Psychology

Categorization is a process of group conceptualization, where things tend to be classified according to what the person behind the classification thinks fit best. Normally entities are classified according to similar characteristics so that those which have common characteristics are grouped together. The field sometimes depends on training that someone is given when the person is being oriented to the world and it is not easy to change what one believes in. A common phenomenon worth of concern for psychological theories is the vagueness of many conceptual categories. Even though all categories can be said to have clear members and clear non-members, there are exceptions that are borderline to a category. There is always an element of vagueness in the use of common language terms that are sometimes fuzzy rendering some instances un-decidable. In relation to vagueness, it is the typicality of a category which is used as a core tenet of the prototype theory (Rosch,  Mervis, 1975 578).
The following study is aimed at looking at the ways in which people have classified in the past what influences them and are they successful or the contrary applies. This introduction part is aimed at justifying the classification methods used as either significant or insignificant and if so what do they require to incorporate to be successful. Members belonging to one category tend to have like features and the big question here is typicality, what role does it play in the mental representation of a category

In the recent times psychologists have renewed their interest in mental categories and their learning. The reason behind this is the rekindling of interest that has got to do with some apparently positive findings that seem to make the topic investigatable. In regard to this case what seems positive is the recent discussion on some concepts which were first addressed by Wittgenstein in (1953) followed by some concrete evidence later who seemed to second the findings of Wittgenstein Rosch (1981)  who found out some powerful empirical demonstrations of prototypicality effects. This paper is a continuation of a discussion and interpretation of protypicality theory of mental categories in light of some experiments which have been done. In summary, the findings lead to a cluster of descriptions which are less satisfactory for a theory of human conceptual structure which might have been hoped.

    A core idea in the study of categories is that members of one category are thought of having resemblance to their colleagues in the group and the members vary in their degree of typicality. The hypothesis in this introductory study is that the more typical an item is of the given category, the faster subjects will be to judge whether it is a member of that category. Subjects to a particular group have been found to take more time to confirm category membership when the thing is typical, and to take less time when it is a typical example. In this case the independent variable is the archetypal of the stimulus item and the dependent variable is reaction time (Wittgenstein, 1953 67).    The nature of cognitive representation of semantic categories at times bears a direct relevance to two important areas of psychological inquiry. The first one deals with the structure of categories and concepts and has implications for the way in which concepts and concept attainment should be studied in psychological research (Rosch, 1975 577). The second area is the nature of mental representations in General, a high-flying concern in the post behaviorist study of mental events (Putnam, 1975 1177). In respect to the issue of the nature of categories, Rosch has argued that many traditions of thought in psychology, linguistics and anthropology imply that categories are Aristotelian in nature implying that the categories are coherent, clearly bounded entities whose membership is distinct of an items possession of a simple set criterial features, in which all instances possessing the criterial attributes have full and equal degree of membership.

    It is worth of notice further that a domain which has lent itself to the manifestation of a type of categorical structure of contradictory to the Aristotelian is that of colour. There is evidence that colour categories are processed by the human mind, in terms of their internal structure colour categories have been found to be represented in cognition not as a set criterial features with clear-cut boundaries but rather in terms of a prototype of the category, surrounded by other colours of decreasing similarity to the prototype and of decreasing degree of membership. Categorization is aimed at using identities which will be having very clear cutting lines and not just approximations as in the case of colour because every person perceives colour in his own way so the categorization might be in different ways. There is also a case of people who are colour blind, how are they going to go through this exercise yet they dont have clear cuts on which colour they are seeing and which they are not. For Rosch, colour is a perceptual domain and its categorization is probably physiologically based because not all categories have an obvious perceptual basis and many categories may be culturally relative.

    Categorization has to address questions on how elements can be considered to belong in one category and how other categories are eliminated from certain groups. For example people can divide the world of objects into the dogs and non-dogs. The clearest demonstration that people do acquire and use such a category is that all of them, in a linguistic community, standardly use the same word dog to refer to more or less the same creatures.  In relation to this we can distinguish the extension of a dog from its category and from its linguistic title. All the real and projected creatures in the world that properly fall into the category dog form the extension of the category dog the English word is used to refer to the domesticated animal at home for security purposes and the category dog may be used to represent some mental representation that fixes the conditions under which the word dog is used. It is at many instances we have heard people abusing others as dogs and it really has to take the context to denote the meaning of using such an explanation where the animal is absent.

    Cognitive psychologists have been under criticism of the mental bases for some categorizations and what is the internal structure of such categories A possible answer to the puzzle would be that the word dog refers to a category that is unanalysable and such holistic theories have never been considered till recently. The reason for their unpopularity would be attributed to the desire to limit the set of atomic categories or elementary discriminations with which human must be assumed to be endowed. Some traditional theories have had an assumption that most common words are cover labels for mental categories that are themselves bundles of simpler mental categories. Knowledge of complex categories is then built by recognizing that some sensible elements recur together in the encounters of the sensorium with the external world and so by association get bundled together. Maybe for example what we call bird in English is an animal that flies, has wings, feathers, lays eggs and back limbs covered with scales. As by many proponents of feature theories, it is the structure of the real world as observed by the learner that gives rise to such categorizations and in the back of the mind of that person what has feathers tends to fly and lay eggs belongs to the complex category bird.

    A host of thinkers have shown that there is an enormous difficulty in explicating even so simple and a concrete a concept as a bird. They have also revealed that the difficulty becomes greater by orders of magnitude when confronted with an abstract functional concept like game. Perhaps psychologists are more than a little over exuberant in supposing it will be easier to explicate the concept concept (Putnam, 1975 1177). Arguments of whether a Childs language develops by becoming more or less abstract have received considerable attention (Putnam, 1975 1178). The present method makes possible a detailed investigation of the nature of the mental representations generated by category terms at any level of abstraction. The addition of such knowledge may make possible greater understanding of the nature of psychological representation, the nature of taxonomies and the process of abstraction.