Research

Peter Gärdenfors has created and led the Section for Cognitive Science at Lund University since 1988. He is perhaps best known for his early work on belief revision, the foundations of which were presented in the book Knowledge in Flux 1988. He has wide research interests, but during later years they focus on two main themes: (1) Concept formation and semantics. He has developed a geometric model of concepts and concept learning that was introduced in the book Conceptual Spaces 2000. He has then applied this model to develop a socio-cognitive theory of semantics. (2) The evolution of thought. He has analysed the cognitive prerequisites for the evolution of human thinking and the emergence of language. Some of this work was presented in the book How Homo Became Sapiens 2003.