The aim of this paper is to reconcile two claims that have long been thought to be incompatible: that we compositionally determine the meaning of complex expressions from the meaning of their parts, and that prototypes are components of the meaning of lexical terms such as fish, red, and gun. Hypotheses and are independently plausible, but most researchers think that reconciling them is a difficult, if not hopeless task. In particular, most linguists and philosophers agree that is not negotiable; (...) so they tend to reject. Recently, there have been some attempts to reconcile these claims, but they all adopt an implausibly weak notion of compositionality. Furthermore, parties to this debate tend to fall into a problematic way of individuating prototypes that is too externalistic. In contrast, I propose that we can reconcile and if we adopt, instead, an internalist and pluralist conception of prototypes and a context-sensitive but strong notion of compositionality. I argue that each of this proposals is independently plausible, and that, when taken together, provide the basis for a satisfactory account of prototype compositionality. (shrink)

In this contribution the prototypical argumentative patterns are discussed in which pragmatic argumentation is used in the context of legal justification in hard cases. First, the function and implementation of pragmatic argumentation in prototypical argumentative patterns in legal justification are addressed. The dialectical function of the different parts of the complex argumentation are explained by characterizing them as argumentative moves that are put forward in reaction to certain forms of critique. Then, on the basis of an exemplary case, the famous (...) Holy Trinity case, the way in which the U.S. Supreme Court uses pragmatic argumentation in this case is discussed by showing how the court instantiates general prototypical argumentative patterns in light of the institutional preconditions of the justification in the context of the specific case. (shrink)

Materialization practices in the architecture and building industry have evolved with the advancement of manufacturing and information technologies. This evolution is evident across various design and production phases, with a pronounced impact on prototyping. Advances in design and fabrication tools have empowered prototypes, integral in any production cycle, to furnish a growing array of information and feedback for designers and manufacturers. In this context, prototypes have transformed from merely showcasing data-driven building solutions to presenting socio-environmentally conscious systems. Innovation (...) in prototyping connects the initial design and construction stages to the operational phase, creating a seamless transition throughout the project lifecycle. This chapter provides a range of definitions and prototypical case studies for smart prototyping by identifying practiced approaches in integrated design to production workflows. This chapter introduces three paradigms for smart prototyping: Digital prototyping focuses on data-driven design for mass customization, phygital prototyping involves mixed-reality-enabled design and assembly, and thirdly collaborative prototyping explores human-machine hybrid intelligence and co-production in architectural and urban contexts. The chosen case studies in this chapter and how they are categorized aim to provide a comprehensive overview of smart prototyping, covering projects conducted in both research and practice. This chapter concludes with potential future trends and the role of emerging and evolving mediums of prototyping for smart design and construction. (shrink)

Throughout history, certain art pieces have been labeled as rule-breaking or pioneering. Such artworks elicited strong reactions and rejection initially, but ultimately broke conventions and introduced new art kinds. Although revolutionary artworks play a key role in art history and society, established theories in philosophy of art have neglected this central topic. To address this gap in the literature, this article offers an analysis of pioneering artworks by drawing on tools from the ontology of artifacts while also introducing new concepts. (...) I argue that the emergence of pioneering artworks is comparable to the emergence of prototypes in artifacts. These artworks enable the creation of new art kinds, much like prototypes provoke the emergence of new artifact kinds through the introduction of a new function. Furthermore, such artworks do not merely introduce a new function, as prototypes do, but often a function perceived as heretical, one that challenges artistic norms and provokes strong audience reactions. I conclude that a functional understanding of pioneering artworks that takes into consideration their disruptive force reveals their unique nature. (shrink)

In this paper I evaluate the soundness of the prototype paradigm, in particular its basic assumption that there are pan-human psychological essences or core meanings that refer to basic-level natural kinds, explaining why, on the whole, human communication and learning are successful. Instead I argue that there are no particular pan-human basic elements for thought, meaning and cognition, neither prototypes, nor otherwise. To illuminate my view I draw on examples from anthropology. More generally I argue that the prototype paradigm (...) exemplifies two assumptions that dominate cognitive science: (1) If human beings use words they mean something particular and what they mean can be discovered by scientific methods. (2) There is a fixed number of domains of categorization, each made up of a fixed number of basic categories. I suggest that these two assumptions lead to Brave New World. (shrink)

Prototype theory makes a crucial distinction between central and peripheral sense of words. Geeraerts explores the implications of this model for a theory of semantic change, in the first full-scale treatment of the impact of the most recent developments in lexicological theory on the study of meaning change. He identifies structural features of the development of word meanings which follow from a prototype-theoretical model of semantic structure, and incorporates these diachronic prototypicality effects into a theory of meaning change.

