Revealing criterial vagueness in inconsistencies

Sixty undergraduate students made category membership decisions for each of 132 candidate exemplar-category name pairs (e.g., chess – Sports) in each of two separate sessions. They were frequently inconsistent from one session to the next, both for nominal categories such as Sports and Fish, and ad hoc categories such as Things You Rescue from a Burning House. A mixture model analysis revealed that several of these inconsistencies could be attributed to criterial vagueness: participants adopting different criteria for membership in the two sessions. This finding indicates that categorization is a probabilistic process, whereby the conditions for applying a category label are not invariant. Individuals have various functional meanings of nominal categories at their disposal and entertain competing goals for ad hoc categories

Children struggle beyond preschool-age in a continuous version of the ambiguous figures task

Children until the age of five are only able to reverse an ambiguous figure when they are informed about the second interpretation. In two experiments, we examined whether children’s difficulties would extend to a continuous version of the ambiguous figures task. Children (Experiment 1: 66 3- to 5-year olds; Experiment 2: 54 4- to 9-year olds) and adult controls saw line drawings of animals gradually morph—through well-known ambiguous figures—into other animals. Results show a relatively late developing ability to recognize the target animal, with difficulties extending beyond preschool-age. This delay can neither be explained with improvements in theory of mind, inhibitory control, nor individual differences in eye movements. Even the best achieving children only started to approach adult level performance at the age of 9, suggesting a fundamentally different processing style in children and adults

The Sorites paradox in psychology

status: publishe

Tolerant, classical, strict

In this paper we investigate a semantics for first-order logic originally proposed by R. van Rooij to account for the idea that vague predicates are tolerant, that is, for the principle that if x is P, then y should be P whenever y is similar enough to x. The semantics, which makes use of indifference relations to model similarity, rests on the interaction of three notions of truth: the classical notion, and two dual notions simultaneously defined in terms of it, which we call tolerant truth and strict truth. We characterize the space of consequence relations definable in terms of those and discuss the kind of solution this gives to the sorites paradox. We discuss some applications of the framework to the pragmatics and psycholinguistics of vague predicates, in particular regarding judgments about borderline cases