SeyedGhasemipour1

SeyedKamyarSeyedGhasemipour
ProfessorVervaeke
CognitiveScience250
24November2014
MyTitleWhichIShallNotForgetToWrite
The ancient Greek believed in five basic elements earth, water, air, fire, and aether.
Using thisclassificationmodel,theywereabletogroupwhattheyfoundinnatureintocategories
to which they attributed certain properties such as sharpness, mobility, and density. This
seemingly simplistic categorization allowed them to make hypotheses about their world and
explain what they encountered. It appears that categorization plays a major role in how we
interact with the world around us. Indeed, time and time again philosophers have argued that
categorization yields the coding of experience, abstracts relevant and useful information, and
affords the ability to engage in inductive inference. On the other hand, many believe that the
brain has evolved to extract, organize, and make use oftheinformationtoexplaintheworldand
interfere in it. It is this convergence that has led categorization to be considered as the basisfor
cognition,andhassparkedtheinterestofavidresearchersinvariousdisciplines.
Research in this domain has lead to the rise of various models of categorization, the
oldest of which is the classical theory of concepts. The classical theory says that concepts are a
list of features that are all necessary and sufficient formembership inthe categoryofthingsthat
fit intothatconcept(Murphy&Gregory).However,withtheriseofnewempiricalevidence,this
view of concepts was shown to be incomplete.Oneofthemaincriticismsofthismodelwasthat
feature list representation of concepts could not explain why people have typicality ratings for

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different objects of the same category, which was shown to be true in work done by Malt and
Smith. Over the following decades, scientific finding have led to the development of new
theories of concepts, each iteration improving upon the previous, and trying to provide an
explanation for what the former couldnt. The most prevalent of these theories are prototype
theory and the theory theory (Murphy & Gregory). However, what ails all these models is that
they have yet been able to afford the mechanization of concepts and categorization, and in turn
cognition. Creating an instance of true cognition is the main goal of the field of artificial
intelligence and a common pursuit of the cognitive sciences due to its potential contribution to
understanding the human brain. We believe that the reason why the mechanization of current
theories has been unsuccessful is rooted at the way concepts are defined. In this essay, we will
present a new model of concepts that keeps mechanization as its central goal. Subsequently, by
drawing upon research on categorization inpsychology,neuroscience,andmachinelearning,we
willarguethemeritsofthisapproachandwhywebelieveitshouldbeadopted.
Before we dive into the presentation of our model, we will introduce a set of simple
mathematicalconstructsthatwebelievearenecessarytotheunderstandingofthematerial:
First we will define graphs. Inmathematics,agraphisarepresentationofasetofobjects
that are connected by links. The objects in this representation are called verticesandthelinks
between themarecallededges.Inaparticulargraph,theremayormaynotbeanedgebetween
two vertices in fact it is possible to have no edges in the entiregraphatall(West).Typically,a
graph is denoted as an ordered pair G = (V , E) where V denotes the set of vertices and E
denotes the set of edges in the graph G. A graph is said to be adirectedgraph,ifthe edgesof

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the graph have directions. The direction of an edge indicates how we are able to traverse the
graph. Another important concept is a weighted graph. In a weighted graph, a number is
associated with each edge. A typicalexampleofwhenitmaybe usefultouseweightsassociated
with edges is when we are using a graph to model cities in a country and the distance between
thecountries.Thefigurebelowdemonstratesanexampleofadirectedweightedgraph.

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References
Malt,B.C.,&Smith,E.E.(1984,12).Correlatedpropertiesinnaturalcategories.Journalof
VerbalLearningandVerbalBehavior,23(2),250269.doi:
10.1016/S00225371(84)901701
Murphy,G.L.(2002).Thebigbookofconcepts.Cambridge,MA:MITPress.