From Classical to Prototype Theory of

Categorization
- George Lakoff, The Importance of Categorization,
taken from Women, Fire and Dangerous Things -

Categorization is essential to human thought and the epitome of what makes us human.

Categorization takes part at the level of abstraction, and occurs unconsciously (not only physical
existence, but relational, affective and largely that of entities which may be thought of exclusively as
abstractions).

human thinking = categories for all we know

From Aristotle categories were never even rendered worth discussing until the revolution Ms Rosch
started in the 80s.

2 problems she focused on:

1. Members of a category should all be identical in terms of features they possess if Aristotles
axiom should still stand.
2. Categories should exist outside of human or any other existence that would consider them,
devoid of any consideration toward the way human perception and reasoning operate.

and came up with the theory of PROTOTYPES which is more humane and appears to be a more
workable/accurate description of reality.

Strongly reliant on the classical theory, the theory of disembodied symbol-manipulation as reason
(which gave rise to the mind-as-computer and computer-achieving-reason understanding of affairs)
suffered a blow as a result of her discoveries.

The classical view of categorization implicitly, but completely disregards the role of the peculiarities of
human reasoning in favor of placing abstractions in charge of human thinking. It turns matters upside
down, in a nutshell.

According to Rosh, categorization is in close relations with human experience and imagination, and
depends on: human perception, motor activity, culture; metaphor, metonymy, and mental imagery.

Higher implications of this theory are that it changes the way we feel and perceive of the world around
us. It leads us to understand that categories, that appear inherent, are in fact constructs of the mind and
are largely shaped by the culture we are immersed in. This implies changes in the concepts of truth,
knowledge, meaning, rationality. Grammar, too. :D, which had been present for at least 2000 years in
Western thought.

1. Meaning =/= truth or reference BUT relationships btwn symbols and existing entities.
2. Biological species =/= natural and their members do not share essential features
(birds&mammals).
3. The Mind = EMBODIED
4. Emotion HAS conceptual content.
5. Grammar is more than form.
6. Reason is NOT transcendental, nor is math.
7. Truth is NOT an absolute value.
8. Peoples conceptual systems are unique at an individual level.

View of science is then irrevocably altered, since computations and deductions can no longer be
sufficient if it relies on the classical view of categories, which it certainly has so far. Rigor and precision
must not stifle the empirical study of the mind in ways pertaining to delusions. (There often seem to be
more exceptions than there are adherents to a great number of rules imposed by categories!)

In correcting the classical view of categorization, the general standards of scientific accuracy are
improved in cognitive studies.

Family Resemblances Ludwig

Wittgenstein
Various GAMES: similarities crop up and disappear, yet, we continue to ascribe them to the common
category.

Similarities which are in often complex interplay of relationships and their continuous overlapping, and
which form the common ground for members of a category, should be renamed into family
resemblances. Games are a family of concepts with subsets of corresponding sub-concepts. The same
goes for number.

These families have no natural boundaries. The boundaries may be imposed, but what will remain is
their conventional, artificial nature. Our ignorance of boundaries, however, never stands in the way of
our actually making use of the terms implied by the concepts.

P.S. What is exactness???

Is a blurred concept a concept at all?! actually, it is very useful that way, because it is left open to
greater variety of sub-concepts. Ignorance is bliss, as it enables imagination.
roughly, about, approximatelyare therefore, very useful terms. Exactly, and the like terms, are
often really not helpful at all, as they can often not be specific enough, despite endeavors. Examples are
only useful if they are taken in a particular way, from a specific point of view, which implies the
addressees exact insight into the mind of the one giving the example, otherwise, there may be
misunderstandings.

What is in common?

- ostensible definitions -

There can be different ways of formulating a definition. They can all confuse us in very different ways.
The attention of the addressee may be misdirected in many unfortunate ways so as to miss the point
completely. Think of babies and their under- and overextensions of names/concepts.

