Kalish C W
Department of Educational Psychology, University of Wisconsin, Madison 53706, USA.
Mem Cognit. 1995 May;23(3):335-53. doi: 10.3758/bf03197235.
A number of studies have argued that people view membership in animal and artifact categories as a matter of degree. These studies have generally failed to distinguish between the issues of typicality and category membership. Thus, data which have been taken to demonstrate that membership is a matter of degree may only demonstrate that typicality is graded. Partly on the basis of these findings, it has been argued that some categories are organized around an underlying essence. The essence determines membership absolutely. The present paper reports a series of studies that reexamine the question of graded membership. In the first study, subjects were asked to rate both typicality and category membership for the same stimuli as a way of distinguishing the two questions. A second method relied on the intuition that disagreements about membership in all-or-none and graded categories may have different qualities. Results from both studies suggest some support for claims that membership in animal and artifact categories is a matter of degree. A third study explored the possibility that graded responses were due to conflicting, or ambiguous, sets of criteria. A task focusing on biological features did not lead to more absolute categorization. These results contradict essentialist predictions.
一些研究认为，人们将动物和人工制品类别的成员身份视为一个程度问题。这些研究通常未能区分典型性和类别成员身份的问题。因此，那些被用来证明成员身份是一个程度问题的数据，可能仅仅证明了典型性是有等级之分的。部分基于这些发现，有人认为一些类别是围绕着一种潜在的本质组织起来的。这种本质绝对地决定了成员身份。本文报告了一系列重新审视等级成员身份问题的研究。在第一项研究中，要求受试者对相同刺激的典型性和类别成员身份进行评分，以此来区分这两个问题。第二种方法基于这样一种直觉，即对于全有或全无类别和等级类别中成员身份的分歧可能具有不同的性质。两项研究的结果都为动物和人工制品类别中的成员身份是一个程度问题的说法提供了一些支持。第三项研究探讨了等级反应是否由于相互冲突或模糊的标准集所致的可能性。一项关注生物特征的任务并没有导致更绝对的分类。这些结果与本质主义的预测相矛盾。
