Similarity and Categorization

Understanding how objects are partitioned into useful groups to form concepts is important to most disciplines. Concepts allow us to treat different objects equivalently according to shared attributes, and hence to communicate about, draw inferences from, reason with, and explain these objects. Understanding how concepts are formed and used is thus essential to understanding and applying these basic processes, and the topic of similarity-based classification is central to psychology, artificial intelligence, statistics, and philosophy. Similarity and Categorisation provides a uniquely interdisciplinary overview of this area. The book brings together leading researchers, reflecting the key topics and important developments in the field. It will be of interest to researchers and graduate students within the areas of cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, and philosophy.