Toward an Epistemic-Logical Theory of Categorization

Willem Conradie
Sabine Frittella
Alessandra Palmigiano
Michele Piazzai
Apostolos Tzimoulis
Nachoem M. Wijnberg

Categorization systems are widely studied in psychology, sociology, and organization theory as information-structuring devices which are critical to decision-making processes. In the present paper, we introduce a sound and complete epistemic logic of categories and agents' categorical perception. The Kripke-style semantics of this logic is given in terms of data structures based on two domains: one domain representing objects (e.g. market products) and one domain representing the features of the objects which are relevant to the agents' decision-making. We use this framework to discuss and propose logic-based formalizations of some core concepts from psychological, sociological, and organizational research in categorization theory.

In Jérôme Lang: Proceedings Sixteenth Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK 2017), Liverpool, UK, 24-26 July 2017, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 251, pp. 167–186.
Published: 25th July 2017.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.251.12 bibtex PDF
References in reconstructed bibtex, XML and HTML format (approximated).
Comments and questions to: eptcs@eptcs.org
For website issues: webmaster@eptcs.org