Similarity after Goodman

© The Author(s) 2010. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract In a famous critique, Goodman dismissed similarity as a slippery and both philosophically and scientifically useless notion. We revisit his critique in the light of important recent work on similarity in psychology and cognitive science. Specifically, we use Tversky’s influential set-theoretic account of similarity as well as Gärdenfors’s more recent resuscitation of the geometrical account to show that, while Goodman’s critique contained valuable insights, it does not warrant a dismissal of similarity. 1 Formal Modes of Similarity For much of the twentieth century, both philosophical and psychological theorizing about similarity has been dominated by the geometrical model o