Conceptual Spaces for Conceptual Engineering? Feminism as a Case Study.

Recently, there has been much research into conceptual engineering in connection with feminist inquiry and activism, most notably involving gender issues, but also sexism and misogyny. Our paper contributes to this research by explicating, in a principled manner, a series of other concepts important for feminist research and activism, to wit, feminist political identity terms. More specifically, we show how the popular Conceptual Spaces Framework (CSF) can be used to identify and regiment concepts that are central to feminist research, focusing especially on feminism in France.

Inference to the best neuroscientific explanation.

Neuroscientists routinely use reverse inference (RI) to draw conclusions about cognitive processes from neural activation data. However, despite its widespread use, the methodological status of RI is a matter of ongoing controversy, with some critics arguing that it should be rejected wholesale on the grounds that it instantiates a deductively invalid argument form. In response to these critiques, some have proposed to conceive of RI as a form of abduction or inference to the best explanation (IBE).

Similarity-based reasoning in conceptual spaces.

Whereas the validity of deductive inferences can be characterized in terms of their logical form, this is not true for all inferences that appear pre-theoretically valid. Nonetheless, philosophers have argued that at least some of those inferences-sometimes called "similarity-based inferences" -can be given a formal treatment with the help of similarity spaces, which are mathematical spaces purporting to represent human similarity judgments. In these inferences, we conclude that a given property pertains to a category of items on the grounds that the same property pertains to a similar category of items.

Williamson on conditionals and testimony.

In , Williamson makes a new case for the material conditional account. He tries to explain away apparently countervailing data by arguing that these have been misinterpreted because researchers have overlooked the role of heuristics in the processing of conditionals. Cases involving the receipt of apparently conflicting conditionals play an important dialectical role in Williamson's book: they are supposed to provide evidence for the material conditional account as well as for the defeasibility of a key procedure underlying our everyday assessments of conditionals.

Network effects in a bounded confidence model.

The bounded confidence model has become a popular tool for studying communities of epistemically interacting agents. The model makes the idealizing assumption that all agents always have access to all other agents' belief states. We draw on resources from network epistemology to do away with this assumption.

Conceptual spaces and the strength of similarity-based arguments.

Central to the conceptual spaces framework is the thought that concepts can be studied mathematically, by geometrical and topological means. Various applications of the framework have already been subjected to empirical testing, mostly with excellent results, demonstrating the framework's usefulness. So far untested is the suggestion that conceptual spaces may help explain certain inferences people are willing to make.

How explanation guides belief change.

Philosophers have argued that people ought to change their graded beliefs via Bayes' rule. Recent work in psychology indicates that people sometimes violate that rule by attending to explanatory factors. Results from computational modeling suggest that such violations may actually be rational.

Abductive conditionals as a test case for inferentialism.

According to inferentialism, for an indicative conditional to be true, there must be a sufficiently strong inferential connection between its antecedent and its consequent. Previous experimental research has found support for inferentialism, but the materials used concerned a fairly abstract context, leaving open the question of how accurately the account can predict semantic judgments about more realistic materials. To address this question, we conducted three experiments using abductive conditionals, which are conditionals featuring an explanatory-inferential connection between their antecedent and consequent (typically, the event cited in the consequent is, or purports to be, the best explanation of the event cited in the antecedent).

The ecological rationality of explanatory reasoning.

There is growing evidence that explanatory considerations influence how people change their degrees of belief in light of new information. Recent studies indicate that this influence is systematic and may result from people's following a probabilistic update rule. While formally very similar to Bayes' rule, the rule or rules people appear to follow are different from, and inconsistent with, that better-known update rule.

Putting prototypes in place.

It has recently been proposed that natural concepts are those represented by the cells of an optimally partitioned similarity space. In this proposal, optimal partitioning has been defined in terms of rational design criteria, criteria that a good engineer would adopt if asked to develop a conceptual system. It has been argued, for instance, that convexity should rank high among such criteria.

Delving Deeper Into Color Space.

So far, color-naming studies have relied on a rather limited set of color stimuli. Most importantly, stimuli have been largely limited to highly saturated colors. Because of this, little is known about how people categorize less saturated colors and, more generally, about the structure of color categories as they extend across all dimensions of color space.

Best, second-best, and good-enough explanations: How they matter to reasoning.

There is a wealth of evidence that people's reasoning is influenced by explanatory considerations. Little is known, however, about the exact form this influence takes, for instance about whether the influence is unsystematic or because of people's following some rule. Three experiments investigate the descriptive adequacy of a precise proposal to be found in the philosophical literature, to wit, that we should infer to the best explanation, provided certain additional conditions are met.

