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From: bondc@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Clay M Bond)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,talk.philosophy.misc,sci.lang
Subject: Re: Categorization: Lakoff's mistake.
Keywords: Reference
Message-ID: <16020@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>
Date: 25 Dec 88 13:11:32 GMT
References: <484@soleil.UUCP> <1654@hp-sdd.HP.COM> <1908@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <151@feedme.UUCP> <719@quintus.UUCP> <18@csd4.milw.wisc.edu> <9402@bcsaic.UUCP>
Reply-To: bondc@iuvax.UUCP (Clay M Bond)
Organization: Indiana University CSCI, Bloomington
Lines: 44

A classroom anecdote, inspired by the recent discussion of prototypes:

My students, all being quite as brainwashed as anyone else by our
educational system, were quite fond of the idea that everything could
be packaged up in nice, discrete little units and manipulated mathe-
matically.  They liked the idea that everything was rule-governed, and
when we started talking about cognition, I asked for a show of hands
for the "Classical" theory of categorization.

The vote "for" was unanimous, so I asked them to give me:

	a.  The properties that all members of the category
		GLASS share;

	b.  The properties that all members of the category
		CUP share;

	c.  The properties which differentiate CUP from GLASS
		(courtesy of Labov.)

They all seemed to think this was a brain-damaged idea, as simple as
it seemed to them, and as they gave me properties, I wrote them on the
board under their appropriate category labels.

By the time five properties had been listed they were arguing about
them and giving not only counter-examples, but alternative properties.
By the time another four properties had been listed, we had to put up
yet another category, MUG.  And the argument could have lasted for
days.

They began the discussion thinking not only that the "Classical" system
was correct, but also by logical extension, the more defining properties
they gave, the more discrete and well-defined the categories would be.
They left the classroom realizing that the categories were anything but
discrete, and that the more properties they listed, the less discrete
the categories became.

Something else to put into the Classical pipe and smoke.

-- 
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<< Clay Bond Indiana University Department of Leather, uh, Linguistics >>
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