Fabrizio in Edinburgh and Amsterdam

On the structure of multidimensional concepts.

The week of April 20-24 Fabrizio is in northwestern Europe talking about "The structure of multidimensional concepts," joint work with Ilaria and Eric, abstracted below. On the 20th he delivers the talk in Edinburgh, and on the 24th, at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation in Amsterdam, in its Logic and Interactive Rationality Seminar Series.

Recent work in philosophy and cognitive science has brought renewed attention to multidimensional concepts and properties such as healthy, biodiverse, intelligent and democratic. In this paper, we take steps toward a comprehensive theory of them. Much of the existing literature treats multidimensionality piecemeal, isolating particular features. Most prominent among them is the fact that such concepts appear to involve forms of aggregation structurally akin to those studied in social choice theory. While these insights are illuminating, they stop short of explaining why multidimensional concepts exhibit the structural features they do. Our aim is to embed these familiar modules within a unified framework that accounts for their characteristic patterns in a principled way. With our account in place, we argue that influential proposed solutions to longstanding puzzles about multidimensional concepts cannot be sustained.