Oh, wow, oh, oh, whoa, oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

Oh, wow. Hello, you're listening to The Science of Everything podcast, episode 64.

Knowledge Representation. I'm your host, James Fodor.

In this episode, we're going to talk about the psychology behind how we understand things and think about things.

Particularly, we'll look at how knowledge is represented and how we understand different concepts.

We'll look at this mostly from a psychological perspective, although we'll dip into a little bit of

neuroscientific sort of ideas at points.

So in particular, we'll talk about semantic networks, propositional representation,

connectionism versus computationalism.

We'll look at family resemblance notions of categorization,

prototype and exemplar theory, and some evidence for and problems with each,

and we'll also look at concepts as theories.

No particular recommended pre-listening for this episode,

although if you've listened to some of the episodes of past episodes about neurons or neuroscience,

that might help for some parts of what we're going to

discuss. So, let's get started. First of all, let me just outline sort of what we're trying to do

in this episode, because it might seem a little bit abstract. What we're trying to do is understand

how knowledge, broadly speaking, particularly semantic knowledge, so propositional knowledge,

Paris as a capital of France, would be an example of that,

how that sort of knowledge is represented in the brain, or more generally just in the mind.

So one quite fruitful recent approach towards understanding this is to use what broadly called semantic networks,

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