There is in our minds something like an unformulated expression of items that constitutes human
knowledge of the world. There is no need for it to take expression, except when this is intentionally
imposed as a problem. When we hear of a definition of a phenomenon, we may feel like it resembles
how we feel about that phenomenon, or that it does not. This may only reveal differences in perception,
and relative closeness or distance, but always a similar set of relations - kinship. Precision, however, is
unattainable, so, vagueness is our best shot. Concrete concepts, like particular shapes or colors, and
abstract notions in aesthetics and ethics are, according to Wittgenstein, in the same position.

There are, ultimately, different kinds of knowledge: factual (the height of Mont Blanc), relational (how a
word is used) and emotional (how a clarinet sounds). There are things we can know and say and those
we surely do know, but have difficulty expressing or expressing precisely. Ask yourself how you got to
learn it all.

Categories Aristotle
- on quantities:
o discrete (number and language always separate without common boundaries and
continuity) or continuous (lines, surfaces, bodies; time and place there is a point
which connects parts for lines, a line that connects parts of surfaces, and a line or
surface connecting parts of a body; 3 aspects of time are always connected via the
present and the same goes for places as does for bodies, which must occupy some space
- place)
o made of parts with positions in relations to one another
o made of parts with no positions (contd or not?)
- on man as a two-footed animal
- truth conditions error
Concepts Gottlob Frege
- concepts must be defined unambiguously, there must be no doubt of members belonging to
categories
- peoples knowledge is, however, flawed!
- HoWeVeR to this however, there must be constant pursuit of clean-cut definitions, for this is the
only way of knowing what is real and true.

This would not be an area at all <if it has no clear-cut boundaries in space>

- There is need for logic and precision. Otherwise, we cannot rely on anything in language and in the
world that it signifies.

Vagueness Bertrand Russell

A large number of philosophical problems explore the relations between what means and what is
meant. The extent of language is all-pervasive, in that we naturally ascribe properties of language to
the world whenever we are concerned with philosophy and logic. This does and does not make sense. In
the latter case it causes problems. If we become aware of this, we might be able to avoid some of them.

Language must be vague. It always is.

Vagueness and precision are mere characteristics of representations, not actual things that exist. Our
issue, then, is with the relation between a representation and that which it represents.

The tricky nature of knowledge! The relationship between knower known .

Vagueness in a cognitive occurrence is a characteristic of its relation to that which is known, not the
characteristic of the occurrence in itself.

Examples of continuum:

RED (the spectrum starts and ends where?),

bald (was there 1 hair that separated non- baldness from baldness?),
metre (measure between two (exact?) points in space rod in Paris),
temperature,
second (time is relative to rotations of bodies in space Pluto hour vs Jupiter hour),
ultimately, our perception of all of these is simply subjective.
Proper nouns (names) in the cases of processes of:
BIRTH and DEATH
All words are attributable without doubt over a certain area, but become questionable within a
penumbra, outside of which they are again certainly not attributable.

Knowledge we obtain through our senses is not as fine-grained as the stimuli that leads to it from the
object itself. The knowledge is vague, and more limited than our perception, however, our perception is
also quite limited (tow glasses), which made scientists doubt its validity.

Words of LOGIC (and, or, not) also lose their otherwise perfectly precise meaning because they are
employed in combination with content, or tragically vague, words. Additional problem: truth-
conditioning, which can in no way be justified. The example of prehistoric man Is this a man?

Precision is an unattainable ideal that might only exist in our imagination.

Definition of accuracy:

One system of terms related in various ways is an accurate representation of another system of terms
related in various other ways if there is a one-on-one relation of the terms of the one to the terms of
the other, and likewise a one-on-one relation of the relations of the one to the relations of the other,
such that, when two or more terms in the one system have a relation belonging to that system, the
corresponding terms of the other system have the corresponding relation belonging to the other
system.

A representation is, on the contrary, vague, when there is not just one-on-one, but a one-on-many
relation among terms or relations of the two systems: a smudged face on a photograph or a small-scale
map. So, vagueness is a matter of degree depending on the range of differences two representations of
the same subject can offer.

