Chapter 1 Amalgams, Colimits, and Conceptual Blending

2018

This chapter is a theoretical exploration of Joseph Goguen’s category-theoretic model of conceptual blending and presents an alternative proposal to model blending as amalgams, which were originally proposed as a method for knowledge transfer in case-based reasoning. The chapter concludes with a generalisation of the amalgam-based model by relating it to the notion of colimit, thus providing a category-theoretic characterisation of amalgams that is ultimately computationally realisable.