Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind

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Women, Fire, and Dangerous ThingsWhat
Categories Reveal About the Mind
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Why Care About Categories

• Categorization is basic to experience. We
  categorize things automatically in order to make
  sense of the world.
• The majority of our words and concepts represent
  categories.
• These terms, representing categories, are how
  users navigate websites.

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What the PB Book Lacks....

• A cohesive theory of how people form categories.
• Definitive principles on what makes a good
  category, regardless of context.
• What if we could apply the key findings from
  experiments throughout the history of category
  theory in order to predict how users will label
  the content in a website, saving time and money
  in usability research?

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George Lakoff

• Professor of Cognitive Linguistics at the
  University of California at Berkeley since 1972.
• Most famous for his ideas about the centrality
  of metaphor to human thinking, political behavior
  and society.
• Began his career as a student of Noam Chomsky at
  MIT.

"Our brains take their input from the rest of our
bodies. What our bodies are like and how they
function in the world thus structures the very
concepts we can use to think. We cannot think
just anything - only what our embodied brains
permit."
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Criticism

• Lakoff's Germanic thoroughness comes as no
  unmixed blessing the lay reader, at least, may
  find interest in the author's ideas drowning in a
  sea of repetition and restatement... Raymond
  W. Gibbs, Jr.

• Lakoffs book is a tremendous piece of
  scholarship and an intellectual achievement of
  the first order. Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr.
• The latest offering from one of the foremost
  linguists of our time should not be missing from
  any library that claims to have holdings in the
  humanities, cognitive science, or education.
  Terence M. Odlin
• Stop! The! World! For! A! Moment! - Alexander
  Johannesen

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Classical Categories

• Defined by shared properties.
• Have clear boundaries.
• Conceptualized as abstract containers with things
  either inside or outside.
• Reflect categories in nature.

• Set theory reality characterized by abstract
  entities, properties of entities, and sets of
  entities. Categories formed only through union,
  intersection, and complementation of sets (Venn
  diagrams)

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Limitations of Classical Categories

• According to classical category theory
• No member of a category has any special status.
• All levels of a hierarchy are important and
  equivalent.

• Wittgenstein central and non-central members
• Austin some categories don't show family
  resemblances
• Berlin a single level of classification (the
  genus) is psychologically basic because human
  capacities for perception are utilized in the
  same way.

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Basic-Level Categories

• Basic in Four Respects
• Perception overall perceived shape a single
  mental image Gestalt.
• Function interaction with the world.
• Communication Shortest, most commonly used
  terms first words learned.
• Knowledge Organization Most attributes of
  category members are stored at this level.

• Categories that are cognitively basic are at the
  middle of the general-to-specific hierarchy.

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RoschPrototype Theory

• Classical theory also holds that
• If categories are defined only by properties that
  all members have, then no member should be a
  better example of the category than another.

• But,
• Eleanor Rosch found that categories, in general,
  have best examples, called prototypes, and that
  human capacities such as imagination play a
  role in categorization.

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Prototype Effects

• Assymmetries within a category
• Prototypes, stereotypes, or otherwise "typical"
  examples of things
• Demonstrated empirically (people are slower and
  less certain when categorizing "atypical" items
  (e.g., Is a penguin a bird? Is a lamp a piece of
  furniture?))?
• Imply not that some members are less members,
  but that category has additional internal
  structure, central to meaning and inexplicable by
  a (fuzzy) set theoretic model.

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Idealized Cognitive Model (ICM)

• Thesis We organize our knowledge with complex
  structured wholes (gestalts) called Idealized
  Cognitive Models.
• Category structures and prototype effects are
  by-products from attempts to fit these ungraded
  ICM's to the world.
• Bachelors?
• men in long-term unmarried couplings?
• boy abandoned in jungle to mature in isolation?
• the Pope?
• Combine to form clusters more psychologically
  basic than individual models

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Structuring ICMs

• ICMs basic schemas explain category structures
• radial (central member extension principles)
• metaphoric (mapping from experiential to abstract
  domain)
• metonymic (part stands for whole)

birth mother
adoptive mother
nurturance
birth
marital
genealogical
genetic
surrogate mother
foster mother

• Kinesthetic Image Schemas are concepts that
  metaphorically structure complex concepts (ICMs)?

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More is up, less is down

• In addition to structuring complex ICMs, image
  schemas are directly understood structures of
  their own
• Container, part-whole, link, interior-exterior,
  boundary, center-periphery, source-path-goal,
  up-down, front-back, linear-order
• Experiential basis
• Structure our experience preconceptually
• Metaphors map schemas to abstract domain,
  preserving logic
• Set theory interior-exterior, boundary,
  container basic logic metaphors

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Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things?

• On those remote pages it is written that animals
  are divided into (a) those that belong to the
  Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are
  trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f)
  fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are
  included in this classification, (i) those that
  tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable
  ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's
  hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just
  broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble
  flies from a distance.

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Case Study Dyirbal Classification

• Bayi men, kangaroos, possums,bats, most snakes,
  most fishes, some birds, most insects, the moon,
  storms, rainbows, boomerangs, some spears,etc.
• Balan women, bandicoots, dogs, platypus, some
  snakes, some fishes, most birds, some fireflies,
  scorpions, crickets, the hairy mary grub,anything
  connected with water or fire, sun and stars,
  shields, some spears, some trees, etc.
• Balam all edible fruit and the plants that bear
  them, tubers, ferns, honey, cigarettes, wine,
  cake
• Bala parts of the body, meat, bees, wind,
  yamsticks, some spears, most trees, grass, mud,
  stones, noises and language, etc.

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Balam nonflesh foods
Bayi (human) males animals
Bala everything else
Balan (human) females water fire fighting
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Rethinking Category Theory (and Linguistics,
Philosophy, AI, IA ...)

• Categorization in language is more often radial
  and metaphorical than hierarchical, and
  experientially-based
• Regardless of category type, general principles
  persist
• centrality
• chaining
• experiential domains
• idealized models
• specific knowledge
• the other
• no common properties
• motivation

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PB Book on Organization Labeling

• Organization schemes are often ambiguous, and
  should include topical access to content.
  Polysemy can make topical categorization
  difficult!
• Hierarchies form the basis for organization.
  Balances must be struck between
• exclusivity and inclusivity
• breadth and depth
• When designing a labeling system, consistency is
  stressed, and various sources, including social
  tagging, are suggested for ideas.

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PB Book on George Lakoff

• Make use of already-persistent image schemas and
  metaphors to structure navigation of websites
  (link, source-path-goal, up-down,
  center-periphery, part-whole)?
• Construct basic-level categories (think
  gestalts!)?
• Cleaner, more orderly, clean borders among
  categories may be drawn by choosing prototypical
  elements to represent categories
• Design navigation aids to move users to
  basic-level categories as soon as possible.

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Example University of Michigan Library
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Jorge Luis Borges, Information Architect

• If more than one classification scheme exists for
  a given set, how do we choose one over the other?
  How do we evaluate the internal coherence of a
  given classification scheme?
• Classification schemes can't be evaluated
  abstractly, a priori. As miscellaneous categories
  do exist in our minds, even if their use in a
  navigation system may be problematic, choice and
  coherence need to be assessed in respect to an
  empirical paradigm context, goals, users, the
  cultural climate from which the classification
  stems.
• Instead of top-down and bottom-up design models,
  try an up-and-down model where classification
  process starts in the middle, from the
  basic-level categories, grouping them in
  super-categories and splitting them in
  subordinate, more specific classes.

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Thanks!Questions?