Over the past four decades, two distinct alternatives have emerged to rule-based models of how linguistic categories are stored and represented as cognitive structures, namely the prototype and exemplar theories. Although these models were initially thought to be mutually exclusive, shifts from one mechanism to the other have been observed in category learning experiments, bringing the models closer together. In this paper we implement a technique akin to varying abstraction modelling, that assumes intermediate abstraction processes to underlie category representations and (...) categorization decisions; we do so using familiar statistical techniques such as regression and clustering that track frequency distributions in input. With this model we simulate, on the basis of actual usage of Russian try verbs and Finnish think verbs as observed in corpora, how prototypes for near-synonymous verbs could be formed from concrete exemplars at different levels of abstraction.In so doing, we take a closer look at the cognitive linguistic flirtation with multiple categorization theories, suggesting three improvements anchored in the fact that cognitive linguistics is a usage-based theory of language. Firstly, we show that language provides support for considering single prototype and full exemplar models as opposite ends along a continuum of abstraction. Secondly, we present a methodology that simulates how prototypes can be obtained from exemplars at more than one level of abstraction in a systematic and verifiable way. And thirdly, we illustrate our claims on the basis of work on verbs, denoting intangible events that are neither stable in nor independent of time and express relational concepts; this implies that verbs are more susceptible to their meanings being influenced by the concepts they relate. (shrink)

Our goal is to use prototype analysis to distinguish the folk or culturally held understandings of love, romantic love, and sex and to specify, from the obtained data, the semantic relationship among these three associated concepts. By considering the semantic distinctions between these three concepts, we come to an unintended insight: if romantic love is a socio-cultural universal it does not appear to have the same evolutionary history as love or sex and this may account for its somewhat ambiguous status (...) in the scholarly literature on romantic love. We demonstrate that, in the United States, sex, in and of itself, is seldom conceived of as a relationship while love and romantic love are primarily viewed as relational. Our findings, though preliminary, strongly suggest that romantic love is a synthesis of two evolutionary drives: love and sex. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to present a topological method for constructing discretizations of topological conceptual spaces. The method works for a class of topological spaces that the Russian mathematician Pavel Alexandroff defined more than 80 years ago. The aim of this paper is to show that Alexandroff spaces, as they are called today, have many interesting properties that can be used to explicate and clarify a variety of problems in philosophy, cognitive science, and related disciplines. For instance, recently, (...) Ian Rumfitt used a special type of Alexandroff spaces to elucidate the logic of vague concepts in a new way. Moreover, Rumfitt’s class of Alexandroff spaces can be shown to provide a natural topological semantics for Susanne Bobzien’s “logic of clearness”. Mainly due to the work of Peter Gärdenfors and his collaborators, conceptual spaces have become an increasingly popular tool of dealing with a variety of problems in the fields of cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics and philosophy. For Gärdenfors’s conceptual spaces, geometrically defined discretizations play an essential role. These tessellations can be shown to be extensionally equivalent to topological tessellations that can be constructed for Alexandroff spaces in general. Thereby, Rumfitt’s and Gärdenfors’s constructions turn out to be special cases of an approach that works for a more general class of spaces, namely, for weakly scattered Alexandroff spaces. The main aim of this paper is to show that this class of spaces provides a convenient framework for conceptual spaces as used in epistemology and related disciplines in general. Weakly scattered Alexandroff spaces are useful for elucidating problems related to the logic of vague concepts, in particular they offer a solution of the Sorites paradox. Further, they provide a semantics for the logic of clearness that overcomes certain problems of the concept of higher-order vagueness. Moreover, these spaces help find a natural place for classical syllogistics in the framework of conceptual spaces. The specialization order of Alexandroff spaces can be used to refine the all-or-nothing distinction between prototypical and non-prototypical stimuli in favor of a gradual distinction between more or less prototypical elements of conceptual spaces. The greater conceptual flexibility of the topological approach helps avoid some inherent inadequacies of the geometrical approach, for instance, the so-called “thickness problem”. Finally, it is shown that the Alexandroff spaces offer an appropriate framework to deal with digital conceptual spaces that are gaining more and more importance in the areas of artificial intelligence, computer science and related disciplines. (shrink)

