Cosci 215
Categories and Natural Kinds: Constraints on Concept Formation
Instructor: James Pustejovsky,
email:
jamesp@cs.brandeis.edu,
homepage
TAI: Marc Verhagen,
email: marc@cs.brandeis.edu,
homepage
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Course Outline and Reading List
Format: Weekly reading of 2-3 research articles, with student presentations of material and student discussion.
Course Syllabus:
- Classical Categories
- Aristotelian system of classification
- Hume and Reid on Concept Innateness
- Kant's categories and the logic of representation
- Causal Theories of Natural Kinds: Putnam and Kripke
- The Internal Structure of Categories
- Inheritance Theory
- Default Logic for Conceptual Reasoning
- Extensional Approaches to Categories: Case-Based Reasoning
- The Generative Lexicon and Underspefication Theory
- Acquisition of Categories and Category Terms
- CoreLex and Semantic Typing
- Color Terms and Visual Constraints on Categories