From: pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky)
Subject: Re: Prototypes
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1992 23:52:18 GMT

In article <1992Aug31.152803.17752@ils.nwu.edu> pautler@ils.nwu.edu (David Pautler) writes:
>In article <10559@spark.ed.ac.uk>, iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) writes:
>> In article <1992Aug28.160327.19391@athena.mit.edu> pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:
>> >In any case, I know of no evidence, for example, that
>> >syntactic movement can "more or less happen" (HPSG language, "that a
>> >category can be not a particularly good instantiation of SLASH") or any
>> >evidence that a preposition "belongs inside a particular NP, but not as
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Prototypes
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In article <1992Sep1.150726.12704@ils.nwu.edu> pautler@ils.nwu.edu (David Pautler) writes:
>And don't syntacticians quibble over how to categorize new phenomena like
>everyone else?  If they agree on what the category means but not on the
>membership of a particular example, what are they each basing their opinion
>on?  

Quibble?

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.

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?"

>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.

My point throughout has been simple: my casual and mainly second-hand
knowledge of this literature suggested to me that it is guilty of an
equivocation on "categorization" as a result nominal (a set of
categories) and "categorization" as an action nominal (declaring that
something is in a particular category or behaving in a way consistent
with such a belief).  What has disappointed me is the non-starter
quality to the discussion.  This distinction, which seemed to me quite
clear (a fact *independent* of whether mental categories actually have
prototypes, of course), seems quite opaque to many other people here.  I
don't think that any of the replies I've read have addressed my point
head-on -- but then again, some people aren't seeing the point, or don't
think there is a point.  Chacun a son gout; maybe I'm wrong on one or
all counts, or misguided, but I would have been happier if someone could
have cited an argument or two.

-David Pesetsky
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