Program
Richard Dietz (Leuven)
Comparative Concepts
Comparative concepts such as 'being greener than' or 'being higher than' are ways of ordering objects. They are fundamental to our grasp of gradable concepts, that is the type of meanings expressed by gradable general terms, such as “is green” or “is high”, which are embeddable in comparative constructions in natural language. Some comparative concepts seem natural, whereas others seem gerrymandered. The aim of this talk is to outline a theoretical approach to comparative concepts that bears both on the account of naturalness for comparative concepts and on the theory of gradable concepts. The approach is novel in that it carries some basic assumptions from Peter Gärdenfors' conceptual spaces account of categorical concepts over to comparative concepts. The offered framework is more general in that it supplies means of motivating various types of categorisation rules for gradable terms. Time permitting, also some implications with empirical content and some applications to the theory of imprecision in mind will be highlighted.
