Concepts and Categories

Concepts and Categories PDF Author: Michael T. Hannan
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231549938
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Why do people like books, music, or movies that adhere consistently to genre conventions? Why is it hard for politicians to take positions that cross ideological boundaries? Why do we have dramatically different expectations of companies that are categorized as social media platforms as opposed to news media sites? The answers to these questions require an understanding of how people use basic concepts in their everyday lives to give meaning to objects, other people, and social situations and actions. In this book, a team of sociologists presents a groundbreaking model of concepts and categorization that can guide sociological and cultural analysis of a wide variety of social situations. Drawing on research in various fields, including cognitive science, computational linguistics, and psychology, the book develops an innovative view of concepts. It argues that concepts have meanings that are probabilistic rather than sharp, occupying fuzzy, overlapping positions in a “conceptual space.” Measurements of distances in this space reveal our mental representations of categories. Using this model, important yet commonplace phenomena such as our routine buying decisions can be quantified in terms of the cognitive distance between concepts. Concepts and Categories provides an essential set of formal theoretical tools and illustrates their application using an eclectic set of methodologies, from micro-level controlled experiments to macro-level language processing. It illuminates how explicit attention to concepts and categories can give us a new understanding of everyday situations and interactions.

Concepts and Categories

Concepts and Categories PDF Author: Michael T. Hannan
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231549938
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why do people like books, music, or movies that adhere consistently to genre conventions? Why is it hard for politicians to take positions that cross ideological boundaries? Why do we have dramatically different expectations of companies that are categorized as social media platforms as opposed to news media sites? The answers to these questions require an understanding of how people use basic concepts in their everyday lives to give meaning to objects, other people, and social situations and actions. In this book, a team of sociologists presents a groundbreaking model of concepts and categorization that can guide sociological and cultural analysis of a wide variety of social situations. Drawing on research in various fields, including cognitive science, computational linguistics, and psychology, the book develops an innovative view of concepts. It argues that concepts have meanings that are probabilistic rather than sharp, occupying fuzzy, overlapping positions in a “conceptual space.” Measurements of distances in this space reveal our mental representations of categories. Using this model, important yet commonplace phenomena such as our routine buying decisions can be quantified in terms of the cognitive distance between concepts. Concepts and Categories provides an essential set of formal theoretical tools and illustrates their application using an eclectic set of methodologies, from micro-level controlled experiments to macro-level language processing. It illuminates how explicit attention to concepts and categories can give us a new understanding of everyday situations and interactions.

Knowledge Concepts and Categories

Knowledge Concepts and Categories PDF Author: Koen Lamberts
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1135064415
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 479

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Book Description
Knowledge, Concepts and Categories brings together an overview of recent research on concepts and knowledge that abstracts across a variety of specific fields of cognitive psychology. Readers will find data from many different areas: developmental psychology, formal modelling, neuropsychology, connectionism, philosophy, and so on. The book can be divided into three parts. Chapters 1 to 5 each contain a thorough and systematic review of a significant aspect of research on concepts and categories. Chapters 6 to 9 are concerned primarily with issues related to the taxonomy of human knowledge. Finally, Chapters 10 to 12 discuss formal models of categorization and function learning. The purpose of these three chapters is to provide a few examples of current formal modelling of conceptual behaviour. Knowledge, Concepts and Categories will be welcomed by students and researchers in cognitive psychology and related areas as an unusually wide-ranging and authoritative review of an important subfield of psychology.

The Big Book of Concepts

The Big Book of Concepts PDF Author: Gregory Murphy
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262250061
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 574

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Book Description
Concepts embody our knowledge of the kinds of things there are in the world. Tying our past experiences to our present interactions with the environment, they enable us to recognize and understand new objects and events. Concepts are also relevant to understanding domains such as social situations, personality types, and even artistic styles. Yet like other phenomenologically simple cognitive processes such as walking or understanding speech, concept formation and use are maddeningly complex. Research since the 1970s and the decline of the "classical view" of concepts have greatly illuminated the psychology of concepts. But persistent theoretical disputes have sometimes obscured this progress. The Big Book of Concepts goes beyond those disputes to reveal the advances that have been made, focusing on the major empirical discoveries. By reviewing and evaluating research on diverse topics such as category learning, word meaning, conceptual development in infants and children, and the basic level of categorization, the book develops a much broader range of criteria than is usual for evaluating theories of concepts.

