You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

fubarobfusco comments on Review of Machery, 'Doing Without Concepts' - Less Wrong Discussion

8 Post author: lukeprog 29 November 2011 11:22PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (11)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 30 November 2011 04:04:11AM 2 points [-]

Having tried to read it, I get the idea that prototypes represent knowledge about a category of things in terms of typical properties of members of that categories (e.g. "dogs bark and pee on things"); whereas exemplars represent knowledge in terms of familiarity with individual members of the category (e.g. "dogs are like Fido and Lassie").

The description of theories seems substantially hazier:

Theories are bodies of causal, functional, generic, and nomological knowledge about categories, substances, types of events, and the like. A theory of dogs would consist of some such knowledge about dogs.

I'm having difficulty figuring out what this means.

Comment author: [deleted] 30 November 2011 05:26:49PM *  2 points [-]

I think that's meant to encompass the sort of "necessary and sufficient" rules-based reasoning that was originally associated with concepts-in-general. Whereas prototypes and exemplars denote fuzzy categories, theories are usually more straightforward.

At least, that's how I read it. Certainly, I would say that some human reasoning is of that form.