Conditionals and inferential connections: A hypothetical inferential theory.

Intuition suggests that for a conditional to be evaluated as true, there must be some kind of connection between its component clauses. In this paper, we formulate and test a new psychological theory to account for this intuition. We combined previous semantic and psychological theorizing to propose that the key to the intuition is a relevance-driven, satisficing-bounded inferential connection between antecedent and consequent.

A Bayesian perspective on Likert scales and central tendency.

The central tendency bias is a robust finding in data from experiments using Likert scales to elicit responses. The present paper offers a Bayesian perspective on this bias, explaining it as a natural outcome of how participants provide point estimates of probability distributions over the items on a Likert scale. Two studies are reported that support this Bayesian explanation.

Does optimal partitioning of color space account for universal color categorization?

A 2007 study by Regier, Kay, and Khetarpal purports to show that universal categories emerge as a result of optimal partitioning of color space. Regier, Kay, and Khetarpal only consider color categorizations of up to six categories. However, in most industrialized societies eleven color categories are observed.

Vagueness, graded membership, and conceptual spaces.

This paper is concerned with a version of Kamp and Partee's account of graded membership that relies on the conceptual spaces framework. Three studies are reported, one to construct a particular shape space, one to detect which shapes representable in that space are typical for certain sorts of objects, and one to elicit degrees of category membership for the various shapes from which the shape space was constructed. Taking Kamp and Partee's proposal as given, the first two studies allowed us to predict the degrees to which people would judge shapes representable in the space to be members of certain categories.

Measuring Graded Membership: The Case of Color.

This paper considers Kamp and Partee's account of graded membership within a conceptual spaces framework and puts the account to the test in the domain of colors. Three experiments are reported that are meant to determine, on the one hand, the regions in color space where the typical instances of blue and green are located and, on the other hand, the degrees of blueness/greenness of various shades in the blue-green region as judged by human observers. From the locations of the typical blue and typical green regions in conjunction with Kamp and Partee's account follow degrees of blueness/greenness for the color shades we are interested in.

How group members contribute to group performance: Evidence from agent-based simulations.

The authors argue that group performance depends on the degree to which group members identify with the group as well as on their degree of differentiation. In this commentary, I discuss results from agent-based simulations, suggesting that group performance depends, at least in part, on features orthogonal to agents' caring about group performance or about how they are perceived by other group members.

The role of explanatory considerations in updating.

There is an ongoing controversy in philosophy about the connection between explanation and inference. According to Bayesians, explanatory considerations should be given weight in determining which inferences to make, if at all, only insofar as doing so is compatible with Strict Conditionalization. Explanationists, on the other hand, hold that explanatory considerations can be relevant to the question of how much confidence to invest in our hypotheses in ways which violate Strict Conditionalization.

Probabilistic alternatives to Bayesianism: the case of explanationism.

There has been a probabilistic turn in contemporary cognitive science. Far and away, most of the work in this vein is Bayesian, at least in name. Coinciding with this development, philosophers have increasingly promoted Bayesianism as the best normative account of how humans ought to reason.

Rationality: a social-epistemology perspective.

Both in philosophy and in psychology, human rationality has traditionally been studied from an "individualistic" perspective. Recently, social epistemologists have drawn attention to the fact that epistemic interactions among agents also give rise to important questions concerning rationality. In previous work, we have used a formal model to assess the risk that a particular type of social-epistemic interactions lead agents with initially consistent belief states into inconsistent belief states.

The probabilities of conditionals revisited.

According to what is now commonly referred to as "the Equation" in the literature on indicative conditionals, the probability of any indicative conditional equals the probability of its consequent of the conditional given the antecedent of the conditional. Philosophers widely agree in their assessment that the triviality arguments of Lewis and others have conclusively shown the Equation to be tenable only at the expense of the view that indicative conditionals express propositions. This study challenges the correctness of that assessment by presenting data that cast doubt on an assumption underlying all triviality arguments.

Similarity After Goodman.

In a famous critique, Goodman dismissed similarity as a slippery and both philosophically and scientifically useless notion. We revisit his critique in the light of important recent work on similarity in psychology and cognitive science. Specifically, we use Tversky's influential set-theoretic account of similarity as well as Gärdenfors's more recent resuscitation of the geometrical account to show that, while Goodman's critique contained valuable insights, it does not warrant a dismissal of similarity.