From: pautler@ils.nwu.edu (David Pautler)
Subject: Re: Prototypes
Organization: The Institute for the Learning Sciences
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 04:04:15 GMT

In article <1992Aug26.214444.24183@athena.mit.edu>, pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:
> In article <1992Aug26.160927.12506@ils.nwu.edu> pautler@ils.nwu.edu (David Pautler) writes:
> >In article <1992Aug26.120018.9260@athena.mit.edu>, pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:
> >
> >You appear to be claiming that the classical view of categories allows for
> >the possibility that the necessary and sufficient conditions are inaccurate.
> >English is a member of the Germanic language category by the end of your
> >example, isn't it?  
> 
> I wasn't clear enough in what I wrote. Let me give a clearer example
> that gets even farther from Esperanto.
> 
> As you may know, the various towns of the Boston area were never
> incorporated into Boston the way the various towns of the New York area
> were incorporated as boroughs of the City of New York.  Brookline, for
> example, flows out of adjoining neighborhoods that belong to Boston, is
> served by the same mediocre public transportation system, would have the
> status of a neighborhood in New York -- yet is a separate town entirely,
> as are Cambridge, Somerville, Belmont, Watertown, etc.  Now if someone
> asks me "Is X (who is from Brookline) from Boston?", there is a clear
> correct answer: no.
> 
> Nonetheless, in the right context, under the right conditions, a person
> might very well say "yes", or list a Brookline restaurant when asked for
> the name of a good restaurant in Boston.  And I could very well believe
> that rigorous experimentation could pick up an extra millisecond or two
> in a decision task that ended up with someone claiming that, yes some
> Brookline restaurant or other is in Boston.  Now there need be no
> prototype here for Boston.  You are either in it or you're not, and
> Brookline is not in it, period.  There are no degrees of Bostonness, no
> better or worse instances of Boston, simply an attempt on a hearer's
> part to evaluate what is being asked and be helpful.
> 
> So what might be going on?  Context, presumably.  A person makes
> assumptions about what is being asked that expand or limit the range of
> correct answers.  Since these assumptions involve communication, and
> guesses about other speakers, I can easily believe that data from such
> guesses will be statistical in nature.  The person who asks about
> Boston can be presumed, under the right circumstances, to really be
> asking about "Boston Metropolitan area" or city within driving distance
> of Boston, or something of the sort.

The amount of uneasiness in telling such a lie is purely a reflection of the
restaurant's "Boston-ness", isn't it?  The need to be helpful to the
listener doesn't skew the categorization judgement in either direction.

> The ostrich case can very well be an inverse instance of the same thing.
> Someone who talks about birds is more likely to be talking about birds
> that have the properties that most (types of?) birds share, which
> includes things like neck size or flying ability that don't necessarily
> enter into anyone's mental definition of "bird".  When pressed, anyone
> who knows what an ostrich is can easily place it in the bird category.
> But in conversation or in particular tasks one might easily assume that
> the speaker who talks about birds means some smaller set, just as one
> might assume that something more than Boston is intended in the first
> example.

I think Lakoff and others mean prototypicality to be an umbrella term
for an effect with several known causes.  One of the causes is conventionalized
salience, I believe.  Is there a reason why conventionalized salience and
prototypicality should be considered distinct?

> I am simply
> showing how a non-prototype definition, combined with pragmatic
> influence on categorization, can yield results that one might view as
> evidence for a prototype.

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.

> By the way, I also see nothing wrong with a third view, by which a
> person entertains several simultaneous definitions for "bird", and uses
> context to determine which one is intended.  Perhaps the one that is fit
> more often is more salient.  Voila, it takes longer to decide the Pope
> is a bachelor, because he fits only a less salient definition.  We
> clearly do this sort of thing all the time, for example whenever a
> common-language term has a jargon-specific meaning, and prototypes get
> you nowhere.  If you're doing botany, I guess, a tomato is a fruit.  I'd
> say it's not a poor fruit, just a botanist's idea of a fruit.

If we were really using several different senses, shifting between them
would seem more abrupt.  And since distance from Boston proper is a continuous
value, the multiple-senses account is likely to degenerate into a prototype
account for that particular example.

	-dp-
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