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15 - Comments on models and categorization theories: the razor's edge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

By
Douglas Medin
Edited by
Emmanuel M. Pothos  and
Andy J. Wills
Emmanuel M. Pothos
Affiliation:
Swansea University
Andy J. Wills
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Summary

If I may make a personal remark, one sign of old age is that people ask you to write commentaries on new(er) work. In the present case the invitation for me to write something may be linked to the publication of the Medin and Schaffer (1978) context theory of categorization model more than 30 years ago and/or the Smith and Medin (1981), Categories and Concepts book, almost as old. This ought to provide enough distance to view cumulative progress in this area of research and theory. Of course there was more than a little earlier work by Posner and Keele (1968), Reed (1973), and Smith, Shoben and Rips (1974) relevant to models and by Rosch, Mervis and others (e.g. Rosch, 1973, 1975; Rosch & Mervis, 1975; Rosch et al., 1976) laying out basic levels and goodness of example or typicality effects that reverberated through the cognitive sciences. The basic levels work was so important that it now has the status of being presupposed in developmental studies on the interaction of language and conceptual development (e.g., Waxman, 1989, 2002; Waxman & Lidz, 2006).

One way of assessing progress in an area is to evaluate how it is doing with respect to narrowness and insularity versus breadth. Cutting edge research seems like something that is inherently good, but it may be useful to examine what is being cut and how that edge is related to broader configurations.

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Formal Approaches in Categorization , pp. 325 - 331
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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