enough to a prototype of the concept (e.g. to have enough of the features typically associated to the concept). However, this may suggest that the framework is not applicable to the sort of concepts that philosophers deal with when they engage in conceptual analysis, namely classical concepts defined by individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions (e.g. KNOWLEDGE, JUSTICE, and so on). 
In this talk I want to show that, if we choose our space wisely, we can represent classical concepts geometrically in a natural way. Moreover, this geometric representation illuminates many features of classical concepts, including object-similarity as sharing properties, conceptual categorisation as satisfying definitions, crispness of concepts as empty boundaries, Kantian-like analyticity as inclusion of definitions, concept compositionality as combinations of definitions and conceptual analysis as the converging process of revision of definitions in the light of counterexamples. Thus, classical concepts can be fruitfully studied more geometrico too.