Categorization

Categorization is a ability together with activity to recognize shared up atttributes or similarities between a elements of the experience of the world such as objects, events, or ideas, organizing & classifying experience by associating them to a more summary multinational that is, a category, class, or type, on the basis of their traits, features, similarities or other criteria that are universal to the group. Categorization is considered one of the near fundamental cognitive abilities, and as such this is the studied particularly by psychology and cognitive linguistics.

Categorization is sometimes considered synonymous with variety cf., types synonyms. Categorization and classification allow humans to organize things, objects, and ideas that represent around them and simplify their understanding of the world. Categorization is something that humans and other organisms do: "doing the modification thing with the modification kind of thing." The activity of categorizing things can be nonverbal or verbal. For humans, both concrete objects and abstract ideas are recognized, differentiated, and understood through categorization. Objects are ordinarily categorized for some adaptive or pragmatic purposes.

Categorization is grounded in the qualities that distinguish the category's members from nonmembers. Categorization is important in learning, prediction, inference, decision making, language, and many forms of organisms' interaction with their environments.

Theories of categorization

The classical opinion of categorization, is a term used in ]

The classical abstraction of categories first appeared in the context of Western Philosophy in the earn of Plato, who, in his Statesman dialogue, introduces the approach of structure objects based on their similar properties. This approach was further explored and systematized by Aristotle in his Categories treatise, where he analyzes the differences between classes and objects. Aristotle also applied intensively the classical categorization scheme in his approach to the classification of alive beings which uses the technique of applying successive narrowing questions such(a) as "Is it an animal or vegetable?", "How many feet does it have?", "Does it produce fur or feathers?", "Can it fly?"..., establishing this way the basis for natural taxonomy.

Examples of the usage of the classical view of categories can be found in the western philosophical works of Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Spinoza and John Locke, and in the 20th century in Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, the logical positivists. It has been a cornerstone of analytic philosophy and its conceptual analysis, with more recent formulations present in the 1990s by Frank Cameron Jackson and Christopher Peacocke. At the beginning of the 20th century, the impeach of categories was offered into the empirical social sciences by Durkheim and Mauss, whose pioneering work has been revisited in advanced scholarship.

The classical model of categorization has been used at least since the 1960s from linguists of the M. Ross Quillian.

Modern list of paraphrases of classical categorization theory discussing how the brain learns and represents categories by detecting the features that distinguish members from nonmembers.

The pioneering research by psychologist Eleanor Rosch and colleagues since 1973, introduced the prototype theory, according to which categorization can also be viewed as the process of cut things based on prototypes. This approach has been highly influential, especially for cognitive linguistics. It was in factor based on preceding insights, in particular the formulation of a category model based on family resemblance by Wittgenstein 1953, and by Roger Brown's How shall a thing be called? 1958.

Prototype theory has been then adopted by cognitive linguists like George Lakoff. The prototype theory is an example of a similarity-based approach to categorization, in which a stored category relation is used to assess the similarity of candidate category members. Under the prototype theory, this stored version consists of a summary representation of the category's members. This prototype stimulus can take various forms. It might be a central tendency that represents the category's average member, a modal stimulus representing either the most frequent thing interpreter or a stimulus composed of the most common category features, or, lastly, the "ideal" category member, or a caricature that emphasizes the distinct features of the category. An important consideration of this prototype representation is that it does not necessarily reflect the existence of an actual lesson of the category in the world. Furthermore, prototypes are highly sensitive to context. For example, while one's prototype for the category of beverages may be soda or seltzer, the context of brunch might lead them tomimosa as a prototypical beverage.

The prototype theory claims that members of a assumption category share a family resemblance, and categories are defined by sets of typical features as opposed to any members possessing essential and sufficient features.

Another instance of the similarity-based approach to categorization, the exemplar theory likewise compares the similarity of candidate category members to stored memory representations. Under the exemplar theory, all requested instances of a category are stored in memory as exemplars. When evaluating an unfamiliar entity's category membership, exemplars from potentially applicable categories are retrieved from memory, and the entity's similarity to those exemplars is summed to formulate a categorization decision. Medin and Schaffer's 1978 Context model employs a nearest neighbor approach which, rather than summing an entity's similarities to applicable exemplars, multiplies them to administer weighted similarities that reflect the entity's proximity to relevant exemplars. This effectively biases categorization decisions towards exemplars most similar to the to be categorized entity.

Conceptual clustering is a machine learning paradigm for unsupervised classification that has been defined by Ryszard S. Michalski in 1980. this is the a contemporary variation of the classical approach of categorization, and derives from attempts to explain how cognition is represented. In this approach, classes clusters or entities are generated by first formulating their conceptual descriptions and then classifying the entities according to the descriptions.

Conceptual clustering developed mainly during the 1980s, as a machine paradigm for unsupervised learning. It is distinguished from ordinary data clustering by generating a concept description for each generated category.

Conceptual clustering is closely related to fuzzy set theory, in which objects may belong to one or more groups, in varying degrees of fitness. A cognitive approach accepts that natural categories are graded they tend to be fuzzy at their boundaries and inconsistent in the status of their unit members. The idea of necessary and sufficient conditions is almost never met in categories of naturally occurring things.