From: pautler@ils.nwu.edu (David Pautler)
Subject: Re: Prototypes
Organization: The Institute for the Learning Sciences
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 17:08:30 GMT

In article <1992Aug27.141918.8820@athena.mit.edu>, pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:
> In article <1992Aug27.040415.22469@ils.nwu.edu> pautler@ils.nwu.edu (David Pautler) writes:
> >
> >But the degree to which your Boston restaurant recommendation counts as a lie
> >*is* a reflection of a prototype-based definition.  It's not a binary-valued
> >judgement, for one thing, and the pragmatics doesn't provide its gradedness.
> >
> Well there is a leap from not being binary-valued to being graded.  Can
> one ever argue convincingly for the latter over the former, by the way?
> I imagine there's a field about that somewhere.  What's it called?

I wasn't implying that gradedness is the only alternative to binary values.
It's immediately obvious to me that the statement has a graded value as
a lie depending on how close the restaurant is to Boston, and I thought
it would be obvious to everyone else.  Its gradedness begs an explanation
the pragmatics can't provide.

> In any case, I've been assuming that Cognitive linguistics is
> "mentalist", not behaviorist.  That is the only way I could interpret
> the claim that people's categories "are" prototypes.  If my assumption
> is right, there is a difference between categorization behavior and the
> mental categories this behavior touches upon, and my questions are
> relevant: are the mental categories discussed by Lakoff prototypes or
> not, and how can we tell? If Cognitive linguists assume a priori that
> there is no *conceivable* gap between categories and categorization
> behavior (the issue of an *actual* gap being the point I am raising),
> then there's little point in the discussion.  Cognitive linguistics then
> doesn't even touch upon the stuff of traditional/generative linguistics,
> and any debate between them is like arguing whether a car is a machine
> or a mode of transportation.

We don't have to jump to behaviorism just yet, either.  There is a camp in
cognitive psychology, I'll call it Doug Medin's camp so someone can tell
me if I'm wrong, that believes we have no category structure.  He believes
we only know of particular instances, and any category structure is temporarily
built on-the-fly from the feature representation of all the instances.  The
prototypes of the category are also determined on-the-fly (prototypes aren't
categories; they're category members).  (Don't be misled by the term "instances", they aren't category instances until the categories are built.)  Within this
mentalist view, there is no real difference between the category constructed
and the categorization judgement.

One way to determine if a category exhibits prototype effects is to ask the
questions you've been asking.  For example, are bluejays birds because they
fit an intensional description of all birds, or because of their resemblance
to a particular kind of bird, like sparrows*?  Are some birds better examples
of the category than others?  Does the multiple-senses view or the pragmatic-
influence view account for these common examples?

*I'm not saying categories have to be determined wholly by either intensional
description or prototype-resemblance, but that the latter is certainly
a factor some of the time.

Finally, why do you accuse the cognitive linguists of taking an a priori
position?  I have pointed out why your alternatives to the prototype account
aren't robust enough to cover the examples you yourself provide.  But you
haven't answered my questions.  If you accept that the "Boston restaurant"
statement has a graded value as a lie, what accounts for that gradedness?
Is English a member of your German languages category?  On what basis?

	-dp-

Newsgroups: sci.lang,alt.usage.english