The role of theories in conceptual coherence.
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23362634 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Gregory L Murphy, Douglas L Medin (0000-0003-4372-7202, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) |
| Year | 1985 |
| Volume | 92 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 289-316 |
| Publication date | 1985-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Psychological Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0033-295X • E-ISSN: 1939-1471 |
| Publisher | American Psychological Association (APA) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1037/0033-295x.92.3.289 |
| PMID | 4023146 |
| OpenAlex | W2114826854 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 324 |
| References cited | 38 |
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 categorization. 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.
Cognitive psychology · Cognitive science · Coherence (philosophical gambling strategy) · Statistics · Categorization, perception, and language · Child and Animal Learning Development · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Mathematics · Psychology
More Correlations Signal Causation
Latent Diversity in Human Concepts
The Effect of Coherence Level and Assumption Form on the Wason Selection Task Solution
Embodiment in Religious Knowledge
The Creative Structuring of Counterintuitive Worlds
Prototypic Moral Character
Similarity, Relevance, and the Comparison Process
Theory of Mind in Deaf Adults and the Organization of Verbs of Knowing
Implicit Theories and Their Role in Judgments and Reactions
Domains and image schemas
Category overlap and neutralization
The relationship between indecisiveness and eye movement patterns in a decision making informational search task
Metaphor Comprehension
Limitações na avaliação de perturbação de personalidade
Consideran Los Magallánicos Que Su Cultura Posee Una Esencia Única
Anatomy of the Two Subdisciplines of Communication Study
Metaphors and Categories
Young children's theory of knowing
Situated simulation in the human conceptual system
Essentialist beliefs about social categories
Perceptions of perceptual symbols
Bayesian Fundamentalism or Enlightenment? On the explanatory status and theoretical contributions of Bayesian models of cognition
Uniquely Human
Universal Tendencies in the Semantics of the Diminutive
Race as a visual feature
Psychological connectedness and intertemporal choice.
Alternative Approaches to Understanding the Determinants of Typicality
Dimensions of Consumer Expertise
A Study of Information Search Behavior During the Categorization of New Products
On the Utility of Consumers' Theories in Judgments of Covariation
Concepts and Folk Theories
Learning from Others
Respects for similarity.
The adaptive nature of human categorization.
Understanding metaphorical comparisons
A solution to Plato's problem
A neuropsychological theory of multiple systems in category learning.
Children and adults as intuitive scientists.
Toward an instance theory of automatization.
Relational categories as a bridge between cognitive and educational research
The empirical case for two systems of reasoning
Explaining basic categories
What's next? Judging sequences of binary events
Recent views of conceptual structure
Negativity and extremity biases in impression formation
When one model casts doubt on another
Connectionist modeling of developmental changes in infancy
Concepts Are Not a Natural Kind
Associative Engines
The Socio-Political Construction of a European Census of Higher Education Institutions
Implicit theories and conceptions of morality
Thinking about people
Traits as goal-based categories
Stereotypes
Essentialism goes social
Causal trait theories
Activating transference without consciousness
Social judgeability
The role of feasibility and desirability considerations in near and distant future decisions
Generating Synergy between Conceptual Change and Knowledge Building
Do Ethnic Groups Exist
Relations as rules
The effect of generic statements on children's causal attributions
Setters and samoyeds
The importance of knowing a dodo is a bird
The development of scientific reasoning in knowledge-rich contexts
Microgenetic analysis of first steps in children's acquisition of expertise on shorebirds
Labels and explanations in mother–child emotion talk
The role of object parts in infants' attention to form-function correlations
Institutional actors
Dangerous and distinctive properties bias category judgments late in development
Word, thought, and deed
Information about the logical structure of a category affects generalization
The language machine
Structure mapping in analogy and similarity
Doing without Concepts
On seeing human
A cognitive-affective system theory of personality
The Conceptual Mind
Similarity and Analogical Reasoning
Perceptual symbol systems
Emerging Trends in Culture and Concepts
Concepts and CategorizationWe are grateful to Alice Healy, Robert Proctor, Brian Rogosky, and Irving Weiner for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. This research was funded by National Science Foundation Reese grant DRL‐0910218, and Department of Education IES grant R305A1100060. Correspondence concerning this chapter should be addressed to [email protected] or Robert Goldstone, Psychology Department, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405. Further information about the laboratory can be found at http
Cognitive Foundations and Cultural Models
Prototype Theory in Linguistics
Antecedent-Contained Deletion
Negation
Vagueness
Cognitive Approaches to Judgment and Decision Making
Politeness
Metonymy
Word Senses
Scalar Implicatures
Counterfactuals
Exhaustivity in It -Clefts
Constraint-Based Pragmatic Processing
Theory of Mind
Language Comprehension, Inference, and Alternatives
The Emotions
Plurality
The Structure of scientific theories
Human inference
From a Logical Point of View
Language and Perception
What some concepts might not be
Audience Design in Meaning and Reference
Genesis of popular but erroneous psychodiagnostic observations.
Space, Time, Semantics, and the Child11the Preparation of This Paper Was Supported in Part by Public Health Service Grant Mh-20021 From the National Institute of Mental Health. I Wish to Thank Eve v. Clark for Her Suggestions and Comments in the Writing of This Paper.
Can human irrationality be experimentally demonstrated?
Categorization and Representation of Physics Problems by Experts and Novices
Basic objects in natural categories
Ad hoc categories
Features of similarity.
Sentence memory
Context theory of classification learning.
Structure‐Mapping
Non-linguistic strategies and the acquisition of word meanings
Illusory correlation as an obstacle to the use of valid psychodiagnostic signs.
Logic and Conversation
Family resemblances
The structure of scientific revolutions
Carmichael's manual of child psychology.
The Social Construction of the Person
Polytypy in Folk Biological Taxonomies 1
What's in a Name? A Study of How Children Learn Common and Proper Names
Identifying basic categories
Remember that old theory of memory? Well, forget it
Categories and Concepts
Judgment of covariation by social perceivers
Scripts, plans, goals, and understanding
Categorization of Natural Objects
Cue validity and levels of categorization
When Nouns Surface as Verbs
Elements of Discourse Understanding
Animals Are Good to Think and Good to Prohibit
Why is the Cassowary Not a Bird? A Problem of Zoological Taxonomy Among the Karam of the New Guinea Highlands
Salience and relativity in classification
General Principles of Classification and Nomenclature in Folk Biology
| Unique citing works | 324 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 8,1 |
| Citation span | 1986 - 2026 (41) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | Yes |
| Citation types | Neutral: 249 |