Categories and Concepts

Categories and Concepts PDF Author: Edward E. Smith
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780674866263
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description


Basic Concepts of Enriched Category Theory

Basic Concepts of Enriched Category Theory PDF Author: Gregory Maxwell Kelly
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521287029
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description


Concepts and Categories

Concepts and Categories PDF Author: Isaiah Berlin
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448155460
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Although Isaiah Berlin liked to say that he left philosophy for the history of ideas after the Second World War, there is a decided continuity between his more purely philosophical writings, most of which are collected in this volume, and the more historical work for which he is better known. Included here are Berlin's early arguments against logical positivism and later essays which more evidently reflect his life-long interest in political theory, intellectual history and the philosophy of history. In two related pieces he gives his view on the philosopher's task, to uncover the various models - the concepts and categories - that we bring to our experience, and that help to form it. In his own words 'The goal of philosophy is always the same, to assist men to understand themselves and thus operate in the open, and not wildly, in the dark.'

Categories and Concepts

Categories and Concepts PDF Author: Iven van Mechelen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
A book aimed at advanced undergraduates and graduates in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, linguistics, applied mathematics and data analysis.

The Cambridge Handbook of Psycholinguistics

The Cambridge Handbook of Psycholinguistics PDF Author: Michael Spivey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139536141
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 1297

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Book Description
Our ability to speak, write, understand speech and read is critical to our ability to function in today's society. As such, psycholinguistics, or the study of how humans learn and use language, is a central topic in cognitive science. This comprehensive handbook is a collection of chapters written not by practitioners in the field, who can summarize the work going on around them, but by trailblazers from a wide array of subfields, who have been shaping the field of psycholinguistics over the last decade. Some topics discussed include how children learn language, how average adults understand and produce language, how language is represented in the brain, how brain-damaged individuals perform in terms of their language abilities and computer-based models of language and meaning. This is required reading for advanced researchers, graduate students and upper-level undergraduates who are interested in the recent developments and the future of psycholinguistics.

Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science

Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science PDF Author: Henri Cohen
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0128097663
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 1277

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Book Description
Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science, Second Edition presents the study of categories and the process of categorization as viewed through the lens of the founding disciplines of the cognitive sciences, and how the study of categorization has long been at the core of each of these disciplines. The literature on categorization reveals there is a plethora of definitions, theories, models and methods to apprehend this central object of study. The contributions in this handbook reflect this diversity. For example, the notion of category is not uniform across these contributions, and there are multiple definitions of the notion of concept. Furthermore, the study of category and categorization is approached differently within each discipline. For some authors, the categories themselves constitute the object of study, whereas for others, it is the process of categorization, and for others still, it is the technical manipulation of large chunks of information. Finally, yet another contrast has to do with the biological versus artificial nature of agents or categorizers. Defines notions of category and categorization Discusses the nature of categories: discrete, vague, or other Explores the modality effects on categories Bridges the category divide - calling attention to the bridges that have already been built, and avenues for further cross-fertilization between disciplines

The Origin of Concepts

The Origin of Concepts PDF Author: Susan Carey
Publisher: Oxford Series in Cognitive Dev
ISBN: 0199838801
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 609

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Book Description
Carey begins by characterizing the innate starting point for conceptual development, namely systems of core cognition. Representations of core cognition are the output of dedicated input analyzers, as with perceptual representations, but these core representations differ from perceptual representations in having more abstract contents and richer functional roles. Carey argues that the key to understanding cognitive development lies in recognizing conceptual discontinuities in which new representational systems emerge that have more expressive power than core cognition and are also incommensurate with core cognition and other earlier representational systems. Finally, Carey fleshes out Quinian bootstrapping, a learning mechanism that has been repeatedly sketched in the literature on the history and philosophy of science. She demonstrates that Quinian bootstrapping is a major mechanism in the construction of new representational resources over the course of children's cognitive development.