Fans of ‘roguelike’ video games have long been engaged in an intense debate over what this genre label means, and how we should understand the task of thinking about it. This article argues that the attempt to define ‘roguelike’ known as the ‘Berlin Interpretation’ is an example of the ‘prototype theory’ of categorization in action, and considers the strengths and weaknesses of this type of categorization for understanding video game genres. Using examples from roguelike fan discourse, it shows how the (...) problem with the Interpretation lied in its privileging game mechanics as the salient features of games on which to ground its definition, where a more productive place to start would have been experience and skills, which can also be extrapolated from prototypical examples. (shrink)

The species problem is often described as the abundance of conflicting definitions of _species_, such as the biological species concept and phylogenetic species concepts. But biologists understand the notion of species in a non-definitional as well as a definitional way. In this article I argue that when they understand _species_ without a definition in their mind, their understanding is often mediated by the notion of _good species_, or prototypical species, as the idea of ``prototype'' is explicated in cognitive psychology. This (...) distinction helps us make sense of several puzzling phenomena regarding biologists' dealing with species, such as the fact that in everyday research biologists often behave as if the species problem is solved, while they should be fully aware that it is not. I also briefly discuss implications of this finding, including that some extant attempts to answer what the nature of species is have an inadequate assumption about how the notion of species is represented in biologists' minds. (shrink)

Although we have gained great insight into the variety of cultural influences on emotion concept prototypes from a plethora of studies examining such cross-cultural effects, there has been relatively little academic focus on the nature of emotion concept prototypes within a cultural perspective. Our discussion of the nature of emotion concept prototypes centres on essentialist versus non-essentialist principles. We argue that at a general, decontextualised level, essentialist and non-essentialist principles predict similarity in the structure of emotion concept (...) prototypes. We further argue that context is central in assessments of the nature of emotion concept prototypes from a cultural perspective. Rather than asking how emotion concept prototypes differ as a consequence of how certain influences might vary from one culture to another, a key question is whether emotion concept prototypes vary in different contexts within and between cultures and what this might inform us about the nature of emotion concept prototypes. (shrink)

Practice-based immersive design research produces rich artefacts but often weakly traceable claims. Prototype operation, designer reflection, technical traces, participant accounts, and theoretical interpretation may be combined even though they support different inferences. This short article proposes the Prototype-to-Claim Traceability Protocol (PCTP), developed through methodological synthesis and demonstrated through an artefact-centred reconstruction of four immersive VR prototypes: Resonance of Light, Breathing Space, Temporal Displacement, and Echoes of Self. No participant quotations, outcomes, recordings, transcripts, or personal data are reported. The protocol (...) separates five evidence classes and pairs them with descriptive, relational, explanatory, and transfer claims. Its six-stage workflow covers evidence planning, source identification, artefact versioning, source-near coding, claim–evidence mapping, and negative-case/verb auditing. The PCTP treats absent or retrospective records as limits rather than invitations to reconstruct evidence. It offers a compact method for retaining the epistemic value of making while increasing auditability, reflexivity, and ethical restraint. Keywords: practice-based research; research through design; virtual reality; prototype; traceability; evidence; reflexivity. (shrink)

