Publications

Publication details [#766]

Sangoi, Massimo. 2012. Interview with Bipin Indurkhya. HUMANA.MENTE 23 : 197–215. 19 pp.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English

Abstract

Bipin Indurkhya is a cognitive scientist and a philosopher. He studied Electronics Engineering in India and the Netherlands before getting his Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA. He has been trained under a number of very bright and knowledgeable scholars from different fields. Besides his basic training as an electronics engineer and a computer scientist, he studied formal semantics and computational linguistics from Jan Landsbergen and Remko Scha at the Philips Research Labs in Eindhoven. During his Ph.D course, he studied brain theory and cybernetics with Michael Arbib and Nico Spinelli, formal semantics and linguistics with Barbara Partee, category theory and topos theory from Ernie Manes, and philosophy of language with Ed Gettier. All these experiences have resulted in a deeply interdisciplinary research work. After that he taught and carried out research in the USA, Asia and Europe. His main research interests are creative metaphors and analogies, and their formal and computational modeling. Indurkhya’s best known book, Metaphor and Cognition: An Interactionist Approach (1992), sets out an original and comprehensive theory of metaphor in which the interaction between the cognitive agent and his physical and cultural environment stands as a key explanatory principle for a set of issues related to cognition, such as categorization, inductive inference, change of theoretical paradigm, analogical reasoning, creativity etc. The various aspects described within this theoretical framework are discussed, deepened and declined with regard to specific issues in a long series of articles. Currently he has been facing the issue of perceptual similarity related to imagery, setting out an account of the mechanisms involved in visual metaphor reading. Creativity is also being addressed in his recent work, which has resulted in some original theoretical proposal.