GEOLOGY 002 Lecture Notes - Lecture 25: Stereotype, Racialism, Essentialism
Document Summary
Concepts and categories: concept mental representations of an object, event or pattern, category a class of similar things that share an essential core or something similar in perceptual, biological or functional properties; provides rules and information. Constantly changing: conceptual knowledge knowledge enabling us to recognize objects and events and to make inferences about their properties, categorization process of matching objects to a category. Categorizing is assumed to be based on the similarity of an instance to some category or specification: classical approach. Hard boundaries; one object only belongs to one category. Limitation: not all members of categories have the main features. Typicality-effect cannot be explained (everyone would have the same definition of a category) Cannot explain intuitions about feeling that some things fit better into a category: prototype approach. Prototype starts with an average of every member. Explains typicality effect by reference to family resemblance. High typicality: a category member closely resembles the prototype.