In a previous paper the concept of disease was fuzzy-logically analyzed and a sketch was given of a prototype resemblance theory of disease (Sadegh-Zadeh (2000). J. Med. Philos., 25:605–38). This theory is outlined in the present paper. It demonstrates what it means to say that the concept of disease is a nonclassical one and, therefore, not amenable to traditional methods of inquiry. The theory undertakes a reconstruction of disease as a category that in contradistinction to traditional views is not based (...) on a set of common features of its members, that is individual diseases, but on a few best examples of the category, called its prototypes, and a similarity relationship such that a human condition is considered a disease if it resembles a prototype. It enables new approaches to resolving many of the stubborn problems associated with the concept of disease. (shrink)

The foregoing considerations support the conjecture that prototypes are semi-compositional in the sense that there exist unboundedly many combinations of nouns with non-exceptional adjectives, which satisfy the rule default-to-prototype and hence are compositional. Presumably there also exist unboundedly many combinations of nouns with exceptional adjectives, which violate DP and hence are non-compositional. An analysis of the connection between productivity and compositionality has been suggested by Robbins. He argues that, for the explanation of productivity, one need not assume that conceptual (...) meanings always compose—it is enough that they compose in infinitely many cases. Since semi-compositionality entails the existence of unboundedly many non-compositional cases, non-compositionality cannot be dealt away with a finite list of idiomatic exceptions, but is a genuine feature of prototype semantics in natural language. (shrink)

This paper introduces the Transfer Learning Particle Swarm for Clustering (TLPSC), a novel algorithm that integrates Particle Swarm Clustering (PSC) with Prototype-Based Transfer Learning to enhance clustering performance. By leveraging knowledge from a source domain, TLPSC improves cluster formation, particularly in sparse or noisy data scenarios. Experimental results show that TLPSC consistently outperforms traditional methods, including K-Means, Gaussian Mixture Models, and standard PSC, across multiple evaluation metrics, such as Normalized Mutual Information, Adjusted Rand Index, Silhouette Score, and Davies–Bouldin Index. TLPSC (...) effectively preserves the structure of the data and forms cohesive partitions, highlighting its robustness and applicability to complex clustering tasks. (shrink)

An integrated representation of large‐scale space, or cognitive map, colled PLAN, is presented that attempts to address a broader spectrum of issues than has been previously attempted in a single model. Rather than examining way‐finding as a process separate from the rest of cognition, one or the fundamental goals of this work is to examine how the wayfinding process is integrated into general cognition. One result of this approach is that the model is “heads‐up,” or scene‐based, because it takes advantage (...) of the properties of the human visual system and, particularly, the visual system's split into two pathways. The emphasis on the human location or “where” system is new to cognitive mapping and is port of an attempt to synthesize prototype theory, associative networks and location together in a connectionist system. Not all of PLAN is new, however. Many of its parts have analogues in one or another preexisting theory. What makes PLAN unique is integrating the various components into a coherent whole, and the capacity of this resulting system to speak to a wide range of constraints. Our approach emphasizes adaptiveness; thus, our focus on such issues as ease of use and efficiency of learning. The result is a model that has a stronger relationship both to the environment, and to the ways that humans interact with it, compared with previous models. The resulting model is examined in some detail and compared to other systems. (shrink)

Concepts are mental representations that are the constituents of thought. EdouardMachery claims that psychologists generally understand concepts to be bodies of knowledge or information carrying mental states stored in long term memory that are used in the higher cognitive competences such as in categorization judgments, induction, planning, and analogical reasoning. While most research in the concepts field generally have been on concrete concepts such as LION, APPLE, and CHAIR, this paper will examine abstract moral concepts and whether such concepts may (...) have prototype and exemplar structure. After discussing the philosophical importance of this project and explaining the prototype and exemplar theories, criticisms will be made against philosophers, who without experimental support from the sciences of the mind, contend that moral concepts have prototype and/or exemplar structure. Next, I will scrutinize Mark Johnson’s experimentally-based argument that moral concepts have prototype structure. Finally, I will show how our moral concepts may indeed have prototype and exemplar structure as well as explore the further ethical implications that may be reached by this particular moral concepts conclusion. (shrink)

