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Stanford Symbolic Systems Distinguished Speaker Lecture
Thursday, March 6, 2013

Douglas Hofstadter, College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Comparative Literature. Indiana University

What is a quintessential category? Bird, perhaps? Or maybe chair? And what is a quintessential concept? Two? Number? Prime number?

I'm not trying to put words into your mouth -- I'm just trying to get you to ask yourself these questions. Also, I wonder if by any chance you thought that these are really exactly the same question, in which case you might have wondered why I asked you the same question twice.


Or did you perhaps think something along these lines: "A category is a set of objects
out there in the real world, whereas a concept is a mental entity that gets activated whenever one sees a member of the corresponding category"? In that case, you would essentially be equating a category with the extension of a set, and a concept with the intension of a set. (Those are notions borrowed from mathematical logic and set theory.)

Actually, none of the notions above is at all close to the viewpoint that I wish to convey to you about concepts and categories. My viewpoint is, I think, quite unorthodox and quite radical, and it claims that concepts and categories include many extremely commonplace, dime-a-dozen notions that you might never have thought of as being categories or concepts. (Sorry -- I'm not going to list any of them here; you'll have to come to the talk to find out what I mean!) I will try to convince you that, despite any initial skepticism, these are primordial, quintessential cases, and I hope that this novel view will have a serious impact on what you think thinking is.