Social choice and categorial membership
Résumé
We investigate the family of concepts that can be grasped through a set of defining features, and examine the way they apply to the objects of the universe. When categorial membership is measured through a weak order relation translating the fact that a concept may apply more to an object than to another, the passage from the features membership functions to a global resulting order poses a problem analogous to vote aggregation in social choice theory: each defining feature may be considered indeed as a voter that sets a ranking relation among the objects at hand, these latter playing the role of candidates. A final decision is taken by the agent, yielding a rank that corresponds to the membership order induced by the target concept. We evoke different decision procedures and propose an original solution that is particularly well-adapted to the framework of cognitive psychology.