Resumen: La tragedia clásica en China, como forma literaria única, encarna el espíritu cultural de la nación y posee un profundo patrimonio histórico y un valor estético distintivo. Desde tiempos antiguos, la tragedia ha ocupado un lugar importante en la historia de la literatura China, reflejlas preocupaciones públicas sobre la realidad social y su contemplación del destino humano. Como método de investigación interdisciplin, el análisis de prototipos proporciona nuevas perspectivas y herramientas teóricas para profundizar en las connode la tragedia. El (...) estudio de los prototipos de la tragedia clásica en China ayuda a revelar la trayectoria de desarrollo y las leyes inherentes de la tragedia clásica en la historia. Este artículo toma el marco de la teoría de prototipos para analizar los prototipos de la tragedia clásica en China, con el objetivo de proporcionar la base teórica para la investigación relacionada. (shrink)

Human cloning until recently has been considered to belong to the domain of science fiction; now it is a tangible possibility, a hopeful as well as a fearsome one. One of the fears that necessarily come along with it is about the peril cloning might represent for human uniqueness, since the clones are expected to be identical to their prototypes; this would unavoidably compromise moral agents’ right to a unique identity. In this paper I will put under examination the (...) argument against cloning that is based upon the right to a unique identity; I will argue that cloning represents no actual threat for anybody’s unique identity, therefore this argument is futile. I will also support the view that the so-called right to a unique identity is not as indisputable as to serve as the basis of a moral argument against human reproductive cloning. (shrink)

This article demonstrates the potential of using hierarchical Bayesian methods to relate models and data in the cognitive sciences. This is done using a worked example that considers an existing model of category representation, the Varying Abstraction Model (VAM), which attempts to infer the representations people use from their behavior in category learning tasks. The VAM allows for a wide variety of category representations to be inferred, but this article shows how a hierarchical Bayesian analysis can provide a unifying explanation (...) of the representational possibilities using 2 parameters. One parameter controls the emphasis on abstraction in category representations, and the other controls the emphasis on similarity. Using 30 previously published data sets, this work shows how inferences about these parameters, and about the category representations they generate, can be used to evaluate data in terms of the ongoing exemplar versus prototype and similarity versus rules debates in the literature. Using this concrete example, this article emphasizes the advantages of hierarchical Bayesian models in converting model selection problems to parameter estimation problems, and providing one way of specifying theoretically based priors for competing models. (shrink)

The question of how people represent emotions is eminently important for a number of different domains of psychological research. The present study tested the assumption that emotion concepts are represented similar to theories in that they are comprised of a set of causally interrelated features. Using emotional scenarios and investigating the emotion concepts of anger, anxiety, and sadness it was found that people's representations of emotion concepts essentially involved the representation of the causal relation of emotion features and that the (...) causal status of a feature determined the feature's centrality in the concept. Moreover, people's representations of emotion concepts corresponded to basic assumptions of cognitive emotion theories, namely that cognitive appraisals cause other surface features of emotion, like expression and behaviour. By providing evidence for a theory-based representation, the present results show that the classical and the prototype approach are insufficient to model the representation of emotion concepts. (shrink)

Disillusionment is acknowledged to be a painful process with important personal and social consequences. However, scientific conceptualisations of the experience are inconsistent. Across four studies, we examined whether lay conceptions of disillusionment produce a consistent pattern of features. In Study 1 (N = 204), we extracted 19 features of disillusionment from open-ended participant definitions. In Study 2 (N = 131), participants rated the centrality of these features and indicated that features such as discovery, disappointment, and loss, were highly representative, while (...) features such as hopelessness, orientation, and truth, were more peripheral. In two further studies, we used experimental designs to test the diagnosticity of these features. In Study 3 (N = 155), participants rated vignettes descriptions as more disillusioning when they were based on more, rather than less, prototypical disillusionment features. Given that disappointment is a feature of disillusionment, we conducted Study 4 (N = 60) to test whether the extracted features effectively distinguish disillusionment from disappointment. Overall, we found evidence to suggest that disillusionment contains a consistent set of features, and represents a state of negative epistemic affect associated with the violation of core assumptions. These results create avenues for research on disillusionment, its antecedents and its consequences. (shrink)

