| Abstract |
Categories are cognitive tools humans use to make sense of the world,
and interact with it and with each other. They are key to the use of
language, the construction of knowledge and identity, and the
formation of agents' evaluations and decisions. The literature on
categorization is expanding rapidly in fields ranging from cognitive
linguistics to social and management science to AI, and the emerging
insights common to these disciplines concerns the dynamic essence of
categories, and the tight interconnection between the dynamics of
categories and processes of social interaction. However, these key
aspects are precisely those that both the extant foundational views on
categorization and the extant mathematical models for
concept-formation struggle the most to address.
I will present informally a broad research programme I am currently
engaged in, which is aimed at creating novel formal (logical)
foundations of categorization theory which—being based on these
emerging insights on categorization—take the dynamics of categories as
their starting point, and highlight that their dynamism both results
from and shapes processes of social interaction.
I will discuss categories and categorization in connection with
context-dynamics, decision-making and self-reinforcing processes,
creating an overarching formal theory in which these three themes
illuminate each other.
This research line engages with a broad range of issues, both
theoretical (e.g. category-emergence, dynamic frame analysis, Matthew
effects) and real-life (e.g. innovation, deliberation in committees,
polarization). |