Explain the four major theories of concepts: the classical view, the exemplar view, the prototype view and the theory view. WHat are their weak and strong points? What is some experimental evidence supporting or challenging these views?

Explain the four major theories of concepts: the classical view, the exemplar view, the prototype view and the theory view. WHat are their weak and strong points? What is some experimental evidence supporting or challenging these views?

The classical view is based on the idea, that all examples of one category have something in common, some fundamental characteristics that makes them belong to certain category. So, every category have a list of some characteristics that are necessary for being classified as something, that belongs to this category. So, in conclusion, all categories have defining features. But the idea of classical view has some problems, and the most serious of them are:

1) Failure to specify defining features - it means that something, that we might think is the defining feature, is not, in fact. For example someone can say (an older person), that books are made of paper, and younger people can argue, that it is not true, because we have ebooks now etc.
2) Goodness of example effects - classical view assume, that all examples of the category are equally good, because they share the same defining features. But that is not true, because some examples actually can be better, they can be more representable and meaningful.
3) Unclear cases - even if we assume, that if something has this defining features, it belongs to the category, there are still many unclear cases, in which it is hard to determine either it belongs to the category or not. People usually have problems with this cases, they do not agree with each other, or even contradict themselves.

Prototype view – according to this view, membership in a category is determined by comparing the object to a prototype that represents the category. For example, when asked to give an example of the concept furniture, chair is more frequently cited than, say, stool. High prototypicality means that a category member closely resembles the category prototype.

Advantage – works best for large categories
Disadvantage – atypical cases are lost in the overall average that creates a prototype.

Exemplar view- this approach involves determining whether an object is similar to standard object. The standard for an exemplar approach involves many examples, each one called an exemplar. Exemplars are actual members of the category that a person has encountered in the past. For example if a person has encountered sparrow, robin or a pigeon in the past, each of these would be an exemplar for the category ‘birds’.

Advantages –
1) By using real examples, we can take more easily into account atypical cases eg. flightless birds. We are therefore able to take into account individual cases so the exemplar view doesn’t discard information that might be useful later.
2) The second advantage is that the exemplar approach can deal more easily with variable categories eg. games
3) Works best for small categories

The theory view stresses that categorization and concepts is/are based on our knowledge and our theories about the world.

Medin & Shoben showed that our interpretation of white and gray is connected to our knowledge/out theory about how the world works. The participants in their experiment judged gray and white hair as being more similar than gray and black hair. Our knowledge of hair colors as we age explains this. When asked to judge the similarity between gray and white clouds vs. gray and black clouds the latter were judged to be more similar than the former. Our knowledge of clouds explains the results in this case.

A strength of this theory is that it actually deals to some extent with the question of why we have categories in the first place and why they are so sensitive. It also explains how meanaing is given to concepts, by knowledge.