An argument that makes use of a generalization activates the prototype for the category used in the generalization. We conducted two experiments that investigated how the activation of the prototype affects the persuasiveness of the argument. The results of the experiments suggest that the features of the prototype overshadow and partly overwrite the actual facts of the case. The case is, to some extent, judged as if it had the features of the prototype instead of the features it actually has. (...) This prototype effect increases the persuasiveness of the argument in situations where the audience finds the judgment more warranted for the prototype than for the actual case, but decreases persuasiveness in situations where the audience finds the judgment less warranted for the prototype than for the actual case. (shrink)

This essay adopts an internalist perspective in order to address a theme central to lexical semantics: the concept of prototype and its associated theories. Assuming a phenomenological point of view enables Violi to explore the crucial topic of the relation between categorization and semantics, or in other words, the difference between categorial prototypicality and semantic typicality. These notions concern, respectively, the prototypicality of something as the most central instance within the superordinate category, and something as the most regular instance within (...) the category. From this point of view, Violi’s essay links closely with Geeraerts’s contribution, which deals with the problem of prototypicality from a semasiological standpoint. Moreover, since it analyses typicality in terms of morphological and perceptive characteristics, it also connects closely with those by Croft and Wood (different images structuring the same content), Kövecses (typicality in emotions), Wildgen (inherent dynamic of language), and Albertazzi (foundational role of perception). Finally, by exploring aspects to do with context, frame, limited set of features, and the nature of the componential structure of meaning, the essay develops several of the issues discussed by Albertazzi in the Introduction. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the implications of recent empirical research on concept representation for the philosophical enterprise of conceptual analysis. I argue that conceptual analysis, as it is commonly practiced, is committed to certain assumptions about the nature of our intuitive categorization judgments. I then try to show how these assumptions clash with contemporary accounts of concept representation in cognitive psychology. After entertaining an objection to my argument, I close by considering ways in which conceptual analysis might be altered (...) to accord better with the empirical work. (shrink)

Strategic manoeuvring while taking the institutional preconditions into account results in the various domains of argumentative reality in different kinds of argumentative patterns, consisting of specific constellations of argumentative moves. Depending on the institutional preconditions, different “prototypical” argumentative patterns will come into being in the various (clusters of) communicative activity types. In this chapter some prototypical argumentative patterns are described that are characteristic of communicative activity types in the political, the medical and the legal domain. It is explained that further (...) research is required concerning other prototypical argumentative patterns, “stereotypical” argumentative patterns which occur frequently, differences caused by the cultural or ideological background, “strategic scenarios”, “argumentative styles”, and interventions based on observations of argumentative patterns. (shrink)

Elimination of imaginaries for 1-variable definable equivalence relations is proved for a theory of algebraically closed valued fields with new sorts for the disc spaces. The proof is constructive, and is based upon a new framework for proving elimination of imaginaries, in terms of prototypes which form a canonical family of formulas for defining each set that is definable with parameters. The proof also depends upon the formal development of the tree-like structure of valued fields, in terms of valued (...) trees, and a decomposition of valued trees which is used in the coding of certain sets of discs. (shrink)

Role congruity theory affirms that female managers face more difficulties at work because of the incongruity between female gender and leadership role expectations. Furthermore, due to this incongruity, it is harder for female managers to perceive themselves as authentic leaders. However, followers’ attributions of prototypicality could attenuate this role incongruity and have implications on a managers’ organizational identification. Hence, we expect male managers to be more authentic and to identify more with their organizations, when compared to female managers who are (...) low in prototypicality. We hypothesized that authentic leadership dimensions mediate the relation between managers’ biological gender and their OID. However, this indirect effect is conditional of these managers' team prototypicality. For testing these hypotheses, we conducted an online experiment with 149 participants from different work sectors using a 2 × 2 between-subject design. As predicted, men scored higher on authentic leadership, and three dimensions partially mediated the effect of participants’ biological gender on OID. In the low team prototypicality condition female managers scored lower in authentic leadership and identified less with the organization, whereas in the high team prototypicality condition, no gender differences were found. (shrink)

