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(1995) have powerfully developed prototype theory within the field of sociolinguistics. One finding of the theory is that different social groups tend to have quite different prototypes in mind when classifying something as, say, a piece of furniture. Thus when surveyed, a group of Germans came up consistently with a different set of best examples than did a group of Americans (Taylor 1995, 4457). For the Americans, chair and sofa are best fits for furniture, for the Germans, asked about möbel, it was bed and table. |
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An important implication of the theory is that there are levels at which we most easily and naturally distinguish between objects in the world, and that supervenient or subvenient levels tend to be more technically defined. Looking at a picture of a Maine coon cat, a non-expert will say that this is a picture of a cat, while an expert might call it either a Maine coon cat or a vertebrate. |
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This distinction between two main types of classification is a very useful one. There are a number of reasons, however, for saying that it is not an absolute distinction. Indeed, one could say that we all probably have our own prototype of the ideal Aristotelian classification system, but that no one system in practice fully meets a single set of Aristotelian requirements (Sweetser 1987). As Coleman and Kay note, while blackboxing the notion of "knowledge of the occasions": |
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It seems that the use of some words, like lie, may depend on two sorts of considerations. One is the traditional question of what count as criteria for classifying a real-world thing in the category: perhaps we would like to reserve the term semantic prototype for this constellation of things. But a second consideration is knowledge of the occasions, reasons, etc., for deciding whether or not to classify something in a particular way. A frequent reason for reporting something as a lie is that we want to blame or criticize the person who said it. (1981, 37) |
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Our analysis here stresses precisely this latter criterion of "in practice." Turning to an example from the workplace, it is possible to begin to see how practice and location mediate such divisions. In the medical arena, the criterion emerged from a survey of physicians in 1979 in the United Kingdom that general practitioners, "had a constant tendency to regard a wider range of phenomena as disease" than the hospital physicians, who in turn were more inclusive than the lay public. The perceived need for medical intervention was the determining axis (Prins 1981, 176; Campbell, Scadding, and Roberts 1979). An influential factor, Prins notes, appears to have been whether or not medical intervention was requiredfor the lay public measles and |
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