A couple of weeks ago I started blitzing my way through one of your posts on natural abstraction and, wham! it hit me: J.J. Gibson, ecological psychology. Are you familiar with that body of work? Gibson’s idea was that the environment has affordances (he’s the one who brought that word to prominence) which are natural “points of attachment” [my phrase] for perceptual processes. It seems to me that his affordances are the low-dimensional projections (or whatever) that are the locuses of your natural abstractions. Gibson didn’t have the kind of mathematical framework you’re interested in, though I have the vague sense that some people who’ve been influenced by him have worked with complex dynamics.
And then there’s the geometry of meaning Peter Gärdenfors has been developing: Conceptual Spaces, MIT 2000 and The Geometry of Meaning, MIT 2014. He argues that natural language semantics is organized into very low dimensional conceptual spaces. Might have some clues of things to look for.
Hmmm...On Gibson, I’d read his last book, An Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979). I’d also look at his Wikipedia entry. You might also check out Donald Norman, a cognitive psychologist who adapted Gibson’s ideas to industrial design while at Apple and then as a private consultant.
On Gärdenfors the two books are good. You should start with the 2000 book. But you might want to look at an article first: Peter Gärdenfors, An Epigenetic Approach to Semantic Categories, IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems (Volume: 12 , Issue: 2, June 2020 ) 139 – 147. DOI: 10.1109/TCDS.2018.2833387 (sci-hub link, https://sci-hub.tw/10.1109/TCDS.2018.2833387). Here’s a video of a recent talk, Peter Gärdenfors: Conceptual Spaces, Cognitive Semantics and Robotics: https://youtu.be/RAAuMT-K1vw
A couple of weeks ago I started blitzing my way through one of your posts on natural abstraction and, wham! it hit me: J.J. Gibson, ecological psychology. Are you familiar with that body of work? Gibson’s idea was that the environment has affordances (he’s the one who brought that word to prominence) which are natural “points of attachment” [my phrase] for perceptual processes. It seems to me that his affordances are the low-dimensional projections (or whatever) that are the locuses of your natural abstractions. Gibson didn’t have the kind of mathematical framework you’re interested in, though I have the vague sense that some people who’ve been influenced by him have worked with complex dynamics.
And then there’s the geometry of meaning Peter Gärdenfors has been developing: Conceptual Spaces, MIT 2000 and The Geometry of Meaning, MIT 2014. He argues that natural language semantics is organized into very low dimensional conceptual spaces. Might have some clues of things to look for.
If I want to know more about these two things, which papers/books should I read?
Hmmm...On Gibson, I’d read his last book, An Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979). I’d also look at his Wikipedia entry. You might also check out Donald Norman, a cognitive psychologist who adapted Gibson’s ideas to industrial design while at Apple and then as a private consultant.
On Gärdenfors the two books are good. You should start with the 2000 book. But you might want to look at an article first: Peter Gärdenfors, An Epigenetic Approach to Semantic Categories, IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems (Volume: 12 , Issue: 2, June 2020 ) 139 – 147. DOI: 10.1109/TCDS.2018.2833387 (sci-hub link, https://sci-hub.tw/10.1109/TCDS.2018.2833387). Here’s a video of a recent talk, Peter Gärdenfors: Conceptual Spaces, Cognitive Semantics and Robotics: https://youtu.be/RAAuMT-K1vw