Attractor Compositionality:
A Critique of Gardenfors’s Account of Conceptual Combination
David Byrd
University of California, Davis
In his book, Conceptual Spaces: The Geometry of Thought, Peter Gardenfors
(2000) develops an account of prototype compositionality that he suggests
can be implemented in a connectionist net by using the dynamical notion of
an attractor. If successful, this account would cure one of the most
popular theories of concepts of its greatest illness, its failure to account
for conceptual combination. Further, Gardenfors’s account would give
us the kind of implementational guidance that most theories of concepts lack.
Unfortunately, construing concepts in terms of the attractors of an underlying
connectionist net faces a serious problem, what I call “the problem of entrapment.”
It is the purpose of this paper to illustrate this problem.