Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science

Categorization, the basic cognitive process of arranging objects into categories, is a fundamental process in human and machine intelligence and is central to investigations and research in cognitive science. Until now, categorization has been approached from singular disciplinary perspectives with little overlap or communication between the disciplines involved (Linguistics, Psychology, Philosophy, Neuroscience, Computer Science, Cognitive Anthropology). Henri Cohen and Claire Lefebvre have gathered together a stellar collection of contributors in this unique, ambitious attempt to bring together converging disciplinary and conceptual perspectives on this topic.

"Categorization is a key concept across the range of cognitive sciences, including linguistics and philosophy, yet hitherto it has been hard to find accounts that go beyond the concerns of one or two individual disciplines. The Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science provides just the sort of interdisciplinary approach that is necessary to synthesize knowledge from the different fields and provide the basis for future innovation."

Professor Bernard Comrie, Department of Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany

"Anyone concerned with language, semantics, or categorization will want to have this encyclopedic collection."

Professor Eleanor Rosch, Dept of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Dr. Henri Cohen’s research interests focus on speech and language development and neurological disorders, learning and emotion in Parkinson’s disease, complexity and learning, skill acquisition and interference, and origin of language. He is Professor of Psychology (ret.) at Université du Québec à Montréal, and visiting scholar, at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Universidad de la Frontera, Chile. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles, and edited two books (with Elsevier) on cognition and consciousness, and on categorization, and a book on the origins of language (Benjamins). He is the current editor of Brain and Cognition (Elsevier), and past editor of Journal of Neurolinguistics (Elsevier).

Department of Linguistics, University of Quebec, Montreal, Canada. Dr. Lefebvre studies: linguistic theory, syntactic category theory; cognitive processes involved in the formation of new languages; languages in contact, French, Quechua, Creole Haitian, Fon, and other African languages.