The proofs of universally quantified statements, in mathematics, are given as “schemata” or as “prototypes” which may be applied to each specific instance of the quantified variable. Type Theory allows to turn into a rigorous notion this informal intuition described by many, including Herbrand. In this constructive approach where propositions are types, proofs are viewed as terms of λ-calculus and act as “proof-schemata”, as for universally quantified types. We examine here the critical case of Impredicative Type Theory, i. e. (...) Girard's system F, where type-quantification ranges over all types. Coherence and decidability properties are proved for prototype proofs in this impredicative context. (shrink)

The Page target article is interesting because of apparent coverage of many psychological phenomena with simple, unified neural techniques. However, prototype phenomena cannot be covered because the strongest response would be to the first-learned stimulus in each category rather than to a prototype stimulus or most frequently presented stimuli. Alternative methods using distributed coding can also achieve portability of network knowledge.

It has been claimed that the prototype theory of concepts supports two controversial claims in the philosophy of art: that art cannot be defined, and that the possession of a certain sort of historical narrative is a sufficient but not necessary means of determining the art status of contested works. It is argued here that two sorts of considerations undermine the thesis that prototype theory offers significant support to anti-definitionism and historical narrativism. First, there is reason to think that prototype (...) theory is as a psychological theory not the sort of view that can support philosophical theories like anti-definitionism and historical narrativism. Second, well-known objections and theoretical alternatives to prototype theory theory raise serious questions about that theory’s own credentials. (shrink)

In the present paper, we shall discuss the notion of prototype and show its benefits. First, we shall argue that the prototypes of common-sense concepts are necessary for making prompt and reliable categorisations and inferences. However, the features constituting the prototype of a particular concept are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for determining category membership; in this sense, the prototype might lead to conclusions regarded as wrong from a theoretical perspective. That being said, the prototype remains essential to handling (...) most ordinary situations and helps us to perform important cognitive tasks. To exemplify this point, we shall focus on disease concepts. Our analysis concludes that the prototypical conception of disease is needed to make important inferences from a practical and clinical point of view. Moreover, it can still be compatible with a classical definition of disease, given in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. In the first section, we shall compare the notion of stereotype, as it has been introduced in philosophy of language by Hilary Putnam, with the notion of prototype, as it has been developed in the cognitive sciences. In the second section, we shall discuss the general role of prototypical information in cognition and stress its centrality. In the third section, we shall apply our previous discussion to the specific case of medical concepts, before briefly summarising our conclusions in section four. (shrink)

It has been argued that prototypes cannot compose, and that for this reason concepts cannot be prototypes (Osherson and Smith in Cognition 9:35–58, 1981; Fodor and Lepore in Cognition 58:253–270, 1996; Connolly et al. in Cognition 103:1–22, 2007). In this paper I examine the intensional and extensional approaches to prototype compositionality, arguing that neither succeeds in their present formulations. I then propose a hybrid extensional theory of prototype compositionality, according to which the extension of a complex concept is (...) determined as a function of what triggers its constituent prototypes. I argue that the theory escapes the problems traditionally raised against extensional theories of compositionality. (shrink)

120 students in grades 3 to 7 (aged 8 to 13) heard an argumentative text and were immediately submitted to a free recall task. The results show that before grade 7, the subjects did not view the text as argumentative. The discussion centers on the relevancy of a prototypical argumentative schema in accounting for these findings.

There is a disparity between the multitude of apparently successful expert system prototypes and the scarcity of expert systems in real everyday use. Modern tools make it deceptively easy to make reasonable prototypes, but these prototypes are seldom made subject to serious evaluation. Instead the development team confronts their product with a set of cases, and the primary evaluation criterion is the percentage of correct answers: we are faced with a “95% syndrome”. Other aspects related to the (...) use of the system are almost ignored. There is still a long way to go from a promising prototype to a final system.It is maintained in the article that a useful test must be performed by future users in a situation that is as realistic as possible. If this is not done claims of usefulness cannot be justified. It is also stated that prototyping does not make “traditional” analysis and design obsolete, although the contents of these activities will change.In order to discuss the effects of using the systems a distinction between expert systems as media, tools and experts is proposed. (shrink)

Tolerance spaces are sets equipped with a reflexive, symmetric, but not necessarily transitive, relation of indistinguishability, and are useful for describing vagueness based on error-prone measurements. We show that any tolerance space can be embedded in one generated by comparisons using prototypical objects. As a result propositions, definable on a tolerance space can be translated into propositions behaving classically.

