Polysemy and the Nonspherical Shapes of Concepts
It would be naive to imagine that each lexical item defines a perfectly “spherical” region in conceptual space, as pristine as an atomic nucleus surrounded by a spherical electron cloud whose density gradually attenuates with increasing distance from the core. Although the single-nucleus spherical-cloud image has some truth to it, a more accurate image of what lies behind a typical lexical item might be that of a molecule with two, three, or more nuclei that share an irregularly shaped electron cloud. .
Analogy as the Core of Cognition
by Douglas R. Hofstadter
Stanford Presidential Lectures in the Humanities and Arts
