The Original Approach of Jean Nicod and its Interest in Semantics and Cognitive Science

This paper is a presentation of La géométrie dans le monde sensible, an important contribution of Jean Nicod to the axiomatization of geometry in the framework of mathematical logic. The book, prefaced by B. Russell has been published in 1924. The primitive terms and relations Nicod uses in his axiomatization belong to the sensory domain, which makes his attempt interesting from the standpoint of contemporary cognitive science. Indeed, his methodology can guide modeling in many areas of Artificial Intelligence, such as time and space representation. After presenting Nicod’s work, we give some examples to show how it could be used in cognitive semantics, and more generally in systems handling diagrammatic representations.