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Full Idea
Recent empirical work on concepts says that many concepts have graded membership, and stress the importance of phenomena like typicality, prototypes, and exemplars.
Gist of Idea
Research suggests that concepts rely on typical examples
Source
Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 4.2)
Book Ref
'Stanford Online Encyclopaedia of Philosophy', ed/tr. Stanford University [plato.stanford.edu], p.25
A Reaction
[He cites Rorsch 1978 as the start of this] I say the mind is a database, exactly corresponding to tables, fields etc. Prototypes sound good as the way we identify a given category. Universals are the 'typical' examples labelling areas (e.g. goat).
| 10409 | Research suggests that concepts rely on typical examples [Swoyer] |
| 17974 | The most popular theories of concepts are based on prototypes or exemplars [Murphy] |
| 17977 | The exemplar view of concepts says 'dogs' is the set of dogs I remember [Murphy] |
| 17987 | The concept of birds from exemplars must also be used in inductions about birds [Murphy] |
| 17982 | Exemplar theory struggles with hierarchical classification and with induction [Murphy] |
| 17981 | Children using knowing and essentialist categories doesn't fit the exemplar view [Murphy] |
| 17984 | Conceptual combination must be compositional, and can't be built up from exemplars [Murphy] |
| 18597 | Concepts as exemplars are based on the knowledge of properties of each particular [Machery] |
| 18598 | Exemplar theories need to explain how the relevant properties are selected from a multitude of them [Machery] |
| 18599 | In practice, known examples take priority over the rest of the set of exemplars [Machery] |