Guendalina Righetti
University of Oslo (NW)
Monday, June 15th, 2026, 14:00
Room A103, INRIA, Montbonnot
entrée libre
Abstract
This talk has two main goals. First, it focuses on the problem of conceptual continuity and evolution: how concepts persist through change, under which conditions they can be said to remain the same, and what distinguishes legitimate conceptual evolution from cases of conceptual death or replacement. Addressing these questions requires a richer understanding of the internal structure of concepts and of the relations that hold among their different representational components. To this end, the second goal of the talk is to develop a unified framework capable of accounting for a structured representation of concept, leveraging on different forms of conceptual representation, including prototype theory, exemplar theory, and the knowledge view. Rather than treating these as competing accounts, we propose understanding them as coordinated aspects of a single underlying conceptual structure. To both aims, the talk proposes treating concepts as forms of embodiment in the sense first proposed by Kit Fine.