Concepts and Categories Part 2

They model bias present by modeling stereotyped cognition Ex. gender bias with assuming that the doctor is a male and a nurse is a female

They follow production tasks, rating tasks, sentence verification, and picture identification

These theories confuse the notion of a concept with perceptual identification Since visual features don’t define who is a Smith brother The word brother generates inference since brothers are likely to share perceptual properties more than a random pair from the same creature category The idea of physically altered smith brothers/counterfeits & mutilated lemons

Many concepts just can’t be defined by a prototype For example, people know that an odd number is defined by a rule People don’t use prototypes to define well-defined concepts Yet, people can rate the typicality of examples of well-defined concepts and show all the other evidence used to support prototype theory Evidence marshaled to support prototype theory cannot in fact be taken as evidence for the prototype theory

The problem of compositionality - a theory of concepts should explain how words combine to yield the meanings of phrases The prototype theory fails to do so So when using prototype theory for the word pet fish the idea that comes up is a creature that is not the correct concept at all But compositionality is allowed with classic, definitional theory

A body of knowledge explaining how something works

The idea of folk biology/kinship theory Also seen as simulation engines

Under theory theory: something is a grandmother if it is a female parent of a parent due to unseen causal structure of giving birth. That is the symbolic engine But we also have perceptual identification (shortcuts) from resemblance theories on what a grandmother looks like. So a perceptual identification can trigger an abstract concept like what a grandmother is

Argues that things which could be thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all of the things. Has an issue with the definitional account

The problem is that everything resembles everything else, and everything is different from everything else