STABLE CONCEPTS AND CONTEXT-SENSITIVE CLASSIFICATION

This paper focuses on three apparently competing intuitions concerning the nature of concepts and their relation to word use. The first is that concepts are stable representations in long-term memory; the second is that word use is determined by conceptual content; the third is that the different uses of a given word map to the same conceptual content. Demonstrations of the context-sensitivity or instability of word use (in classification and typicality judgements) suggest, therefore, that these three intuitions cannot be jointly satisfied. Indeed, such demonstrations have lead Barsalou (1987) to claim that stable concepts are nothing more than ''analytic fictions'', thus denying the first intuition. In this paper I pursue an alternative interpretation of unstable word use, one which maintains the first two intuitions but denies the third. This interpretation is couched in terms of a Relational View of Concepts (RVC), which is presented in terms of a Prolog implementation involving constructs from Situation Theory (Barwise & Perry, 1983). RVC treats concepts as stable representations, but allows that different uses of the same word express different conceptual content. Though RVC does not represent typicality orderings directly within concepts, natural accounts of typicality and family resemblance emerge: typicality can be regarded as a by-product of binary yet context-sensitive classification; family resemblance can be regarded as a by-product of the mechanism by which different conceptual content for different uses of the same word is generated. These accounts suggest interesting points of divergence from Prototype theories of concepts.