Empirically Informed Philosophy of Mind online Seminar

Similarity-space models of concepts play an important role in contemporary theories of categorization and knowledge representation, modeling concepts as regions within multidimensional spaces, where similarity corresponds to spatial proximity. Despite their appeal, these theories face principled objections that remain unresolved. Among the most influential critiques, Jerry Fodor argued that theories based on similarity are circular and that this notion is too unconstrained to account for the compositional structure of thought. Building on this, Christopher Gauker more recently argued that geometric models struggle to guarantee the individuation and diachronic stability of concepts, as well as to explain our capacity to form judgments about particular objects. This talk revisits these criticisms within the framework of Peter Gärdenfors' theory of conceptual spaces. I will show how conceptual spaces embody structural features that effectively respond to Fodor's concerns. Furthermore, I will propose a solution to Gauker's critique by combining conceptual spaces with the theory of mental files, offering a coherent framework to model object predication.