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Does rank have its privilege ? Inductive inferences within folkbiological taxonomies
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Coleya, J. D. Medina, Diego Luis Atranb, S. |
| Copyright Year | 1997 |
| Abstract | Evidence from psychology (e.g., Rosch et al., 1976) and from cognitive anthropology (e.g., Berlin, 1992) suggests that taxonomies of biological categories have a single level which is privileged, or psychologically basic. However, research to date has not investigated the relation between privileged levels and inductive inference, a crucial function of catgories. Prima facie, categories at privileged levels should also be inductively strong. Moreover, given research suggesting that the privileged level for urban Americans (e.g., fish) is superordinate to the privileged level for members of traditional societies (e.g., trout), such groups might also be expected to differ with respect to inductively privileged levels. In the present studies, we examine the degree to which different levels within folkbiological taxonomies are privileged with respect to inductive inference for American college students and members of a traditional Maya village in lowland Guatemala. Inference patterns reveal consistent advantage for categories at the folk-generic level (e.g., trout) over those at other levels (e.g., rainbow trout, fish) for both groups. For the Maya, the inductively privileged level corresponds to their presumptive basic level. For the Americans, the inductively privileged level does not correspond to the basic level as pinpointed by others (e.g, Rosch et al., 1976). We show that a pure similarity-based account cannot account for this discrepancy. We argue that results for Americans suggest a dissociation of knowledge – which for Americans leads to salient folkbiological categories at the level of fish and tree – and expectation, whereby systematic patterns of nomenclature and assumptions about the inductive potential of named |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.northeastern.edu/corelab/wp-content/uploads/1997-ColeyMedinAtran.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