Innovation is ubiquitous and has become a universal term that is indispensable to describe interventions, projects, or products. Franziska Sörgel argues that emotions influence innovations as they are inherent in initial ideas, expectations and habitual evaluation criteria that impact the development process. Instead of assuming that the innovation process is subject to rational and linear creativity, the study adopts the notion of ›moral economies‹ by Lorraine Daston as a space for negotiation. Such an approach enables decision-makers to question the evaluation (...) criteria and patterns for technological developments before implementing them in society. (shrink)

This study examines how fictional portrayals of artificial intelligence (AI) shape cultural imagination and readiness for AI–human coexistence. Drawing on 42 works ranging from ancient mythology to contemporary film, anime, and games, it analyzes AI characters as narrative constructs endowed with agency, emotional expression, or social roles. Using a descriptive coding framework across four relational dimensions—form of address, relationship structure, autonomy, and emotional depth—this study identifies six recurring narrative types (Tools, Helpers, Caregivers, Partners, Seekers, Transcenders) and synthesizes them into three (...) broader phases of coexistence: Instrumental, Relational, and Autonomous. This analysis introduces the concept of typological shift to describe how AI characters move between types over narrative time, revealing dynamic patterns not captured by fixed classifications. The resulting phase-specific coexistence model illuminates how emotional engagement, functional complementarity, and mutual independence are balanced differently across narrative contexts, whereas relational-phase narratives foreground trust, care, and sustained interaction, autonomous-phase narratives highlight tensions arising from divergent goals, expanding forms of agency, or limits of mutual understanding. By conceptualizing fictional AI as cultural prototypes—as sites of ethical rehearsal and ethical imagination—this study contributes a comparative framework for understanding AI as a social and moral counterpart. The findings have implications for cross-cultural AI ethics, design imaginaries, and public engagement with emerging AI systems, underscoring the importance of cultural imagination in preparing societies for AI–human coexistence. (shrink)

ABB words in Chinese, e.g., hēi-qīqī ‘pitch black’, have been studied for a long time. Most traditional studies analyze these words through derivational rules involving empty suffixes. However, this is problematic, as they are better seen as compounds involving a prosaic A and an ideophonic BB part. By treating ABB as a schema sanctioned by collocate–ideophonic constructions, it is possible to investigate other similar patterns. A corpus study (more than 5,000 tokens) revealed that on the level of schemas, ABB truly (...) acts as a prototype of such constructions, but that it is far from the only pattern to be identified. A second corpus-based study on the level of exemplars showed there are different pockets of salience and non-uniformity in the data from four angles: cue validity, frequency, dispersion, and constructional preference. This paper provides evidence that the traditional ABB narrative needs to be complemented with usage-based data, and grapple with the lexical salience effects this brings along for words involving iconicity. (shrink)

Debates about moral judgments have raised questions about the roles of reasoning, culture, and conflict. In response, the cognitive prototype model explains that over time, through training, and as a result of cognitive development, people construct notions of blameworthy and praiseworthy behavior by abstracting out salient properties that lead to an ideal representation of each. These properties are the primary features of moral prototypes and include social context interpretation, intentionality, consent, and outcomes. According to this model, when the properties (...) are uniform and coherent, they depict a promoral or immoral prototype, relative to the orientations of the properties. A promoral prototype is represented by an action that is supported by the culture, intentionally benevolent or other-regarding, consensual, and resulting in positive outcomes. An immoral prototype is an action that is condemned by the culture, intentionally malevolent or self-serving, lacking consent, and resulting in negative outcomes. It is hypothesized that moral prototypes will result in a high level of agreement and require effortless processing. Alternatively, when properties conflict or the situation deviates from the prototype, a nonprototype will result. It is hypothesized that nonprototypical situations will act as a source of moral disagreement and may require more effortful processing. (shrink)