Conceptual spaces : the geometry of thought

Within cognitive science, two approaches currently dominate the problem of modelling representations.

The symbolic approach views cognition as computation involving symbolic manipulation.

Connectionism, a special case of associationism, models associations using artificial neuron networks.

Peter Gardenfors 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.

Gardenfors's theory of conceptual spaces presents a framework for representing information on the conceptual level.

A conceptual space is built up from geometrical structures based on a number of quality dimensions.

The main applications of the theory are on the constructive side of cognitive science: as a constructive model the theory can be applied to the development of artificial systems capable of solving cognitive tasks.