Linguistically speaking, the relation between the represented and the representing would be meaning.
Meaning could be precise if it were a one-on-one relation, however, this is almost never the case that a
word only has one meaning or that two or more meanings cannot apply to a single word. Therefore,
language must be considered very vague.

It is also problematic that language, in all its vagueness, is the medium of representation for other
phenomena in the world. It turns to chaos!

There is only less vagueness, or more precision, in the near appearance than there is in the distant one.
It would be perfect if we could observe life through a gigantic microscope But! Vague assumptions
have higher chance of being accurate than very specific ones do, so there might be some value in
vagueness, after all.

Vagueness then is physics: what may be called the appearances of things at different places is less and
less differentiated as one gets further away from the thing.

distant vs close-up appearances

solipsism is the only rival to physics
The Discourse Basis for Lexical
Categories in Universal Grammar
- Paul Hopper and Sandra Thompson -
Categorization of the lexicon into parts of speech

From the standpoint of Universal Grammar

keywords: discourse, categories, prototypical(-ity), semantic(-ally), grammatical, linguistic, form

Categories
There is an immense significance in the relationship between language structure and cognition.

Criteria for determining categories in linguistics:

Morphological
o category identification through combinations that can be made with inflection (it is a
noun if it declines acc. to case, number and gender, and it is a verb if it conjugates
acc. to person, tense and mood)
Semantic
o problem of meaning or signification
Syntactic
o N/V, subject/predicate
o generative grammar postulates UG, DS/SS in order to avoid ambiguity
the system of syntactic rules defines the categories
o problem of participles (Vs and Ns at the same time, a syntactic and semantic issue)
o participles are Vs, but due to embedding & complementation have N-like properties

History
in 1950s it was declared that Ns and Vs are universal categories in all languages
Sapir 1921: cluster about concrete concepts and cluster about activity are needed in ordinary
discourse

Prototypes
problem of circularity
Ns and Vs are usually easily set apart, but this is not always the case
Semantics

Ns appear to indicate to a certain time-stability

o first-order or basic Ns: common, concrete Ns (individuals) can be readily re-identified
o second-order and third-order Ns: states, events, situations
Vs appear to lack time-stability

However, this is a largely semantic distinction, and may be characterized as problematic, since there are
many instances of nouns referring to actions (What is earthquake?). There is also the issue of stems in
various Asian languages: there is a percentage of verbs that may undergo the process of nominalization
by attaining characteristic inflection, however their semantic content remains practically unaltered.

Acquisition

Children will readily accept nouns as denoting concrete, tangible, contoured objects, and verbs as
actions. This kind of categorization happens naturally and occurs immediately in speech.

Prototypicality in Grammatical Categories

Categorization does not take place randomly; instead, and as Ms Rosch postulated, there is a
hierarchical order from the more central or prototypical members of a category, to the least
prototypical ones. This notion is important for the cognitive framework in the study of grammar and
lexicon, since, often, very real differences are simply disregarded in favor of discourse functions imposed
on an item.

There are obvious distinctions made between concrete actions (prototypical Vs) and tangible objects
(prototypical Ns) , however, functions in discourse are the ones that sometimes or often seem to blur
the boundaries, and this is mostly a matter of morpho-syntactic details. Non-finite forms of verbs will
not display behavior typical of verbs (participles!!) as finite, indicative forms do.

Therefore, it may be concluded that what causes the confusion is discourse context which imposes
specific discourse roles and the communicative intent of the speaker by which verb forms are
manipulated. This way the contrast which normally occurs between prototypical instances of the two
categories becomes reduced in non-prototypical discourse contexts, and sometimes to non-distinction
even.

There is also the issue of referentiality or non-referentiality, but this is not a basic dichotomy (generic vs
specific use of a noun: Fox is a cunning animal vs There was a baby fox in my garden this morning).

Conclusion
Grammatical forms may be deemed as lacking categoriality on their own, in isolation, and they only
receive it by the imposition that a discourse situation exercises on them. Ns and Vs must, therefore,
exist with the propensity to become either depending on the speakers need in communication. This
choice is further executed by applying specific morphology.