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Prototype Theory

1174 Words5 Pages

In order to make sense of the world, human beings classify events, objects, and patterns, dividing it into endless categories. What humans categorize in the sense of psychology, according to Smith (1990), are objects that are believed to belong together (Aberra, 2014). Human beings, however, do not stop there, they form concepts. Therefore, for many decades’ researchers and cognitive psychologists alike seek to examine and explain the nature of concepts or instances and how human beings categorize them, as concepts are constituents of thoughts and in addition to categorization plays a critical role in decision making, learning, inference and memory (Ross, 2006). This much is relatively uncontroversial, but the nature of concepts and the constraints …show more content…

1); as well as aspects of categorizing concepts with reference to factors in social psychology. For example, the article titled, ‘Prototype Theory: An Alternative Concept Theory for Categorizing Sex and Gender?’ seek to explore the prototype theory to determine whether it captures the fluidity of gender and is able to accommodate transgender and queer identities. The article clearly defined the features of the category labelled ‘woman’ on the basis of sex and gender and applied the prototype theory to these concepts as it relates to the hierarchal levels of categorization. According to Fox (2011), utilizing the prototype theory as a theoretical framework for the concepts of sex and gender provides structural flexibility and inclusiveness (Fox, 2011). In addition, the “family resemblance” stabilizes both concepts enough to accommodate the variations and overlapping idealized features such that the author concluded that the prototype theory can capture the fluidity of gender and thus is able to explain why transgender and queer identities are now incorporated in the concept of gender. Needless to say, that the theory can explain a number of observations both within the field of cognitive linguistics and by extension other fields of psychology as it pertains to defining concepts and categorizing information within a

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