Are human categories formal concepts? A case study using Dutch data

Abstract

While the notion of a formal concept, as used in formal concept analysis, is inspired by the traditional view of human concepts, the psychological relevance of formal concepts has not been examined in the past. In this paper, we provide an experimental exploration of the psychological plausibility of formal concepts as human categories. For this purpose, we use the currently most extensive available psychological data regarding human categories. The data involve several human categories, over 400 exemplars of these categories, several hundreds of binary attributes that describe these exemplars and several binary matrices representing which exemplars have which attributes. Our primary question is: Are human categories formal concepts? That is, do the involved human categories represent formal concepts in the respective exemplar-attribute binary matrices? In most of the examined instances, the answer to this question turns out affirmative. This supports the hypothesis that formal concepts provide a psychologically plausible model of human categories. In addition, we discuss several related questions, provide observations on the psychological data used and present topics for future exploration.