Discussion

A psychological approach to concepts: Comments on Rey's “Concepts and stereotypes”☆

This article provides an original account of slurs and how they may be differentially used by in-group and out-group speakers. Slurs are first distinguished from other terms and their role in social interaction is discussed. A new distinction is introduced between three different uses of slurs: the (a) paradigmatic derogatory use, (b) non-paradigmatic derogatory use, and (c) non-derogatory in-group use. I then account for their literal meaning and explain how a family-resemblance conception of category membership can clarify our understanding of the various natural-language uses of slurs, (a)–(c). The focus is restricted primarily to race-based and sex-based slurs used in the context of English speakers, and the article concludes with desiderata to be met by any subsequent analyses of slurs.

Nominal concepts represent things as tokens of types. We report six experiments that investigate the nature of the relations we represent between the type of thing something is (e.g. DOG) and its other properties. The experiments provide evidence that we represent principled connections between the type of thing something is (e.g. DOG) and some of its properties (k-properties; e.g. having four legs for dogs), but not other properties (t-properties; e.g. being brown for dogs). Principled connections are different from logical, statistical, and causal connections. Principled connections, (i) license the expectation that tokens of the type will generally possess the k-property, (ii) license explanation of the presence of k-properties in tokens of a type by reference to the type of thing it is, and (iii) license normative expectations concerning the presence of the k-property in tokens of the type. The experiments provide evidence for all three of these aspects of principled connections. The experiments also demonstrate that principled connections must be distinguished from merely strong statistical connections. We suggest that principled connections are one of the fundamental types of relations (in addition to logical, statistical, and causal relations) in terms of which our conceptual knowledge is structured. We argue that principled connections reveal a formal mode of understanding and explanation. This mode of understanding complements other modes of understanding that have been studied within the theory-based approach to conceptual representation. Finally, we suggest that kind representations are distinguished from representations of mere types by the representation of principled connections to k-properties.

Studies about proper name anomia generally assume that persons' names are harder to recall than other semantic information one knows about them and that name retrieval is not possible without biographical knowledge. We describe a patient, SB, who, after a left frontal haemorrhage, was unable to recall any biographical information about people she could name. Moreover, she had a normal score in an Object Picture Naming Test, but gave confabulatory answers in a Semantic Questionnaire involving the same items. The role of frontal function in producing this pattern of impairment is discussed, together with the possible existence of a direct route from visual perception to proper name retrieval.

Osherson and Smith (1981, Cognition, 11, 237–262) discuss a number of problems which arise for a prototype-based account of the meanings of simple and complex concepts. Assuming that concept combination in such a theory is to be analyzed in terms of fuzzy logic, they show that some complex concepts inevitably get assigned the wrong meanings. In the present paper we argue that many of the problems O&S discovered are due to difficulties that are intrinsic to fuzzy set theory, and that most of them disappear when fuzzy logic is replaced by supervaluation theory. However, even after this replacement one of O&S's central problems remains: the theory still predicts that the degree to which an object is an instance of, say, “striped apple” must be less than or equal to both the degree to which it is an instance of “striped” and the degree to which it is an instance of “apple”, but this constraint conflicts with O&S's experimental results. The second part of the paper explores ways of solving this and related problems. This leads us to suggest a number of distinctions and principles concerning how prototypicality and other mechanisms interact and which seem important for semantics generally. Prominent among these are (i) the distinction between on the one hand the logical and semantic properties of concepts and on the other the linguistic that between concepts for which the extension is determined by their prototype and concepts for which extension and prototypicality are independent.

Four experiments were designed to test two predictions of Prototype Theory. The first prediction was that when the defining (necessary) features of a concept are only partially matched by an instance, then characteristic (nonnecessary) features of concepts can affect categorization. The test of this prediction was rendered problematic as successive experiments failed to identify clearly necessary features for a range of concepts. The second hypothesis related to the independence of features in determining similarity. Most versions of Prototype Theory assume a linear combination of feature matches, which would predict that the effect of changing a feature on category membership should be greatest when the probability of categorization is closest to 50% (i.e. at the category border). The results showed that, contrary to this prediction, the effect of changing a feature was greatest when other features were all positive, and so categorization probability was at a maximum. The results support either a logistic combination rule for assessing similarity on the basis of feature match (Medin & Shaffer, 1978), or an exponential generalization function relating similarity to prototype to the sum of matching features (Shepard, 1987).

A standard view within psychology is that there have been two important shifts in the study of concepts and that each has led to some improvements. The first shift was from the classical theory of concepts to probabilistic theories, the most popular of which is prototype theory. The second shift was from probabilistic theories to theory-based theories. In this article, I take exception with the view that the first shift has led to any kind of advance. I argue that the main reasons given for preferring prototype theory over the classical theory are flawed and that prototype theory suffers some of the same problems that have been thought to challenge the classical theory.