The Psychology of Abstraction

Abstract

The problem of concepts began life as a philosophical issue. How is it that we are able to have general concepts, such as DOG or HUMAN, that enable us to think and talk about types of things, and to infer the properties of indefinitely many objects with which we have no direct experience? This cognitive question about our concepts was always raised at some point when philosophers dealt with the problem of universals. For the classical empiricists, indeed, the cognitive problem was the problem of universals, for they believed, with John Locke, "that genernl and universal belong not to the real existence of things; but are the inventions and creatures of the understanding, made by it for its own use, and concern only signs, whether words or ideas" (1959: 21). Thus Locke, Berkeley, and Hume were all concerned with the mental processes by which abstract concepts could be formed from the observation of particular instances, and by which abstract words could come to represent classes of particulars. More generally, the problem of concepts was seen as the epistemological side of the problem of universals.Throughout much of twentieth-century philosophy, however, this link has been denied. To put what is really a complex development into a formula: the abstract character of words became a topic for semantics and philosophy of language, while issues about the structure of concepts, and the process of acquiring them, were assigned to psychology. This division of labour has borne fruit. Psychological research, especially in the past decade, has discovered things about our concepts which philosophical speculation never dreamt of. O n the other hand, the psychological theories put forward to explain these phenomena exhibit internal logical difficulties which stem, we believe, from their failure to address certain underlying issues about abstraction-the very philosophical issues, in fact, which Locke and the other empiricists wrestled with. Our goal in this paper is to demonstrate that point in some detail. The argument, if it succeeds, will show that the relationship between empirical research and philosophical analysis is considerably more complex than has frequently been assumed.In the first part of the essay, we set the stage by reviewing some of the experimental findings, and sketching the theoretical options offered by cog-44 nitive psychology. In the second part, we lay out the basic underlying issue, and show how it arises within each of the theories. The final section reviews several possible ways of escaping the impasse, indicating what we take to be the merits and problems of each. At several points along the way, we will also touch briefly on recent work in the semantics of natural kind terms.

Categorical perception effects induced by category learning.

“…Those were the conditions under which it makes sense to neglect the differences among stimuli (i.e., to compress them). In our studies, where the differences between stimuli were readily identified, the categorization task did not present the perceptual discrimination problem encountered in Goldstone's paradigm, and the task could be most efficiently performed by, in Goldstone's (1994a) words, “learning to neglect differences along a categorization-relevant dimension” (p. 197; see also Kelley, 1984, for a theoretical prediction of a similar effect). Further research will be required to establish whether these kinds of differences in stimuli and procedure reliably predict whether the categorical perception effect is one of compression, expansion, or both.…”

A common structure for concepts of individuals, stuffs, and real kinds: More Mama, more milk, and more mouse

“…There is a great deal else to be said about how the mental machinery for abstracting from particulars to concepts actually works (see, e.g., Goldstone 1994;Kelley 1984;Livingston et al, in press), including the role of language and culture in the process (cf. Malt 1995), but the basic thrust of such discussions can and should return to a realist framework.…”

Recent views of conceptual structure.

“…For example, one can assume in this view either that conceptual representations include information about the central tendencies of all attributes displayed by the instances of a category or of only some (unspecified) subset of attributes (typically, those that are most relevant or heavily weighted). The former position (which might be called the prototype approach) argues that concepts represent potential instantiations, whereas the latter (which might be called the duster approach) does not (see alsoKelley & Krueger, 1984;Reed, 1972;.This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.…”