A new construction of a certain conceptual space is presented. Elements of this conceptual space correspond to concept elements of reality, which potentially comprise an infinite number of qualities. This construction of a conceptual space solves a problem stated by Dietz and his co-authors in 2013 in the context of Voronoi diagrams. The fractal construction of the conceptual space is that this problem simply does not pose itself. The concept of convexity is discussed in this new conceptual space. Moreover, the (...) meaning of convexity is discussed in full generality, for example when space is deprived of it, its substitutes for concept domains are considered. (shrink)

This paper deals with Gärdenfors’ theory of conceptual spaces. Let \({\mathcal {S}}\) be a conceptual space consisting of 2-type fuzzy sets equipped with several kinds of metrics. Let a finite set of prototypes \(\tilde{P}_1,\ldots,\tilde{P}_n\in \mathcal {S}\) be given. Our main result is the construction of a classification algorithm. That is, given an element \({\tilde{A}}\in \mathcal {S},\) our algorithm classifies it into the conceptual field determined by one of the given prototypes \(\tilde{P}_i.\) The construction of our algorithm uses some physical analogies (...) and the Newton potential plays a significant role here. Importantly, the resulting conceptual fields are not convex in the Euclidean sense, which we believe is a reasonable departure from the assumptions of Gardenfors’ original definition of the conceptual space. A partitioning algorithm of the space \(\mathcal {S}\) is also considered in the paper. In the application section, we test our classification algorithm on real data and obtain very satisfactory results. Moreover, the example we consider is another argument against requiring convexity of conceptual fields. (shrink)