Why do people like books, music, or movies that adhere consistently to genre conventions? Why is it hard for politicians to take positions that cross ideological boundaries? Why do we have dramatically different expectations of companies that are categorized as social media platforms as opposed to news media sites? The answers to these questions require an understanding of how people use basic concepts in their everyday lives to give meaning to objects, other people, and social situations and actions.

In this book, a team of sociologists presents a groundbreaking model of concepts and categorization that can guide sociological and cultural analysis of a wide variety of social situations. Drawing on research in various fields, including cognitive science, computational linguistics, and psychology, the book develops an innovative view of concepts. It argues that concepts have meanings that are probabilistic rather than sharp, occupying fuzzy, overlapping positions in a "conceptual space." Measurements of distances in this space reveal our mental representations of categories. Using this model, important yet commonplace phenomena such as our routine buying decisions can be quantified in terms of the cognitive distance between concepts. Concepts and Categories provides an essential set of formal theoretical tools and illustrates their application using an eclectic set of methodologies, from micro-level controlled experiments to macro-level language processing. It illuminates how explicit attention to concepts and categories can give us a new understanding of everyday situations and interactions.

Michael T. Hannan, Gaël Le Mens, Greta Hsu, Balázs Kovács, Giacomo Negro, László Pólos, Elizabeth Pontikes, and Amanda J. Sharkey

Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Concepts in Sociological Analysis
Part I. Concepts and Spaces
2. Preliminaries
3. Semantic Space
4. Concepts as Probability Densities in Semantic Space
5. Conceptual Spaces: Domains and Cohorts
6. Expanding Spaces to Compare Concepts
7. Informativeness and Distinctiveness
Part II. Applying Concepts
8. Categories and Categorization
9. Free Categorization
10. Concepts, Perception, and Inference
Part III. Bridges to Sociological Application
11. Conceptual Ambiguity and Contrast
12. Valuation
Part IV. Concepts in Social Interaction
13. The Group Level: Conceptual and Extensional Agreement
14. Social Inference and Taken-for-Grantedness
15. Broadening the Scope of Application
Part V. Appendixes
Appendix A: Glossary of Technical Terms
Appendix B: Some Elemental First-Order Logic
Appendix C: Proofs
Notes
Bibliography
Index