Im Rahmen des Forschungsseminars laden wir recht herzlich ein zum Vortrag:

Annika Schuster, M.A. (Univ. Düsseldorf)
"Ways to approach diagnosticity"

For most common-sense concepts, no classical definition in terms of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions exists. It has been argued that their meaning is instead constituted by their proximity to a prototype, which is commonly understood as a weighted aggregation of properties of the concept’s instances.

Prototype frames aim at specifying the prototype of concepts P in terms of weighted attribute-value structures. While the values j of attributes i are weighted by their typicality for instances T_ij, the attributes shall be weighted by their diagnosticity d_ij, which measures the usefulness of attributes to discriminate between instances of the concept in question and instances of contrast categories. The typicality of an instance I can then be calculated by some version of formula (1), the sum of the sum of multiplying the diagnosticity of each attribute with an adequate function of the typicality of each value for instance and prototype.

(1)   TYP_I = ∑ⁿ_i=1∑^m_j=1 d_i f(T_ij(P), T_ij(I))

In my talk, I will review reported influences on the diagnosticity of attributes and discuss ways to implement them. Important implementations are the family resemblance score proposed in Rosch, Mervis (1975) and the v-statistics proposed in Smith et al. (1988), which shall be critically examined for their weaknesses and possible adjustments with the goal to arrive at predictions of the typicality of concept instances.

Publication bibliography

Rosch, Eleanor; Mervis, Carolyn B. (1975): Family Resemblances: Studies in the Internal Structure of Categories. In Cognitive Psychology (7), pp. 573–605.

Smith, Edward E.; Osherson, Daniel N.; Rips, Lance J.; Keane, Margaret (1988): Combining Prototypes: A Selective Modification Model. In Cognitive science (12), pp. 485–527.

Speaker

Annika Schuster (M.A.) is research fellow at the Chair of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Düsseldorf. She is writing her PhD thesis in Project D01 “Frame representations of prototype concepts and prototype-based reasoning” within the CRC991 “The structure of representations in language, cognition and science”.