From: pautler@ils.nwu.edu (David Pautler)
Subject: Re: Prototypes
Organization: The Institute for the Learning Sciences
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1992 15:07:26 GMT

In article <10583@scott.ed.ac.uk>, iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) writes:
> 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:
> >> From a zoo"logist's point of view,
> >> nothing can be more or less a bird, sort of a bird, or anything like
> >> that, and an ostrich is as good a bird as a robin or a raven.  It is
> >> true that a layman may use some other definition, or even several of
> >> them at once, and may wind up excluding ostriches or calling a bat a
> >> bird, but this is not interesting to the professional.
> >
> >1) "Bird" is a folk concept borrowed by zoologists.  I don't think
> >the "layman's" version should be so easily dismissed, since it largely
> >determines the expert version.
> 
> Many if not most zoo"logical concepts are originally folk concepts,
> but all of them have had their meanings redefined.  The layman may
> wish to call a whale a fish, or a spider an insect, or refuse to call
> himself an animal, and he won't exactly be wrong, but he will find
> that the expert version of these concepts ("fish", "insect", "animal"),
> while largely determined by his, is not the same as his.

Above the species level, there is little motivation for making many of the
family and order distinctions that taxonomists have made, except as a
reflection of folk concepts they are familiar with.  For that reason,
redefining the "bird" category when examples like the Archaeopteryx come
along, dead or not, is highly dependent on folk knowledge.

> >2) Even experts disagree on the meaning of "bird", e.g. the Archaeopteryx.
> 
> I knew that this was coming.  It is partly a reptile and partly a bird,
> as one of the extinct species that constitute the evolutionary link
> between the two classes.  There shouldn't be any problem with granting
> associate birdhood to the Archaeopteryx, but no less than full birdhood
> to the ostrich, and none to the bat.

You don't see a conflict between your defense of the classical view of
categories and your granting things "associate" X-ness?  Do categories
have one set of conditions to determine X-ness and several others to
determine associate X-ness?  The prototypes view is at least as parsimonious.

> >I'd be very surprised to find out there are no syntactic phenomena that
> >play the role of the Archaeopteryx.
> 
> Would we have to go back in time, though, to listen to the language of
> our very distant ancestors who still hadn't started to differentiate
> between nouns and verbs, say?  The Archaeopteryx is as dead as dodo
> (actually much *deader than that).

You shouldn't have to look only at dead languages.  Surely there are plenty
of "living fossil" syntactic phenomena in our own.  (Why should the vitality
of a language matter to a syntactician anyway?)

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?  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.

	-dp-

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