The role of similarity in natural categorization

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Abstract
The intuitive idea that one puts things into categories because one finds them similar appears to be non-controversial, if not circular. Cars are clearly more similar to other cars than they are to trees, and trees more similar to other trees than they are to cars. However, a number of theorists have recently questioned the degree to which the notion of similarity is sufficiently clearly defined and constrained to serve as an explanation of the categorization. This chapter discusses the arguments for and against basing categorization on a notion of similarity, and concludes that, construed broadly, similarity may yet be the best explanation of how most of our conceptual categories function. It proposes a distinction between concepts viewed as a cultural phenomenon and concepts at the psychological level, and suggests a naive model of conceptual development that starts with concepts as similarity clusters.

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