Are “number of sides”, “IQ”, “age”, and “font” all dimensions?
And what are the points in thingspace? It sounds like they include anything that is somewhat “mother” and anything that is somewhat “robin”. (And I should think thingspace is a point in thingspace too.)
I think this post makes some good points, the main one, for me, being that words are centers of (indefinitely extending) clusters rather than boundaries of sets. But I think the notion of thingspace rests on shaky foundations: it assumes the world is broken down into things and those things have attributes.
What are the dimensions of thingspace?
Are “number of sides”, “IQ”, “age”, and “font” all dimensions?
And what are the points in thingspace? It sounds like they include anything that is somewhat “mother” and anything that is somewhat “robin”. (And I should think thingspace is a point in thingspace too.)
I think this post makes some good points, the main one, for me, being that words are centers of (indefinitely extending) clusters rather than boundaries of sets. But I think the notion of thingspace rests on shaky foundations: it assumes the world is broken down into things and those things have attributes.
We don’t all share the same thingspace do we?
I think thingspace is meant to be an abstraction. It’s just a map to help us think about categorisation of objects.