RECENT VIEWS OF CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE

This article reviews theories of concept structure proposed since the mid- 1970s, when the discovery of typicality effects led to the rejection of the view that instances of a concept share necessary and sufficient attributes. To replace that classical view, psychologists proposed the family resemblance and exemplar views (and hybrids of the 2), which argue that instances of a concept share a certain level of overall similarity, rather than necessary and sufficient attributes. These similarity-based views account for much of the typicality data but fail to provide an adequate explanation of the coherence of conceptual categories and of various context effects. Recently proposed explanation-based accounts address these issues but raise further questions about the distinction between concept-specific information and general knowledge and about the relationship between conceptual knowledge and various forms of inference.