The modifier effect and property mutability

The modifier effect is the reduction in perceived likelihood of a generic property sentence, when the head noun is modified. We investigated the prediction that the modifier effect would be stronger for mutable than for central properties, without finding evidence for this predicted interaction over the course of five experiments. However Experiment 6, which provided a brief context for the modified concepts to lend them greater credibility, did reveal the predicted interaction. It is argued that the modifier effect arises primarily from a general lack of confidence in generic statements about the typical properties of unfamiliar concepts. Neither prototype nor classical models of concept combination receive support from the phenomenon

Machine-Proof Your Career

The Jetsons imagined a futuristic world where a typical work week was a single hour, two days a week. Technology took care of the rest for George Jetson and his co-workers – representing the great hope that technology would make human lives easier. But the animated series also foreshadowed a longstanding fear about automation: that it would inevitably steal human jobs and leave people struggling to find work in a technological world

Abstraction and context in concept representation

This paper develops the notion of abstraction in the context of the psychology of concepts, and discusses its relation to context dependence in knowledge representation. Three general approaches to modelling conceptual knowledge from the domain of cognitive psychology are discussed, which serve to illustrate a theoretical dimension of increasing levels of abstraction

Folk biology and external definitions

Atran’s thesis has strong implications for the doctrine of externalism in concepts (Fodor 1994). Beliefs about biological kinds may involve a degree of deference to scientific categories, but these categories are not truly scientific. They involve instead a folk view of science itself

Generics as reflecting conceptual knowledge

Generics are proposed to reflect the content of the conceptual system, whose prototype structure and vague boundaries make an unreliable basis for traditional treatments of truth and logic. Examples from the psychological literature are used to illustrate the relation between generics, similarity‐based reasoning and concepts