From: pautler@ils.nwu.edu (David Pautler)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Prototypes
Date: 2 Sep 92 17:08:47 GMT
Article-I.D.: ils.1992Sep2.170847.19803
Organization: The Institute for the Learning Sciences

In article <1992Sep1.235218.10576@athena.mit.edu>, pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:
> 
> Anyway, I think there's some confusion here. Mine or yours, I don't
> know, but here goes.
> 
> One can have a perfectly biconditional definition of some category, and
> still have insufficient information about some item to justify including
> or excluding it from the category.  To return to an earlier example of
> mine, I can have a quite solid non-prototypical definition of Boston and
> still have to look on a map or reason from signs and signals whether
> some street or other is in Boston or Brookline.  So no prototypes here.

No misunderstanding here.  We were arguing over the case where we do know
the borders of Boston and Brookline, yet we call a Brookline restaurant
"a Boston restaurant" in the sense that it is within easy travel distance
from the city.  But Legal Seafood (it's in Boston, right?) is a better
example of "Boston restaurants" than the one in Brookline.  Admitting
there are "better examples" demonstrates that categorization judgements
have to be based on more than categories-as-classical-sets.

You ask if categories might actually be classical sets, and all prototype
effects can be located in the judgement process itself.  The real question
is what knowledge used in the judgement we can safely claim is "separate"
from the category.

If the pragmatics of the categorization question could account for the
prototype effect, that would be one example of such "separate" knowledge.
But the pragmatics does not skew the judgement in either direction that
I can see.  Could you explain this?

If the basis for our judgement is knowledge of the restaurant's distance
from Boston's border, however, I don't think we can claim that this knowledge
is "separate" from our knowledge of the "Boston restaurants" category.
The "proper" criterion for being a Boston restaurant is being within the
city boundary, but determining this always seems to coincide with determining
the restaurant's distance from the border.  My feeling is that distance
information is part of the encoding of membership in the "Boston restaurants"
category.  If so, the prototype effects are due to the category structure.

I suspect our disagreement boils down to the "separateness" of distance
knowledge.  Perhaps a priming study could shed some light here.  The fact
that I can't remember such a study to cite leads me to understand why
you'll probably remain skeptical.

Perhaps I should be more skeptical, too, but I know that people make
these categorization "white lies" all the time, and they memorize them
(even if they're memorized as "white lies").  Making the Brookline
restaurant a permanent member of your "Boston restaurants" category
(you're probably asked for recommendations often) adds prototype
structure even if there was none to begin with.

> Furthermore, discussion in syntax, or any research field, can concern
> itself with the question "What's the proper, most useful set of
> categories?" but sound as if it's concerning itself with the question
> "Does A belong in category X?"  So, if we ask "Are pronouns nouns?"
> we're not evaluating pronouns against some prototype of the noun, but
> asking the empirical question "Does grammar treat pronouns and things we
> are already calling nouns the same way?"

When the things being compared are abstract categories, I'm not sure we can
distinguish between similarity judgements and subordinate-category
judgements in practice.  Certainly, the *degree* of similarity would have to be
considered a prototype effect if, in fact, the two kinds of judgement aren't
distinguishable here.

> >I think I've shown that the commonly given alternatives to the prototype
> >account, like those David Pesetsky has given, can't account for the difference
> >in categorizations.
> 
> I don't see where you've done that, frankly.

I suspected you felt that way, and I've been waiting for you to address my
counterarguments.

	-dp-