“According to prototype theory, the meaning of many words is still described as a set of features, but not a necessary and sufficient set of them.
But if not, then the definitional theory isn’t correct.” With all these failures of the definition in mind, perhaps it’s wrong to suppose that we can ever find a set of necessary and sufficient features or the concept ‘bird’. And not everything that lays eggs, flies, or has feathers is a bird. One might suppose that having feathers is a feature of all birds, but as we’ve noted, it’s not. Are there features that characterize all birds and that characterized birds only? One might think that being able to fly is a feature of all birds, but it’s not―ostriches can’t fly. The facts that prototype theory tries to account for can easily be illustrated. “Observations like these have led some investigators to argue for an alternative view, called the prototype theory of meaning. This seems to be at odds with the analysis we’ve described thus far, whose aim is to specify the necessary and sufficient attributes that define a concept.” Thus, a German Shepherd seems to be a more typical dog than a Pekinese, and an armchair seems to be a better example of the concept of furniture than a reading lamp. “A related problem for the definitional theory is that some members of a meaning category appear to exemplify that category better than others do. This is an instance of what I imagine Dennett had in mind when he said, “As is so often the case, it’s easier to give examples than to give a definition of the term.” For instance, consider the proposed definition of bird: ‘Any of a class of warm-blooded vertebrates distinguished by having the body more or less completely covered with feathers and the forelimbs modified as wings.’ This definition seems promising, but, in fact, not all birds are covered with feathers (neither baby birds nor plucked birds have feathers, yet they’re still birds all the same).”
For one thing, once we’ve gone beyond such relatively formal words as ‘bachelor’, it’s surprisingly hard to come up with definitions that cover all the uses of a word or do it justice at all. “The definitional theory of meaning faces several problems. And this set of features is also sufficient for bachelorhood―some man might be tall or short, flirtatious or shy, English or Greek, but none of this affects his status as a bachelor.” if the creature is married or is an adult male duck) it couldn’t correctly be called ‘a bachelor’. These features are necessary for bachelorhood, and so, if some creature is missing any of these features (e.g. Thus, ‘bachelor’ is composed of the set of features, ,, and.
#PROTOTYPE PSYCHOLOGY DEFINITION FULL#
The full meaning of each word is a set of features that are essential for membership in the class named by the word. According to this theory, each word can be understood as a bundle of meaning atoms. “These observations are central to the definitional theory of word meaning, which states that words are organized in our mind much as they are in standard dictionaries (though not in alphabetical order). Thus, words like ‘yellow’ and ‘round’ may indeed name simple ideas or concepts, but other words seem more complex―for example, the words ‘canary,’ ‘yolk’, and ‘banana’ all seem to involve the atom of ‘yellowness’, but they involve other elements as well.” The rest are more like molecules―they’re composed of more elementary atoms of meaning. “At first glance, the words of a language seemed to be like little atoms of meaning, each distinct from all the others, but several theories of word meaning assert that only a handful of words in the language describe elementary, ‘simple’ ideas or concepts. This is reminiscent of “Like everything metaphysical, the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of language.” A moment’s thought reveals that the kind of meaning is well correlated with the so-called parts of speech, with things and stuff generally labeled by nouns, acts and states by verbs, properties by adjectives, and manners by adverbs.” Yet other words describe substances (‘water’, ‘aether’), properties (‘blue’, ‘imaginary’), relations (‘similar’, ‘father’), quantities (‘some’, ‘zillions’), actions (‘run’, ‘transform’), states of mind (‘knowing’, ‘hoping’), or being (‘am’, ‘seem’), and manners of doing (‘carefully’, ‘musically’). Some words such as ‘Aristotle’ and ‘Santa’ describe individuals in the real and imaginary world others such as ‘dog’ and ‘unicorn’ are more general and describe categories of things. “Word meanings are of many different kinds.