The role of theories in conceptual coherence.

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
The question of what makes a concept coherent (what makes its members form a comprehensible class) has received a variety of answers. In this article we review accounts based on similarity, feature correlations, and various theories of cate- gorization. We find that each theory provides an inadequate account of conceptual coherence (or no account at all) because none provides enough constraints on possible concepts. We propose that concepts are coherent to the extent that they fit people's background knowledge or naive theories about the world. These theories help to relate the concepts in a domain and to structure the attributes that are internal to a concept. Evidence of the influence of theories on various conceptual tasks is presented, and the possible importance of theories in cognitive development is discussed. Why is a given set of objects grouped together to form a category? That is, why is it that some groupings are informative, useful, and efficient, whereas others are vague, ab- surd, or useless? The current surge of interest in people's concepts has provided much in- formation about conceptual structure and content. Yet, the central question of what makes a category seem coherent has only been sketchily addressed and incompletely answered. A somewhat unusual, but nonetheless use- ful, example arises from an old puzzle of biblical scholarship, the dietary rules asso-

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: