Peter Gärdenfors

Non-resident Long-term Fellow for Programmes in the Cognitive and Biological Sciences, SCAS.
Senior Professor of Cognitive Science, Lund University

Peter Gärdenfors received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Lund University. He taught philosophy of
science, logic and epistemology at the Department of Philosophy, Lund University, before becoming
full Professor of Cognitive Science in 1988. Since then, he has built up M.A and Ph.D. programmes
in cognitive science at Lund University. He was managing editor of Theoria from 1978 to 1986 and of
the Journal of Logic, Language and Information from 1992 to 1995. Gärdenfors’ current research
interests include decision theory, concept formation, cognitive semantics and the evolution of cognition.
His main publications are Knowledge in Flux: Modeling the Dynamics of Epistemic States (Bradford
Books, MIT Press, 1988); Conceptual Spaces: The Geometry of Thought (Bradford Books, MIT Press,
2000); How Homo Became Sapiens: On the Evolution of Thinking (Oxford University Press, 2003);
The Dynamics of Knowledge (Springer, 2005); The Geometry of Meaning: Semantics Based on
Conceptual Spaces (MIT Press, 2014); as well as seven books in Swedish and thirteen edited anthologies.

Currently, Gärdenfors is extending his work on concept formation and the evolution of thinking to
models of learning processes and cognitively based theories of semantics and communication. He is
also one of the initiators of a ten-year interdisciplinary Linnaeus project at Lund University on cognition,
communication and learning.

Gärdenfors is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities; the Royal
Swedish Academy of Sciences; the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina; and Academia
Europaea. He was also a member of the Prize Committee for the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic
Sciences 2011-2017.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2018-19.